Grimrock

Atmosphere and design are spoton.

The backtracking made me numb but acceptable for now.

Ammo consumption is greatly influenced by RNG and thus luck.
1st try on the first boss sequence (5 or 6 undeads at the same time) RNG accuracy made me miss half my shots running out of ammo with the boss' health counter still at 50 %
Multiple tries later I had a lucky streak of crits one shotting them and ending the battle with lots of ammo to spare.
So I don't know how to feel about this mechanic. It felt pretty annoying though

Weight issues. After having played only for an hour I'm already overweight and ran out of inventory slots.
Decided to "console cheat spawn" a wooden box which offcourse made my overweight issue even worse.
The backtracking is already severe and having to drop items and come back later for them will just intensify the backtracking.

I will restart your mod on easy as on Hard the RNG on Firearms was out of balance. I'm interested in your designs further ingame.

Hi Pompidom, thanks for the feedback.

I would have to agree on all that you said:

Accuracy - This was a difficult thing to balance as I too ran into hit / miss issues while game testing. I dumped a lot of accuracy into firearms and felt I got it to a happy place. I see now the error I had made was doing the bulk of my testing in normal difficulty mode, not giving enough consideration to hard mode. I did not want to remove the accuracy mechanic completely as I felt it added a bit more depth by giving players options to improve it through items and skill.
Weight capacity - It was not my intention for weight to be a problem. When I update this mod I will increase Champion weight capacity to make this a nonissue.

Inventory capacity / backtracking - Yes, these annoyances serve no purpose outside of nostalgia, but I definitely do not want players to feel numb, annoyed or bored. Again, when I update this mod I will work to improve upon these things.

Thanks again, and I hope you see it through to the end !

Oh boy, this is a tough call.

I love puzzles, and I loved your puzzles because most of them were interesting, original, unique, and fair. I play this game for the puzzles and your mod absolutely delivered on that. Some of them were really, really hard though.
It's also great that you made some custom assets. They may not be the fanciest, but the fact that you gave enough of a damn to make them at all puts you above 99% of custom dungeons.
And I love that you got rid of the food system and torches burning out and a lot of another annoyances like that.

But the combat encounters are just annoying. They take forever. So does navigating the castle - I quickly found myself changing the time multiplier so that I could move around faster. I like the way the castle gradually opens up, I don't like waiting for my character to slowly plod to wherever I wanted to go. This is an example of a mod that would really benefit from a fast travel system, though I admit it'd be a lot of work.
After the first boss fight I ended up cheating my way out of the monster encounters entirely because actually doing them took forever and I'd rather just do the puzzles.

I'm tempted to recommend removing the "random" monster encounters entirely and just having the only combat be the bosses. The nice thing about being a custom dungeon is that you can assume players are already familiar with Grimrock's combat mechanics, so you don't need to introduce them slowly with weak monsters.

And yeah, more sacks and carrying capacity would have been nice. Still, the puzzles and the other nice things make this one of the best Grimrock 2 mods so far, maybe the best.

Hi minmay, I'm glad to hear you liked the puzzles.

I too am a puzzle enthusiast, Lost Halls of the Drinn stands as my favorite Grimrock mod and so your comments here mean a lot to me. I tried to keep the puzzles light, with a few more challenging ones sprinkled on top. I do see where some of these puzzles and secrets could benefit from more clues / visual cues.

I've been tossing around ideas to improve travel / backtracking. I could probably get away with a sort of teleporter hub similar to the one in the main campaign. I could put an access point on each map to alleviate some of the travel time. Of course, these access points will be guarded by.... more puzzles.

Unfortunately combat improvement is lost on me. When I set out to make this mod I wanted combat to be a puzzle itself by having the players discover / exploit monster weakness, manage / conserve resource, and flat out avoid encounters when appropriate. It seems the idea did not translate well but I'm not quite ready to abandon combat just yet.

One idea I have is to convert combat to a 'shoot em' up' style by dropping in more baddies and having them all killable within 1-3 hits. Not sure if this will improve combat or not, I would love to hear people's suggestions and opinions to this approach.

Thanks

There are several ways to change and improve the combat system for better or worse for sure, but probably too hard to code within the limits of the engine. First you have to identify the drawbacks of the current system.

To me personally:
- You can run out of ammo in for example a boss encounter by RNG.
- My experience of melee combat was underwhelming where I had to square dance over 1 minute with 1 undead with the poison knife you find in the alcove.

I have only played the male gun slinger character, so my observation is only from this character's point of view and only up until the first boss encounter.

So maybe I can throw some ideas which you can pick up some aspects from them in case you find them plausible.

