ToME WikiBucketMan: Hey, Nerdanel! I just spent an hour and half with Zothiqband, and here are my thoughts:
1) I still trip on "Eunuchs do not have any disadvantags..."
NerdanelVampire: Heh.
2) Could we have numeric descriptions for the various descriptors? "Often become a bard or concubine" probably implies a charisma bonus, but '+3 Charisma' would be much more clear.
NerdanelVampire: Probably. Although several descriptors don't really have any effects yet because the engine refuses to take them into account, so this way there's less false advertising. Similarly, ghouls SHOULD be get innate speed, but don't. If I get too specific I run the risk of having the text suddenly obsoleted by a new engine version.
3) Do we really want monsters in town? If we do..ok, but could we at least be selective about it? Invisible monsters in the starter town is really harsh.
NerdanelVampire: Invisible monsters seem to be a good idea to filter out. In fact I'll do it right now... Done. And just in case, I moved the starting village from level 1 to level 0. I never found the place particularly difficult, but now it should be even safer.
4) Along those lines, should 'blubbering idiots' and 'townsfolk' appear and fight alongside corpse pieces and worm masses in the Myrkrasian Mountains? I don't think it would be worth setting up custom ai's and factions to fight one another, at this point, but maybe at least have more selective monster generation.
NerdanelVampire: Consider them evil townsfolk. 
I've taken the Vanilla Angband approach to townsfolk. If they don't bother you, they don't show up on the screen.
5) Skills, abilities and classes are all standard ToME. Are these going to be thematized? Right now Zothiq kind of feels like ToME with a different map and some names changed. Something needs to happen to give it more life. (Or, 'death.') This is potentially an exciting world. You know what I'd really love? There's some creepy stuff in here. Maybe that could be expanded on. With some dark music, some creepy quest dialogues, and maybe the occsional surprise it would be fantastic if Zothiqband could inspire some spine-tingling frights. I want to be scared when I see Cthulhu
NerdanelVampire: I'm planning a cannibal class and the priest classes will certainly be different once I get to them. This is a huge project and I've noticed that for some reason my speed of development is much lower than yours.
I've tried making some music myself, but with little success. The tracker interface is a big obstacle to me and Rosegarden needs JACK to give out more than midi, and JACK is a configuration nightmare on which I have wasted hours without getting it more than half-work at best. (I need something that runs on Linux.) I don't know if I could compose something even in the best situation, but I'd like to find out.
Have you found R'lyeh yet?
6) Weirdness: In wilderness mode, I stepped onto the entrance of the Myrkrasian Mountains, and as ambushed. But, before being placed into not-wilderness mode, I was teleported to the extreme left of the worldmap, in the middle of the ocean. Thus ending the game. (EDIT: Ambushed again, this time I was placed off the extreme right edge of the map, in the midst of darkness.)
NerdanelVampire: That's an engine bug. It should be fixed in the next alpha.
7) Speaking of ambushes, they seem to place you right on the map border, making them very easy to escape.
NerdanelVampire: They didn't use to do that. It sounds like that engine bug again.
8) Should ambushes be allowed on the roads?
NerdanelVampire: Yes. It's only thematic. (See The Tomb-spawn by Clark Ashton Smith.) But the roads are only level 5 so they aren't that bad.
9) Ghoul-caves: Should 'Aquatic' ghorii appear in caves?
NerdanelVampire: No, they shouldn't and they don't in the developer version. Neither do fish get generated in the desert.
10) The description for the blasphemous noble quest runs off the edge of the screen. Is this quest completable?
NerdanelVampire: No. But now it shouldn't run off the edge and it has a disclaimer.
11) Umm...are any quests completable? Some are marked incompletable, like the Goat Robbers quest, but I haven't found any that can be done. Could we have some quests? Zothiq is a really big world. Gobs of monsters, and uniques, lots of towns and dungeons...but it kind of feels like there's nothing to do, and there isn't really any direction yet. We need quests.
NerdanelVampire: I've been concentrating more on getting the basic dungeon crawling working. The next version for example will have some more ego items. Nothing fancy, though.
12) If ghorii and other monsters are going to appear in large cities like Zul-Bha-Sair, could we at least have guards posted in the city? For instance...it might be neat to have guards at every entrance with ai's that only allow them to move within half a dozen spaces in any direction. Then, monsters may spawn freely outside. This way, players are only 'safe' when inside the city. If you really wanted to go far with that, you could even disable instant wilderness map transitions, and maybe make it a recurring strategy theme throughout the game.
NerdanelVampire: Or maybe I should make all the inhabited towns level 0...
13) Permanent walls might look nicer of replaced with strchar('127') instead of '#'
NerdanelVampire: I disagree. It's a matter of taste.
14) Could we remove blue from the possible colors that the Dimensional Rift is allowed to shimmer? Sometimes it blends in with the water.
NerdanelVampire: I'll have to think about that. It's a different shape though.
15) LUA error: "Theme drop item creation failed for race The Hog" when entering the Dimensional Rift. EDIT: Getting this error a lot in a variety of places. Just a guess: some dungeons and some monsters probably don't have drop themes assigned. It's fine either/or, but when you get both together, you'll see an error like this.
