I was curious because i'm a bit familiar to Heroes of Might and Magic III, so I tried it and finally managed to run it via DOSBox. It plays very well and mostly similar to Heroes, but your game philosophy comes through: "twists" that can be added to the game (eh, I already know this word from somewhere...), plenty of monsters with funny special abilities, many different paths to go by leveling up heroes etc.
I really like your game and I'll play it the next weeks, but I don't really understand why you call it best computer game ever. Do you know many other computer games? (Well, I myself don't really but I'm sure there should be some more recent games that could be better.)
It's one of those "it's funny because it's true" things. Dudes has awful art (I did most of it myself, but not the rock or the boot or uh man maybe one other thing), it's low on interface-frills, it's my take on an old game. At the same time I have actually played it more than any other computer game, and can find you uh at least three other people who will cite it as their favorite computer/console/arcade game ever.
I have played a ton of computer/console/arcade games in my day. I played arcade games when they came out. There was a period where there was this incredible variety, and then a few years later it was all driving and punching games (although somehow not both together). I mostly played games with a jump button. Skaff Elias has a funny speech about how stupid it is that so many games had a button that made you be slightly higher briefly, but man I liked those games. Donkey Kong, Vs. Super Mario Bros., Rolling Thunder, Bubble Bobble. I did play some other games too, I will single out Centipede/Millipede.
I had an Atari 400, I remember Shamus especially fondly although it's a blatant red key / red door game. Crush Crumble & Chomp had a brilliant premise and funny rulebook but game-wise could have been better. Star Raiders was cool. I played a bunch of CX2600 games but never owned one.
I played games on the Apple ][ but never owned one. Ultima III and Ultima IV were each the best game ever in their day. Hitchhiker's Guide was the best text adventure although I never knew anyone to have beaten it without cheating. It showed that you could take the genre further, and then no-one ever did. Leather Goddesses of Phobos was good, but it was all downhill for Meretzky after Zork Zero.
I made a commercially available text adventure game in the 80s, Escape From Planet X. It had speech recognition, that was how I got it to exist. I worked for a company that did speech recognition/compression/synthesis.
As an adult I stuck with Nintendo for consoles. I loved the combat in Zelda 2 - it's just, your sword/shield are up/down, you can point one straight up, stab straight down. It's simple but good. Mario 64 was the best console game ever in its day. They are treading water on some of these things now - I expect Mario Kart 8 will be totally cool and yet not remotely new enough. Well to be fair Super Mario 3D World is great, and I liked the new Zelda 3DS game. Rayman Legends is a great recent platformer. I'm playing Pikmin 3 missions some these days by myself; the kids are making me replay the Mario Galaxy games and Kirby's Epic Yarn.
Secret of Monkey Island and the first sequel were the best of their kind. Plus Day of the Tentacle. The genre went way downhill since then. SimCity was cool but they never went anywhere with it, just improved the graphics and added more micromanagement; Caesar III is the real sequel to SimCity, although that series too just stuck with minor tweaks. In the Sims I had a house of all kids, you make money from paintings and eat pizza; I had a house with two prisoners who I let be completely autonomous while other people ran the house. You already know I loved Heroes II and III. Stop there, they messed it up after III. I don't know if the far-removed VI is any good or not.
I liked Oblivion and Skyrim but man the combat sucks. The skill tree is not great either. There are all these interface problems too (picking potion ingredients in Skyrim being a huge example). At the time I said, well the main improvement is that now when you pick a flower, it shows that you picked it. It's fun exploring the world though. If I were them I would make a Skyrim-type game with no combat, or automatic combat; focus on the stuff they do well. The combat is good enough in Fallout 3 although not fantastic or anything. Anyway as we know they made an MMO as their next thing and well I have zero interest in that. I'm not into RTS either.
Origins over the years could be counted on to make games with lots of bugs. I quit playing both Ultima VI and VII at points where all my saved games were wrecked. Ultima Underworld was still very cool in its day; I immediately wrote a 3-D texture-mapped engine. Sometimes you just need to know it's possible. Maxis could be counted on to make awful non-games with Sim in the title. It was a surprise when The Sims was actually good. It's still not really a game but I had some fun. LucasFilm/LucasArts, man I feel like they vanished after X-Wing. Sierra was pretty bad, for in-house games anyway. They profited from just not having a lot of competition in the graphic adventure game genre at one point. The Heroes people also had the Might & Magic series. VI was good, it's crude but the dungeons were reasonably interesting and it's fun building up your guys; VII had the exact same dated engine but hey Arcomage, and still decent level design; VIII and IX had the exact same engine and the level design degenerated into "the heaven place is a featureless stone maze with a cloud graphic for the floor."
I played Rogue when there were no Rogue-likes. I wasn't very good. Then I played the Atari ST version, which had graphics. Oh Time Bandit, that was a fantastic game on the ST. I haven't played many Rogue-likes but I put in some time on ADoM.
Kongregate is the flash game site I go to, though I've heard some developers don't like it. Flash games actually have some innovation; people are scared to blow money on unformulaic PC games, but it's no problem for one person to waste some time on a wacky flash game. Nerdook has done a bunch of neat variations on things, check him out. I liked Kingdom Rush as a recent tower defense game; it's fun drawing the map in a tower defense game, like in Desktop TD, but you so don't need that.
Have you guys tried Desktop Dungeons? There's a free earlier version that's good. You could be trying it in seconds. The premise is "5-minute Rogue-like" although it's kind of a puzzle-game. Exploring is a resource, that's the major idea.
Anyway yes I've played some computer games.
Would a Dominion spinoff always have the same base mechanic (every player has one deck to draw from and to improve) put together with some other stuff (board, tokens, other currencies, other types of cards, cards that don't go into the deck,...)?
Or are you also planning to abstract the base mechanics (e.g. board instead of deck)?
If it has Dominion in the title, you will build a deck, and the rest could be anything. If it doesn't have building a deck - like Kingdom Builder - then it will not have Dominion in the title and will just be a Dominion-inspired game that I made rather than a spin-off.
