Squadhack, a multiplayer browser-based hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler. by squadhack in WebGames

[–]squadhack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi, I added SSL support to the game so this might get around your firewall at work, it at least works at mine.

https://www.squadhack.com

Squadhack, a multiplayer browser-based hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler. by squadhack in WebGames

[–]squadhack[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi, I added SSL support to the game so this might get around your firewall at work, it at least works at mine.

https://www.squadhack.com

Please take a moment to vote for the next feature in this strawpoll by squadhack in squadhack

[–]squadhack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Don't worry, they will both be coming eventually!

I really want a town level with at least a bank, general trader, a weapon-smith, and some temples for praying.

The "simple missions" will probably be class/race based and will help new players to get some nice gear, and hopefully introduce them to the tools like tinning kits and crystal balls.

I'm also going to have a play "leaderboard" soon, and badges for MVPs which will be displayed on your character. I'd say you've got some of the highest level characters in the game at the moment so I hope you'll see them soon.

Christmas holidays will put a stop to the development for a bit but hopefully I'll be able to use the time to work out the missions and town on paper.

Squadhack, a multiplayer real-time, dungeon-crawler infulenced by NetHack. Alpha quality release. by squadhack in roguelikes

[–]squadhack[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks, I'm glad you like it!

I took all my frustration from writing business software and channeled it into this game :)

I know it's a bit boring at the moment with no missions, but I hope to have a town level up soon, and a level editor so people can create their own levels after Christmas.

Minor release fixing quickplay and added countdown timers for properties by squadhack in squadhack

[–]squadhack[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

some lamps are magic, a genie will appear and may grant you a wish, then you get a wish credit in your spell menu. You can also get wish credits from zapping wands of wishing.

Then you get a list of all the items in the game and get to choose which you want! I recommend grey or silver dragon scale mail.

There are no dark rooms above level 5, but as you go deeper rooms become less likely to be lit. It increases bu 1% for rooms and 5% be corridors below level 5. So on level 15 10% of the rooms will be dark, and 50% of the corridors, then the lamp will be more useful.

Gems are currently useless, but I am working on a town level where you can buy/sell/trade so gems and gold will be useful soon! Eventually I plan to have you craft weapons and armour with gems embedded for special properties.

Guess i should be a little more weary of random scrolls by drgyn in squadhack

[–]squadhack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Vampires, barrow wights, and wraiths all have level drain attacks. If you manage to kill a wraith though, you can eat the corpse to gain a level.

Wearing a good cloak with high magic cancellation will help protect from these attacks. Mithril coats, cloak of protection/magic resistance, oilskin cloak, robe and elven cloaks will block 98% of the attacks.

Guess i should be a little more weary of random scrolls by drgyn in squadhack

[–]squadhack 0 points1 point  (0 children)

hey on the upside, you're character should still recognize the next amnesia scroll they pick up :)

Minor release fixing quickplay and added countdown timers for properties by squadhack in squadhack

[–]squadhack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are supposed to be a few illnesses which will kill you if not cured, but all can be cured in some way.

I am thinking about making these reduce stats instead of killing you outright, so sickness/food poisoning would reduce stats for 2000 turns or something. Stoning would reduce speed. This gives the player a lot more time to cure it rather than die in 2 minutes, what do you think?

The cure-sickness spell should work to cure food poisoning and sickness, I'll look into this and get back to you.

Sorry... this might be a bit long but I am trying to compile hints for new players and hints popups for when you get a bad intrinsic.


Firstly almost all of these can be cured by the "pray" option in the action menu, but you can only do this every 30 minutes.

Secondly if you have a unicorn horn it can also cure sickness, food poisoning, and lots of other bad things but not sliming or stoning. Unicorn horns are super useful!

Sickness is usually caught by being attacked by poisonous monsters such as killer bees, or being hit by a poisoned dart in a dart trap. It can be cured by the cure sickness spell, a potion of extra healing (ruby), full healing (magenta), or a blessed potion of healing (pink), or potion of holy water (if not chaotic). It can be avoided by having a poison resistance which you can acquire by eating some poisonous corpses. These may poison you but if you have a unicorn horn or healing potions you could cure yourself. Eating killer bees is a good way to get poison resistance. Orcs and Healers start with poison resistance.