NerdanelVampire: I think I'll have to modify my monster converter program to take that sort of cases into account and give them some default theme.
16) Since the French subrace comes from a dimensional portal, and there's a dimensional rift in the game, this is just begging to have a silly, funny sub-plot. Maybe have a dungeon exit on a certain level (similar to Heart of the Earth in Mirkwood, or the Water Caves in Moria) that leads to France? Make it a small town map filled with npc's who only speak French (poor player!) and policemen who chase the player around if he's brandishing weapons?
NerdanelVampire: There is already a France. Averoigne (behind a dimensional rift) is a forest in Medieval France. I might add a branch or a persistent special level that is a bit more civilized so you can see more of it.
17) You have some dungeons using FLAG_PERSISTENT still. It was removed from the engine in alpha16. Instead of fixing it, maybe bug DarkGod to put it back? I want to use it too.
NerdanelVampire: Mount Doom was still lying around... I had left it as an example for future special levels, but I have it commented out now.
18) Just a thought: perhaps the final end-game quest could be less obvious? Think ToME: You don't even know about Sauron or Morgoth until you're pretty far into the game. Think Dragonball T: The World Tournament is your first quest, but that only takes you about a third of the way through the actual game. Maybe Thasaidon could be gradually worked into the story over time.
NerdanelVampire: I intend to have eventually a series of plot-related quests, but currently the game is only theoretically winnable because the final quest is right there. I thought winnable was good.
19) There are still some ToME elements in the game. Moria, the Land of Rhun, Orfax, Farmer Maggot, the One ring. (Weilding the One Ring generates LUA errors over time, by the way.) Actually, it might be entertaining to keep the One Ring in the game. It certainly fits the 'style' of the world, and it could very easily be adapted into a nifty sub-plot, like France.
NerdanelVampire: Most of those exist in the code, but cannot be accessed normally. Of those, I think only Orfax is really in-game and he should probably be renamed to something else.
20) Maybe the Dying Sun should be a bit more caustic than ordinary lava?
NerdanelVampire: Possibly. It's dying, though.
21) How do we travel to other planets? I know this is probably very way-late-game stuff, but I can see that this is such a HUGE world with so much potential. I'm really eager to see it developed.
NerdanelVampire: You can already travel to other planets, namely Votalp, Lophai and Xiccarph. They are dungeons behind dimensional rifts. (Xiccarph is two.)
Perhaps I should have messages on entering about there being multiple suns of such and such color. That kind of stuff is really hard to portray otherwise. I wonder if I can do something to the calendar?
22) Zothiq really need some special levels, and customization of the random map generation. A few places are unique in some way, like the Ghoul caves have custom monsters, and the Desert of Dluth has a unique map generation style, but overall everything kind of looks the same.
23) Fields probably don't need to be NOTICE=true
NerdanelVampire: No, and you can run through them in the next version.
23) I was notified of a dungeon town in Yethlyreom , but didn't see any stores. For that matter, should there even be dungeons towns?
NerdanelVampire: Dungeon towns are bugged in the engine.
Er, that town in Yethlyreom might have undead living in it as described in The Empire of the Necromancers, my source for Yethlyreom. I like dungeon towns and like to put them everywhere they are marginally justified.
24) The more I play, the more I'm noticing how similar the 'new' monsters are to standard ToME monsters. When I see a 'Water Hound of the Squid Moon' I think 'Water Hound.' Very few of the monsters are actually unique to the world. Sure, there are lots of monsters, but I can easily go five minutes without seeing anything I recognize as distinctly Zothiq.
NerdanelVampire: I might have to do something with the Z hounds, although I don't know what. However, as everyone else seems to drop the nasty, nasty, hated hounds, I decided to continue the Vanilla-old tradition of nastiness and keep them.
There are two methods here. One is to start accumulating monsters from scratch. The other is to keep the old ones, and change them to fit the theme and drop the ones that won't. With the latter method you get balancing for free and mid-developent is more interesting since there are more monsters. To date I have created exactly zero monsters from scratch, although I have tweaked the attributes of some. There are monsters I need to write myself, but I haven't gotten to those yet. I'm also going to re-rename those dragons since even I can't remember what element all of them are supposed to breathe.
25) Overall I think Zothiq needs more spark. I know it's being hindered by some unresolved engine issues, but I assume those will be fixed eventually. Think of the books. It's a unique world, right? So make Zothiqband unique too. I never read the books. Did bards exist? Did the main characters run around with swords and heavy armor? Did they cast spells? If the answer to any of these is 'no' then remove these elements from the game. Zothiq doesn't have to be like ToME at all. The more different it is, the better.
NerdanelVampire: There is one bard, but now that I think of it, his songs seem limited to Charm Madamoiselle, which gives a good reason to drop the bard class, which isn't currently in the game anyway. However, Zothique really has swords and armors and spells, so I can't do anything about that except to make them more thematic. I think the spell system is among the best parts of ToME 2, so I'll have to be careful about tinkering with that and it's going to be low priority. I'm just going to go over everything and tweak the flavor.
Oh yeah, the Charm Player spell is on my to-do list. Monsters cast it in the source material so many times that it has to be in.