Guest Post – Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon Testing Snark

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 4, 2013

Today, if all goes well, I’ll be on my way back to the United States, after a somewhat eventful trip to Bangladesh on business of the day-job variety. It’s been weird being in a completely opposite time zone – 5 AM in Bangladesh has been 5 PM in Salt Lake City. Weird. Anyway, to finish up the two weeks of blogs from the road – semi-canned – I’m including a list of snarky testing comments that Daniel “DGM” McNeese sent me during testing of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon. Some of these have appeared before in dribs and drabs on the blog.  But just so you can get some idea of the kind of interplay that went on during those early beta days… or maybe even late-alpha days… here they are.

Warning – mucho spoilers included.

Plus lots and lots of weirdness and inside jokes. For me, it reminds me of oh so much pain! Pain, pain pain! But hey, I hear that’s a source of humor. So here’s DGM’s compiled list of Frayed Knights testing follies… ripped right from his test reports and emails to my blog… 

 

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>> “Oh, and I also found out what is happening with the damage issues you are seeing from weapons. This is another save-game bug problem. When you reload your characters, there’s a flag that’s not getting set to tell the character attack routines to tell them to look for the currently equipped weapon in the full-fledged player inventory rather than the cheap-and-dirty NPC equipment location. So your characters have been fighting bare-handed.”

 

Okay, I know Arianna’s skills have gotten a bit rusty since her military days, but forgetting you even have a weapon is pretty bad. No wonder the Knights get no respect.

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5) On a personal and somewhat silly note, I’m going to be very sad when you get around to implementing falling damage. There were a couple of points in the tower where taking a swan dive off a high ledge made for a convenient – and amusing – shortcut. 🙂

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2) Imps seem to love blinding Dirk, and while blind Dirk seems to love attacking the wrong target. That seems reasonable enough, but he’ll even attack enemies that have already been dead for several turns. If this isn’t intentional, it’s actually funny enough that you might want to keep it and lampshade it with some dialogue.

“Hey, Sun Tzu! The enemy is over HERE!”

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8) A talking skull for a security system, the artifact skull that the main quest revolves around and now the entrance to the Chapel of Anarchy? Plus three giant skeletons in the chapel with economy-sized skulls of their own? Is there something that you’d like to talk about, Jay? 🙂

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3) One other thing about that bridge puzzle. I see you already noticed that the stairway resets on loading a save. I wanted to note that I was able to get back to the other side by swan-diving into the “cold-lava.” I just wanted to bring this up because, well… This may be the single most bizarre thing I have EVER done to get around a bug. Thank you for that once-in-a-lifetime experience, Jay. 🙂

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PX TEMPLE

1) As long as you don’t cancel out of the fountain dialogue, you can continue to throw coins into it even after running out of money. A thorough explanation of the game’s credit and loan system is called for.

2) When daring Arianna to drink from the fountain, Dirk says “Well, it’s obviously not a normal font.” Problem: this dialogue DOES use the normal font. I suggest switching to Wingdings.

3) No matter how many times I have Chloe toss a coin in the fountain and wish for a pony, it never happens. C’mon, Jay, we’re up to version FIVE here. You really should have ponies implemented by now.

ARDIN

1) Chloe suggests giving Silas some of the pimple jewels in place of the eye jewels the party missed getting. This is despite the fact that I removed the pimple stones from the game forever by dropping them before I even entered the inn. Also, I can offer Nobblehawk the drake statuette even though I’ve never heard of it before. I approve of allowing the party to give away items they don’t have – this is a fresh and original game mechanic and I can’t believe no one’s ever thought of it before. But you forgot to implement the option to give Silas the eye jewels. It would make things SO much easier for the party. Also, selling Silas the Brooklyn Bridge would be a good use of this feature.

2) Ardin is remarkably progressive. According to one of the dialogue options, the five giant rats piloting the mechanical suit are actually the town mayor. Normally I would observe that giving political power to giant, evil, intelligent rats hell-bent on the destruction of civilization may not be the healthiest course for a society to take, but we’re the country that elected Barack Obama so I don’t really have the high ground here.

3) The party has four members, two rooms at the inn and only one bed per room. Where should your customers submit their slash fanfic?

EAST WILDERNESS

1) The storm crows will periodically stop flapping their wings, but manage to remain aloft regardless. They need jetpacks to justify that. Aesthetically, those old WW2 flight helmets and goggles would go well with this.

GENERAL

1) When shopping, merchants will give their selling price for an item regardless of whether the highlighted item is in their inventory or mine. Fine, but if they’re going to charge me full price to sell me my own property they could at least ask if I want some complementary fries with that. Cheap bastards.

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12) Although Chloe wears pink again in her portrait, the title screen still has her in purple. Let me be clear: all vestiges of the Cyndi Lauper/Disney Princess abomination that is purple Chloe must be PURGED. Also, the artist must pay for bringing such a creature into the world in the first place. Where does he live, and do you know of any defenses he may have in place? 😉

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Storm CROWS, not storm bats. Not sure what the hell I was thinking there.

>> “That they are still using a bat model that needs to be replaced?”

(stares)

(facepalms)

Would you believe that until you pointed that out just now, I never consciously realized that the models weren’t crows? Jeebus Christ, for someone who roots out even the most obscure bugs and inconsistencies by the dozen, I can be remarkably dense at times. I must be blind as a – er, never mind.