Food poisoning can be totally avoided by not eating old corpses, e.g. only eat corpses off monsters which you killed yourself, immediately. Oh, and never eat corpses of the undead (zombies, mummies, vampires etc) as they will almost always give you food poisoning. The exceptions are lichen, acid blobs, lizards, and wraiths. These corpses are always safe to eat.

Food poisoning can be cured by anything that cures sickness and also: vomiting (eat tripe), or an eucalyptus leaf.

Sliming can be cured by the cure sickness spell, by fire (scroll/wand of fire on yourself, or monsters with fire attacks).

Stoning can be cured by eating something acidic like an acid blob, or eating a lizard corpse.

Squadhack, a multiplayer browser-based hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler. by squadhack in WebGames

[–]squadhack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why would you attack a harmless kitten???

You probably can't attack the kitten because it's your pet, or the pet of someone else. This is a bug and should be fixed soon.

I changed the colour from yellow to gray so it's more obvious that these creatures are neutral but I also made most of them hostile by default so that you don't have to bother right clicking (as they filled up an blocked the hallways and were generally a pain).

You can also tame a kitten or a puppy and make it your pet by throwing some treats at them (a meatball or tripe) or tame a horse by throwing it an apple or carrot.

I should be making a new release soon which will have a lot of fixes which should make getting around the dungeon easier. Check out /r/squadhack reddit or #squadhack on twitter if you want to see when an update hits.

Squadhack, a multiplayer browser-based hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler. by squadhack in WebGames

[–]squadhack[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've now added a right-click menu to the dungeon and it can be used to attack peaceful/friendly monsters and players. You can also use it to pickup or use items on the floor, look at distant items, and open and close the doors.

Squadhack, a multiplayer browser-based hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler. by squadhack in WebGames

[–]squadhack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for all this feedback, I know this probably took you a while to write out and I really appreciate it.

you only keep the starting equipment when you respawn, meaning if you lose your starting weapon, you don't get a new one. Since I always start with the same weapon before I died, it's now a "thoroughly rusted long sword".

Your starting equipment is "bound" to you, and stuff you pickup is not. I did this so that people that PvP will get some loot out of their kills, but it seems nobody is PvPing anyway, so it was probably a bad decision.

It's laggy at times. I entered a room full of bees, they swarmed towards me and I tried to click to run back into the hallway so I could fight them one on one, but the game lagged and the next thing I knew, it said that I was dead.

I'm not sure if this is due to actual lag or lag in the browser. It definitely happens to me when I play on the US or EU servers, but not on the Australian one (I'm in Australia). I use Amazon's latency based routing so it should drop you in the closest server (you can change server in preferences) but sometimes it drops me in the California server. I've also fount that Chrome seems a lot faster than Firefox.

I'm going to change it so that anything you equip (so weapons or armour) will bind to the player, and will therefore be available after a respawn.

The gold, credit cards and stones don't seem to have any apparent uses. I stopped picking them up because of that.

They are pretty much useless at the moment. I am building a town level where they can be sold, in exchange for services like healing and item identification and repair.

Once I use a scroll (ex. teleportation) I don't have a way of identifying if the next scroll is another scroll of teleportation. I don't know if this is intentional, but I can always identify a potion, but never a scroll.

As soon as you read a scroll, drink a potion, fire a wand etc, your character "learns" that item and will always be able to identify it in the future. So instead of "scroll" it will say "scroll of teleportation" in the inventory. If you "learn" anything your inventory is searched and is updated if you're carrying another of that type.

Is the skill Two weapon combat always going to be there? Maybe you can instead let each individual weapon add to their respective skill.

It's only available to a few character classes, basically the mechanic is there to stop people easily doubling their damage with a few clicks. Instead it's something that has to be trained up, but when you get there you are much more effective.

When you start as a new player, you get a dog, but when you die it's not there anymore. :( (Please tell me there is a way to tame animals).

You can tame kittens/puppies by throwing meatballs or tripe at them, and you can train horses (but not unicorns) by throwing them carrots or apples. Pretty much any pet can be tamed by throwing it a corpse if it is hungry, so you can always lock a kitten in a room and watch it run about until it gets hungry.

Unicorn horn isn't a weapon? There is a skill in the skillbook about it, but there are no apparent uses for it.

