Sherwood: a Stealth Roguelite (MAGS game)

[Radiant]

Quoting from the MAGS thread to have all posts in one place:

Sherwood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF2IFEmAs4E

Thank you, I've enjoyed watching that!

To answer some of your questions:

• Yes, the diagonal movement is intentional, including slipping between trees.
• Rocks can be
  Spoiler

  thrown against a tree to make noise (which sends enemies there), or directly at enemies to stun them.

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• Traps will
  Spoiler

  stun enemies for a long time, if you lure them over the trap. You can also rob stunned enemies.

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I'll go fix the crash and upload a new version. I'd also like to replace the font by something more legible, but I'll do that after the voting concludes.

Good to hear it! I know from experience that seeing someone else play your game can give a lot of context for feedback and help figure out how players think differently than the developer does.

Aside from adding some guide or tutorial to help the player understand what items really do, I feel I have one piece of feedback in hindsight: add a slide to the movement when moving diagonally against an object. Currently it seems that if you approach an obstacle diagonally and don't hit the corner, you just stop, have to adjust sideways and then start moving again. Having the player character slide along the edge of the obstacle until they reach either a dead end or a corner they can slip through would help make the movement feel a lot nicer (though it might also alter the balance too much).

Just my two cents, Sherwood was an impressive outing for a MAGS effort in any case!

Spoiler

Start by staying in stealth mode so enemies can't hear you, and avoid the "sound" symbols that indicate when you hear them.

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Spoiler

Throw a rock against a tree far away, and enemies will hear the thud and chase that.

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Spoiler

Use gold near an enemy to bribe them into looking away. Predictably, this doesn't work on dogs, but something else does.

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HTH! There's a lot of little details like that in Sherwood.

Thanks for that. This is a very professional looking game, but not my cup-of-tea. Also, I did lever into Level 3, and found myself unable to move out of the entry slot, penned in by the wall and surrounded by foliage on the other three sides.

Edit: Just discovered the two-arrow combo that allows diagonal movement, so... Never Mind.  ;-)

I'm not really familiar with the rogue or roguelike games. This one is technically very impressive. I ran around, not bothering too much about stealth, but trying to run into hiding instead. When spotted, I hit the action keys in a panic, often hitting the wrong one, like bribing a soldier, then chucking a rock at him, trying to rob the gold back. I managed to rescue Robin Hood and Little John. I thought it was a nice touch to be able to continue the game as Little John after Much was defeated. I didn't really use the diversion tactics Radiant has made possible. Bottom line is that the programming is very good, while the game suffers from being from a genre I don't play much.

Great idea to make a tile-based, medieval-theme combat quest in AGS! I found that the tiles were a bit small to see what's going on and I had trouble using items using the keyboard controls to use items in inventory. I tried the strategy of just bolting for the exit which worked for a few screens. I realize that part of the gameplay is to figure it out after being defeated and having to start over enough times, but after about 10 minutes of this I felt that I was just not enjoying it enough to continue.

Not really my cup of tea and very buggy. The font was almost impossible to read for me, so I didn't understand the controls. The whole time I didn't really have a clue what I was doing. I was running around, trying to escape other persons. When I died, I sometimes respawned at locations I haven't even been before. Some of the waypoints would put me somewhere in the middle of another map, not at the border. When an archer hit me, I couldn't do anything. Only wait until he would get one field closer and hit me again. At one point, I was suddenly a dog???
I found two different persons that I rescued.
I liked the graphics of the tiles, but I didn't like the portraits (they didn't fit the rest of the game at all). The music was nice.[/spoiler]

Sherwood - a roguelike game made in AGS, impressive! I did not comple it but had some fun