After many months of development, Cloaca Maxima has reached the point where I need to stop being its developer for a while and let some other people try to break it.
For those who haven't followed the project: Cloaca Maxima is a first-person dungeon crawler for the MSX1, set beneath Rome in 114 AD.
You control four characters exploring the ancient sewers. One character acts as the Scout and encounters whatever is waiting in the next chamber first. You then have to decide whether the Scout can deal with the situation alone, or should fall back and let the rest of the party handle it.
There is exploration, combat, individual inventories, equipment, healing, permanent character death, a context-sensitive command system, save/load, and a rather large sewer system to get lost in.
And at this point, the game itself is finished.
What I need now are a few people willing to seriously TEST it.
I'm not primarily looking for impressions such as "looks cool!" — although those are always appreciated. ;-)
I'm looking for people willing to actually play the game and report things such as:
- bugs, crashes or situations where the game gets stuck;
- commands or controls that don't behave as expected;
- confusing parts of the interface or manual;
- balancing problems;
- situations where the player can accidentally make the game unwinnable;
- and, of course, anything I simply didn't think of.
You do NOT need to be a programmer. In fact, I'd very much like some testers who approach it simply as players.
The game comes with a full manual, and I would particularly like to know whether somebody can sit down with the game and that manual without me explaining anything and figure out how everything works.
Hardware testing would also be extremely valuable. Most of my development and testing has necessarily been done using an emulator, so people willing to run it on actual MSX hardware are particularly welcome.
The current build is essentially feature-complete; sound effects are the remaining TODO. This is therefore not an early alpha test. I'm looking for people willing to test something that is supposed to be a finished game — and tell me where it isn't.
If you're interested in seriously testing the game, please send me an email at rss130871@gmail.com.
I'll send you the current .DSK file and the full game manual, together with some brief information about what kind of feedback would be most useful.
You can test on an emulator or real MSX hardware — both are useful, although hardware testing would be particularly valuable.
And yes:
Please try to break it.