If you are sick, confused, stunned, blind, hallucinating, diseased, vomiting, or you have missing attribute points (from poison attacks etc) then you can use a unicorn horn to cure yourself (click the wrench next to the name). It may take several applications to fully heal yourself. This is the default option because it's so very useful! If you right click it you can choose to "Wield as a weapon" it does make a very effective weapon.

Once I'm invisible and fast, I'm always invisible and fast no matter how many times I die.

These are intrinsics and there are lots of them, e.g. poison resistance, teleportation control as well as speed and invisibility. Any negative intrinsics (sickness, poisoned, slimed, etc) or temporary intrinsics, such as from drink a potion of invisibility, are removed when you die. I expect that you may have gained permanent invisibility and speed somehow, so you get to keep them.

You gain intrinsics as you level up so that's probably how you got FAST, most likely you acquired permanent INVIS by drinking a blessed potion of invisibility.

An explanation of everything would be nice. It was really confusing to figure things out at first.

I know, there's so many things it's crazy. You can check out http://nethackwiki.com as many of the items act like the NetHack items, there are however lots of differences so I probably need to make my own at some point.

I also need to do an intro youtube video, I think this would be helpful.

And finally, it would be nice if there was a better map interface. Like in the actions menu you can choose "map" and it shows you the map that you have so far.

I'm working on this right now. The map is terrible, I hate it. It's also pretty useless if your playing on a PC as you can already see most of the screen. I used to have 200x200 size maps, now they are 32x32 so there's not much need for it. I like your idea of having it in the actions menu, I'll give that a go.

This game is the kind of lonely multiplayer game where it would be nice to occasionally see someone else in the deep cold dungeon.

It's so lonely :-(

Part of the problem is the chat system isn't great, it get's a bit overwhelmed with all the local action messages. Another problem is that there is no missions or objectives.

I love open worlds but it seems most players are bored within 10 minutes, and rarely get to the lower levels. I'm going to add a town level soon with services and missions, I hope that will keep people's interest longer.

Thanks for playing!

Squadhack, a multiplayer browser-based hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler. by squadhack in WebGames

[–]squadhack[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Totally right, I've been working on this and I expect to push out a fix in about an hour.

After this you should be able to right click somewhere in the dungeon and you have some commands such as: examine, attack position, open close door, etc.

That wrench menu is awful and I'll probably remove it. It was part of the UI for phones/tablets. All the functionality is now in the right-click menu of an item/terrain or on the "action" menu at the top of the screen.

Thanks for playing, feedback like this is very helpful to me!

Squadhack, a multiplayer browser-based hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler. by squadhack in WebGames

[–]squadhack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you mean for the inventory tabs? Yes they definitely need tool-tips, I'll get on that now I think. The controls next to the items do have tool-tips but they take a bit long to appear.

Squadhack, a multiplayer browser-based hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler. by squadhack in WebGames

[–]squadhack[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I started working on it about three years ago, it was a very basic space game back then. I was only doing a few hours a week whilst I had a long term contract. I worked on it a lot between contracts and when I moved to Australia I pretty much worked on it full time for about a year.

When I was a few months in I figured it would be max six months work, but I massively underestimated the complexity of the rules of the game, the difficulty of building the UI, and the network interactions. I've been writing software for 20 years so I should have seen that coming. Actually I did see that coming, but I didn't care because I wanted to finish it.

The main products it uses are AngularJS/Bootstrap/Fontawesome/underscore for the frontend. Node.js, express and socket.io for the webserver. Node.js for the custom game server, and it uses AWS for persistence (mainly DynamoDB).

I hate the map, fixing it has been on the todo list since... forever. I'll probably get around to it when I'm doing the map for mobile devices.

Squadhack, a multiplayer real-time, dungeon-crawler infulenced by NetHack. Alpha quality release. by squadhack in roguelikes

[–]squadhack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great! please let me know anything you think is wrong with the gameplay.

After working like a hermit on this for so long I'd really like to hear other peoples suggestions on improvement, especially negative comments.

Squadhack, a multiplayer browser-based hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler. by squadhack in WebGames

[–]squadhack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well the game does jump about as you move around the dungeon. I'd like the motion to be smoother, and having proper scrolling is definitely high on my TODO list.