1. possible way of "improving/changing/fucking up" (depending on your personal view) the combat for the gun slinger would be to remove ammo box scrounging and make your guns self recharging over an extended period of time (if that's possible to code with steps taken or something like that). Since it fires shock charges visually, it wouldn't break immersion.
Enough ammo in 1 clip to dispose 2 -3 undeads at once, but then having to run and hide for at least a minute until your gun is recharged. This way you can keep your current accuracy/evasion system in place. And slightly bump up enemy encounters.

A big chunk of Energy can be used to impale an undead halting it's movement for like 20 seconds or something blocking off a corridor. Or simply one shotting an undead at the cost of like 50% of your energy. Make your character look more badass slaying monsters quickly at the cost of huge energy usage.

2. Same idea like the first option but with a very weak unlimited pistol that needs to recharge and make the ammo boxes pick ups very rare for your 2nd "pellet gun" and only to be used in boss fights or heavy encounters.

3. Remove ammo boxes and place recharge stations (fountain demon heads for example) that fill up your energy and/or gun. And place 1 recharge station before each boss encounter.

All these 3 options allow you to bump up enemy encounters reducing the risk of truely running out of ammo/resources.
Then adjust game difficulty so that enemies need more shots to die:

Easy option = ~2 shots -> people can focus on puzzles and quickly dispatch enemies.
Normal option = ~3 shots -> Balanced energy/ammo usage should get you through.
Hard option = 4+ shots -> Every encounter stresses your energy/ammo use to the limit where you will need to retreat and hide until you have recharged.

I really feel you should implement a quick "melee" instakill option like "impale" at the cost of a huge amount of energy.
And then balance energy by making it regenerate slowly or with recharge fountains.

You can even add items/upgrades/secret that will upgrade your energy reserve for example.

When I come up with more "possible" ideas I will edit this post, I have stuff to do now

Hi Iostsol

I finally found time to give a try to your mod and I have to say... i'ts quite sick

I very like the way you managed to put in LOG the mood and game mechanics of the first RE episodes, even if the drawback is the doublebacks which can be very boring when you're trying to figure out where to go next, like me .
Some puzzles are very clever (I particularly liked the ones with the skulls or how to use the horn) and generally speaking, you created a mod which really changes the way to play Grimrock and as Minmay said, only a few managed that (even if there are great mods, of course!!). It's a very neat job and a great experience!

But... after good progress in the manor I'm stuck now and got sick of roaming around (and I can't stand the castle music anymore!!) hoping to open a new passage by luck. I thought you could help me get back in track, without giving me to much spoiler.

So far, I managed to collect a large amount of items, yet I didn't find how to use them: I guess at this point I need a third skull key to get access at the second floor to another boss then another key (key of sword or key of pentacle?), but I can't find this skull key. Also, I couldn't figure out how to enter the central part of the Garden. I guess I have to put another item to replace the broken sword or find another round key to open the gate. Any clue here ?

Also, as I see there is some discussion about the combat system, I have to admit I find it a nice try but not very challenging. Even in hard (which is the difficulty level I always play), you can get rid of the roaming zombies with just a couple of firebursts and a couple of dagger stabs. You can then save your ammo for the few bosses-like combats, to get the foes down to one, then finish the last one with spells or melee combat. So far I still have more than 100 rounds and shells in my inventory

I don't know which would be better: maybe stronger foes to force player to use ammo? Or less ammo? Again, that's just suggestions here.

Cheers
Khollik

[EDIT] still stuck, but I've found a couple of typo and bugs I can PM you, if you want

Looks like I'll have to give the sorceress a try on hard

EDIT: The very first Blood Orb that you encounter in the very first 10 seconds of playing on the pedestal in the very first room you start in doesn't spawn when I'm playing with the sorceress. Am I missing something? It does spawn when I play with the gun slinger.

Hello Pompidom and Khollik, thanks for the feedback !

Pompidom: You have given me a lot of great ideas to think over ! I don't know just yet if I can pull off all of those ideas but I will definitely think on it and respond to it when I put more thought to it.

As far as the blood orb:


Khollik: I deifintely want to know about any bugs / typos, you can post them here if you don't mind.

For your progress: Hope that helps, please let me know if you need more.

Thanks !

Hi Iostsol

Thanks for your answer.
As for the bugs and typos: Thanks for helping me finish your great mod!

Khollik

Hi Khollik,

Great catches on the bugs and typos ! I was totally unaware of any of them and will work on getting them fixed.

Sounds like you are making great progress, here is whats missing: Thanks