Dungeon Bash Tactics announced, playtesters sought
Dungeon Bash Tactics is a free single-player turn-based mouse-controlled, random dungeon, loot & leveling game with a minimalist plot. It’s somewhere between a Rogue-like and a Japanese tactical RPG.
My impressions from my admittedly short time playing the game are as follows: it’s a promising start. There are a good variety of different attacks with different effects, and you’re constantly faced with choices about which attacks to study and how to make the best use of your limited money.
However, the game definitely still needs work. The user interface, in particular, isn’t quite there yet. Right now, you have to press Okay after every action; if you want to take no action, you have to actually select “No Action” from a menu and then hit Okay, which is doubly irritating. I’d like to see DBT offer a larger party and greater class specialization. Terrain effects also seem like a natural addition: without them, the randomly generated dungeon levels don’t make too much of a difference in terms of how the battles play out.
Those are just my impressions, though. You can download the game here and form your own opinions. The creator is requesting feedback on the game, so this is a good opportunity to exercise a critical eye and influence the design of a nascent RPG. A word of warning: Dungeon Bash Tactics requires DirectX 9, which I believe makes it Windows-only.
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About your interface issues: Rather than clicking “Okay”, you can double-click instead. For example, to do No Action, click a character 4 times: once to select, once to have them not move, once to pick the “No Action” command (which is automatically selected when clicking your character after the move command) and once more to confirm. You can confirm any action by clicking on the target of that action an extra time, instead of Okay. This is very non-obvious, though, and definitely needs explaining.
On another note, do you know of any way to contact the developer to give feedback? He says on his site that he wants feedback, but I don’t see an email or feedback form anywhere.
You can confirm actions by double-tapping on the target, and you can perform no action by double-tapping on your character after you move.
@DuckTapeAI: He gives his contact info on the game’s title screen.
@Matt: Good to know. In that case, replace my interface feedback with a suggestion to remove the Okay button entirely and just tell the player to do what you just said.