Morf Feedback

EDIT: Morf has moved to a new home, you can play it here.

As mentioned in my previous post, I've been taking a little break. After releasing Morf I've been pretty tired. Finishing games is hard and what's even worse is when you think it's all over, you release your game to the public and get so much feedback that there's a whole new list of things you still need to do.

Morf is 100% playable now and is pretty well balanced (I believe) but I still don't feel that I can feel comfortable in 'never' working on it again. But at the moment, I believe working on it wouldn't serve a real purpose. The impact has been made and simply modifying a few little things won't result in anything major. I will however get back to it in a few months and when I do, not only will I make the last few enhancements and fix the last few bugs, I will also add that last bit of sparkle the game needs (Think locked doors, traps and bossfights).

Humble Beginnings

Morf Today

Before I move on, I'd like to go over some of the feedback I received. Firstly, I was quite lucky to get featured on a few sites:

• http://www.freeindiegam.es/2013/02/morf-big-bad-wofl/
• http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/11/the-free-webgame-round-up-17/
• http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/02/22/the-free-webgame-round-up-23/
• http://www.flashmush.com/2013/02/morf-flash-game-review.html
• http://indiestatik.com/2013/02/17/spiders-and-goblins-and-rats-oh-my-play-morf-play-morf-play-morf-now/

As for comments, I've added a list of my favourite ones to the bottom of this post. I found it quite hard trying to sift through comments without any prior knowledge about the person making them. A lot of people had issues with understanding the interface which Terri and I thought was pretty intuitive. As you'd expect when masses of people play a roguelike, there were complaints of it being too difficult.

This leaves the question. How do you establish to what extent someone's critique should be taken to heart? Many people felt that the UI was intuitive and that the game was too easy. I can simply hope that this is a skill I'll develop in time.

All in all I am very happy with how the game turned out. To think, the main game mechanic is something I stumbled upon due to a funny bug in my code. I'd like to thank Terri again for the amazing work he did on the art and also thank my fiancé who always serves as my motivator, brainstorming partner and person who doesn't get sick of me typing little words into my computer in the hope that it'll turn into something cool.

This weekend, Terri and I will be reviving an old project of mine. Check back after the weekend when there might be a few screenshots of it.

The game feels super polished and the UI is really awesome. I think I need to spend more time to figure out how the morphing things work. Great works!

Fun game! Made it down to 17 floor.
It's a fun game first time around, i like that. Usually hard to do for roguelies.

I really like your game. I've been burned by things calling themselves roguelikes in the past but this game was definitely something I could see my self diving into.

since the difficulty was lowered there are some neat things on the lower levels and things change enough to keep it interesting. still playing through and on about level 8, almost died once or twice after some blunders. I still wouldn't call it easy, which is good because a challenge is still nice. I'm curious as to what's awaiting further on.

Cool game. I love the web interface and the fact that you are trying some fresh new ideas. The morphing is a neat mechanic.

Hey! Great game i am loving it so far. If you do some final touches i would greenlight and buy it off steam :)

Hey DavianBlack this game is pretty addicting and awesome, I like the simple design.

Good stuff, interesting gameplay. Found myself planning my morphs about 3 enemies in advance trying to make sure I ended up in a Druid.

I havent played it more than 5 minutes by now, but it sure is one of the best looking roguelikes out there! Stylized graphics and a clear and intuitive interface.

The morph mechanic is really cool, good job. I really like how each "class" has a very different playstyle and you must plan your attacks to change your playstyle on the fly. e.g start as rat, see spider, 2 wanderers and a druid. Bite first wanderer, attack to death, morph, shockwave spider, kill, morph, escape using spider web, run around using web while picking off druid, morph to druid, use druid heal, kill wanderer. Actual scenario.

I found myself saying "wow, this feels as frantic as FTL...oh wait, FTL is a roguelike" lol but this is truly fun, i've played about 5 or 6 lives and have enjoyed each. i'll check back and play it some more later. great job!
edit: after googling around i found some of the classic roguelikes and yours feels a lot more accessible to someone who is unfamiliar with the genre. Win7 + Chrome btw, works great.

I'm not really into most roguelikes, but from the 5 minutes I played, I thought you did a really good job on the level generation. I also like that there are often a few more enemies on screen, in the distance, that haven't heard you yet, so you know what your next fight is going to be.

Digging it! It's a lot of fun, I sent it to a friend or two as well. Good work! It's addicting, so I guess that means you win :)

This is actually a really interesting roguelike, I like the idea of swapping between forms to survive, although it does seem to be a bit hard to actually gain back health (with being a druid, drinking from a fountain, and potions being the only way as far as I can tell) but I might just be bad at the game.

I'm really digging it, and I think that the game is pretty self-explanatory if you pay attention and experiment a little, you shouldn't have to dumb it down or clutter the UI with messages and tutorials to capture the more casual/3-second attention span players.

I found the interface pretty self explanatory.
seriously, the first thing you do when you start a game is check out the interface. Literally 10 seconds of this will show you that you have an active ability, and inventory, and inventory slots. The morphing is similarly straightforward. If a player doesn't immediately realize he morphs into what he kills, then he has bigger problems...