>> “I was wondering when you’d eventually pick up on that one… “

The sad part is that I was paying close attention to the “crows” – when we were testing the status countdown bug – and managed to miss that anyway. I even joked about how they should have jetpacks and WW2 flight helmets so clearly I was thinking about their appearance at one point, and I STILL missed it. If you’re laughing up your sleeve right now, I can’t blame you. Even I can’t help but laugh at it – that was a pretty severe case of fail. 🙂

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Thus girded, Team Vanilla proceeded to the tower. Chloe spent most of the way whining that chocolate was actually the best flavor, until Arianna offered to let her try some hemlock and compare.

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The Holy Rollers head into the wilderness, praying fervently that they don’t get lost for forty years.

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Surprisingly, the Ferrous Golem only took 6 rounds this time. And it didn’t really do much damage to me. Having my front-liners cast Blessing on themselves probably helped, but mostly I think the dice were just with me this time (PRAISE THE LAWD!!!).

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2) If you’re already dual-wielding, the game has no idea what to do if you try to equip a two-handed weapon. Trying to put it in the primary hand results in the primary hand being empty. Trying to put it in the off hand is even worse – I had Dirk dual-wielding a dagger and a two-handed warhammer! And he didn’t even meet the might requirement!

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I’m going to go back and make Chloe a throwing specialist after all. In fact, I’m going to see if I can combine that with the dual-wielding bug and make something like this: http://www.nuklearpower.com/2009/01/27/episode-1087-exalted-feat/

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Acting on Ben’s information, Don Arianna orders the party to the tower. Can Ben redeem himself and become a made hippy after all?

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7) FINALLY figured out a bug that’s been vexing me for a while. When you open the door that triggers the fight with 2 elementals and an imp, you get teleported back down 1 floor. I knew even I couldn’t be THAT bad at navigating. Even if I did end up in the wrong state once without trying to leave town.

…Shut up. 🙂

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12) An ice elemental hit the party with Frostwave after Dirk was already down. I’ll let the history scroll speak for itself:

“Dirk takes the beating like a dead Dirk, which it is.”
“Dirk is stunned”

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>> “Sorry Mario, but the item you need (#5) is in another dungeon.”

(facepalms)

Mama-mia. I swear I’m-a gonna jump on ya head one-a these days, Toad, and no jury will-a convict me. 😛

Incidentally: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEVU-YLpM8A

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Team Vanilla heads towards the caverns. Along the way many alternate names for the group are proposed, such as Team Chocolate, Team Extreme and Team Can’t-We-All-Just-Get-Along. Finally Arianna proposes Team If-You-Kids-Don’t-Shut-the-Hell-Up-I’m-Turning-This-Quest-Around-Right-Now, but the others vote it down on the grounds that it’s too long for a business card.

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The Holy Rollers depart for the near caverns on a mission from God. Well, from Silas anyway. But since he’s their ticket into the Adventurer’s Guild, it feels close enough.

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Okay, let me start by warning you that my antics in this run were complete and utter BULLSHIT that will provide you with no useful feedback on balance issues whatsoever. Although they may provide you with some amusement. Or horror. Whichever.

Since you’re making enough changes that I figured further balance-related feedback would be useless under the current rules, I decided to just focus on bugs this time around. And I decided focusing on them might as well include having some fun with them. So I cheated myself a bunch of feat points and some gear and went to town. For most of the party this just meant boosting their weapon skills, but for Arianna I decided to see just how far I could push the dual-wielding. I gave her a battle axe and a shortbow, giving her 3 hands-worth of weapons to start with. Then I gave her Rank Smack, which resulted in her getting a single extra attack against the untargeted opponent in the rank. On top of the 3 attacks given for dual-wielding in the first place I figure that’s two axe strokes and two bow shots a round, or six hands-worth of weapons.

So, basically, I turned Arianna into a Marilith. I could have gone with Kali instead and let her keep the legs, but giving her a tail to go with all the extra arms just completes the crazy nicely, don’t you think?

NEAR CAVERNS

For Kasaga I used my now-standard tactic of killing off one berserker and one shaman, then bitch-slapping the chief into oblivion from afar. This went well enough, although Arianna was usually unable to attack him in the third rank. Occasionally (seemingly at random) the game would let her take a shot at him, but most of the time neither the hotkey nor the amulet would work.

I like to think he took one look at the THING Arianna had become and spent the entire battle trying to run away from her. It’s too bad I don’t have any artistic skills – I would love a picture of Arianna as a Marilith with two axes and two bows. All while looking out at the viewer with the same “I SO don’t have time for you” expression she wears in her default portrait. Oh, well.

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RAT DUNGEON

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3) Why is their secret weapon in a box they can’t open? Did the Nom Postal Service mail it to them that way? If so, there’s some definite humor potential you need to be cashing in on (barely sapient, but they’ve already discovered the wonders of bureaucracy).

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1) The augmented ceiling drop trap on the first basement floor didn’t cause any injury. Instead, it put half the party to sleep. I GUESS you could argue that being hit on the head by falling masonry would knock them out, but you’d think it would also take off some HP in the process. 🙂

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BTW, I’ve got a rather amusing bug for you. Remember how leaving the near caverns immediately after your first arrival can cause the “skull is missing” dialogue to play in other zones? This time, Ben didn’t just complain about it being a long hike back to Ardin – he did it while walking right past the STATUE of Ardin smack dab in the MIDDLE of Ardin. So apparently our little hippie’s been hitting his stash while on the clock.

For shame, Ben.

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1) The description for the Linebacker feat says “offers some protection to those IN THE BEHIND him or her.” I know the entire party is sharing a single bed at the inn now, but come on – is this REALLY that type of game?

 

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