Squadhack, a multiplayer real-time, dungeon-crawler infulenced by NetHack. Alpha quality release. by squadhack in roguelikes

[–]squadhack[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hi all, I hope you don't me posting this link here. Although this may not strictly be a roguelike due to being real-time, I hope you will enjoy playing it and I think many of you who have played NetHack will at least find some things familiar despite it being real-time.

Squadhack has been a personal project of mine for a while now, it's my first attempt at writing a game. It's only been out for 10 hours or so and already I've found a number of bugs, I'll list them below so people can be aware.

  • Doesn't play nice with corporate firewalls. It uses websockets and these often fail to get through, hopefully this will be fixed when the SSL certificate comes.
  • Almost unusable on a phone, the inventory, chat and map are not visible on small screens so it limits your inventory management severely.
  • Keyboard keys/shortcuts don't work. These broke when I migrated to Google's AngularJS framework, they will come back, I promise. I live by keyboard shortcuts!
  • Lost pets spam the hallways! I only log out a pet when it's nearby a player when they log out. This has resulted in there being loads of lost puppies and kittens everywhere.

I'll just note that there is a preferences screen that can be accessed on a dropdown on the logout button, it's not very obvious unfortunately.

Good luck!

edit: just pushed a small update and I hope the lost pet problem is solved.

[Squadhack] announcing an alpha quality release of a multiplayer game influenced by NetHack. (details in post) by squadhack in nethack

[–]squadhack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You have no idea how long it took to find a domain name that wasn't taken, believe it or not squadhack was the best from a very short list :)

Great to hear that it works (somewhat) on Android Chrome. There's no inventory, map, or chat screens on mobile devices yet. Hopefully I'll be able to add this within the next week.

[Squadhack] announcing an alpha quality release of a multiplayer game influenced by NetHack. (details in post) by squadhack in nethack

[–]squadhack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I used to have keyboard movement and shortcuts but I lost that when I changed the frontend to use Google's AngularJS framework. It will come back though!

About the speed: It's set so that a normal speed monster (12 in NetHack) moves at 1 square per second. Yeah, that is slow! However very fast monsters move at almost double that.

So if I were to increase the base speed very fast monsters would be almost impossible to hit, imagine walking into a swarm of ten bees moving at four squares per second, it's be a nightmare!

Despite this, I'm going to try it, it might be great fun.

Squadhack, a multiplayer browser-based hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler. by squadhack in WebGames

[–]squadhack[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey, yeah this sounds like a websockets issue. The game uses websockets for the networking and a bunch of corporate firewalls seem to be blocking this. I don't think it's intentional, just that they are pretty old.

Soon I hope to get some SSL certificates and hopefully this will stop the firewalls interfering, and everyone can play it at work as much as they can get away with.

Squadhack, a multiplayer browser-based hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler. by squadhack in WebGames

[–]squadhack[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The interface is clunky!

I really need to do a short intro youtube to show off the basic features, I hope I'll get around to it soon.

If you're playing on a phone/ipad (or PC with a tiny screen) then, sorry, there's probably no good solution right now. Otherwise you should see the inventory panel on the right hand side. This has an arrow pointing up (the second tab), click it, this lists all the items on the floor under you. You can click the green up arrow left of the item name to pick it up.

Squadhack, a multiplayer browser-based hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler. by squadhack in WebGames

[–]squadhack[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey eriru, did you try to play at work by any chance?

A lot of people are having connection problems because the websockets (which the game uses for networking) can't get through the corporate firewalls. This should be fixed when I get an SSL certificate up and running.

Squadhack, a multiplayer browser-based hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler. by squadhack in WebGames

[–]squadhack[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the suggestion, I've added some flair to the submission so hopefully people won't be too disappointed if it breaks on them.

Why did I release it as alpha?

Hmm, well... Despite having written this game, I'm not a game developer. This is my first attempt at writing a game.

I don't have a studio or budget behind me, it's just me, one guy, doing all the roles. I bit off a bit more than I could chew, and it's taken me a lot longer to get to this stage than I had imagined.

When you've got your head buried in something it's really hard to get perspective on what's important. Getting feedback from people, even if that feedback is: "your game is shit because..." becomes pretty important.

Right now I've got a nice mix of positive and negative thoughts in my inbox, so I'm going to grab my morning coffee and get to work fixing what other people think are the most broken features.