A very nice central game mechanic. I played for about 30 minutes.

Morf is back!

Just a quick note to anyone who noticed that the link for Morf stopped working. I had some issues with hosting (i.e. they took down my site after noticing you lot used 320% of my total bandwidth). I've rehosted on a bigger package and Morf is ready to play again.

Here's the link again: Clickety click!

Play Morf Now!

PLAY MORF NOW

As promised, the moment is here. After what proved to be much more work than anybody ever imagined, Morf has been released. Before I go on I need to thank Terri Vellmann for all the amazing artwork.

Morf has been in development for quite some time now and even though I believe there might still be some balancing issues, it's pretty much complete. If any of you should stumble across any bugs, I'd very much appreciate it if you could leave a comment here about it.

PLAY MORF NOW

Morf, JavaScript and Laziness

First off, let me begin by saying that Morf will be released very soon. We still have some polishing and balancing to do, but the final release will be out by next Saturday (16th of February). The final version will consist of 20 levels, 5 different level themes, 20 monster types and over 50 items. While you wait, feast your eyes on a screenshot of me playing through endgame content:

Now, allow me to apologize for my absence. Lots of factors contributed to me being too busy to post; day-job stuff, gamedev stuff and my laziness being the largest of those. But nevertheless, I'm back to let you know what I've been up to.

When I started Morf I didn't have a very comprehensive vision of where the game was going (as is mostly the case when I start a game) and as a result of that, lots of the code was not generic enough to suit the growing needs Terri (my artist and teammate) and I have for the game. Specifically, I'm talking about how monster abilities and items are defined.

The amount of monster types and items that need to be defined started to really become an issue. In the original engine, I would define an item something like this:

 add_item(name, model, handler, targeting, value1, value2, type, position);  

And every few days I needed a new parameter passed to the Item object, making the syntax bulkier and bulkier. Not to mention trying to modify any of those values when you have a list of 40 of those declarations were a massive pain. So, I took all the data and put it into a neat document and wrote a parser for it. JavaScript's Duck typing made this really easy to do. Now, I can easily define items and monsters like this:

 weapon
 name|steel axe
 %damage|6
 %durability|5
 %min_lvl|5
 %max_lvl|8 

And the best part is, I can extend the document format and the parser would simply add the new properties to objects due to the fact that you can do this in JavaScript:

 object[property] = value;  

This simple fact alone has been the reason I am starting to love developing games in JavaScript more and more. But I'm rambling.

Check back next weekend and you'll be able to check Morf out for yourself!

Well, would you look at that

Play Morf

Nearly a week has passed since my last post and the amount of work Terri and I have done amazes me. This will be old news to those of you who are working alongside an artist already but, for those of you who have yet to experience it: Working with an artist like Terri is motivating for two reasons. firstly because you get to develop in an awesome environment (sans programmer art) and secondly, because during those times when you feel demotivated or bored with something, you know your artist has some assets waiting. Waiting for you to finish the code.

It would be humanly impossible for me to list all the things that have changed since the last post but I'll try listing the bigger ones again:

• Tooltips using custom 'font'
• Wall Sprites
• Water and Lava
• Health and Mana Fountains
• Enhanced Dungeon Generator (Makes dungeons more fun)
• Over 20 new items
• 4 new classes
• Ranged spells
• Weapon and Armor durability
• Mob scaling
• Loading and Death screens
• That's enough, isn't it? Go on, get playing!

Play Morf

Morf: Alpha Version

Play Morf

This has been an interesting week for me. After quite a bit of feedback from Reddit on the previous version of Morf, I've had to swallow my pride and make changes to the game that I wouldn't have made otherwise only to find that after a while, the overall feel of the game was improving drastically.

I think I can say that I've learned my lesson now. I'm pretty sure I'll never get to a point where I can just take negative criticism without losing a beat but I can now see the usefulness of morphing (as it were) negative comments into something positive you can use to your advantage.

Another good thing that came out of this week: I now have a pixel artist working with me on Morf. The request came out of the blue and I am very thankful for it. The game feels so much more immersive now and knowing that the burden of dealing with the artsy aspect of the game has been lifted, I feel so much more driven to continue work on it.

As for changes, there are quite a few and as usual, you can press F during gameplay to see the full changelog. Here are the most notable changes:

• Added new sprites
• Wooden and Iron Chests have been replaced with Bags and Silver Chests
• Mobs can now drop Bags and Keys
• Gold chests require keys to unlock
• Added dungeon decorations (rocks, skulls and lights)

Next, I need to start work on creating more trinkets, especially ones that will allow you to cast spells (fireball, heal, shield, etc...)

Lastly, here's a screenshot of the new look thanks to the wonderful art done by Terri Vellmann

Play Morf

Morf

Play Morf

Hey! Thanks for your interest in Morf, my roguelike. The game has moved to a new location and you can just click on the link above to navigate to it.

While you're at it, check out some of my other games at here.