Merrak's Isometric Adventures -- Artificial Intelligence!

Super glad that you are ok and that the hurricane didn't hit home so to speak!

Since I don't like the value/experience/based games that much I haven't much to say about balancing. I'm more of a puzzle / adventure kind of player and when bashing keys need to be done I'm not interested in that gameplay.
Having a running Spreadsheet with formulas to balance gameplay sounds like a bit overcomplicated thing to do, but again I'm not into designing these kinds of RPGs.

Finding secrets and other treasures is what I do like. Also the idea you had about sounds and the possible interference you could do with the golems was what I was interested in. I would love for games where you can turn on/off certain features so that people can play the game more suited to their needs. If the player doesn't want to fight have an option to turn fight-mode off.

I know that will do much about the balance of the game, but it will allow those people to go and find the route to the balcony

...I'm more of a puzzle / adventure kind of player and when bashing keys need to be done I'm not interested in that gameplay.
Having a running Spreadsheet with formulas to balance gameplay sounds like a bit overcomplicated thing to do, but again I'm not into designing these kinds of RPGs.

I tend to fall somewhere in between. I've mentioned a few times that the Vallas Engine games take a lot of inspiration from a MUD server I used to run ~15 years ago. The MUD was based off of a system called "ACK!MUD", which was heavily hack-and-slash. I found that gameplay very repetitive, albeit enjoyable in shorter bursts and mixed in with other challenges. So that's what I had set out to do back then.

For "Towers of Vallas" I'm sticking to the Game Boy as much as possible: resolution, sound, and controls. Between the limited controls and resolution, I'm probably going to end up with a game that is a lot more hack-and-slash than I'd prefer... but I'm also not intending it to be very long.

I'm viewing "Towers of Vallas" as part exercise/part "real game". It's a bit of a tangent project... but it's simpler and will allow me to test a lot of engine fundamentals before stepping up to more complex features. When I get back to Idosra and its golems, there will be more opportunity for the gameplay I'd really like to have.

Wow!
That will be indeed a good test of the engine.
I was a bit confused with all the different things you did in this 29 page journal
And then I just revisited your first post and noticed you edited it!! That made sense. I should have read that earlier.

So you have temple of Idosra where the Thief of Vallas (Marika) is locked in a temple. (http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/35396)
The latest AI gameplay videos are kind of the latest state of things?

And then you have Towers of Vallas which is the GameBoy version for which I couldn't find a playable version. But you posted that awesome gif:
http://anorthogonaluniverse.com/misc/vallas/2018-09-09-01.gif

Are you switching development between those two projects or do you change the engine with both projects in mind and test the changes on both of them?!

...And then I just revisited your first post and noticed you edited it!! That made sense. I should have read that earlier.

It's probably out of date again I've gone back and forth so many times. Part of that is bad planning, but also part is due to unexpected surprises. In a lot of ways the engine is more capable than I thought it would be.

"Temple of Idosra" is the main title. "Towers of Vallas" is a prequel of sorts. I do have a rough story arc in mind, but it's not terribly important. The enemies in Towers are just guards. Nothing special about them. Their AI is even limited. I use simpler AI so that I have more control over the difficulty of the game. In my mind, Towers is an exercise in level design... something I need to learn more about.

Both games use the same engine--even the same renderer. The engine offers two renderers: a blending renderer (this is the one that made the red/green columns) and a dithering renderer. Both of these games use dithering.

The only real difference I've run into so far is that Towers, with its Game Boy resolution, is more prone to numerical errors. The engine is very customizable through XML files. In fact, although both of these games are separate Stencyl projects, I could bundle them together and even mix "Game Boy" levels with "Idosra" levels. That feature is a holdover from when the map parameters were defined from the Stencyl scene that initialized the map. Before I used XML data to configure a map, I used a scene behavior and the scene gravity, tilesize properties, etc.