I've had a longer play and reached some conclusions which are mainly flavour based:
Firstly, (as mentioned by kilobyte on Mantis) the flavour needs to be changed. I'd have them just as a (slightly plain) insectoid species. I don't think there is any harm in it as it's less confusing and we don't currently have any insect races. Dwants just sounds too jokey/confusing and I think more people could get behind a general insect race.
In defense of the Dwarf aspect, it brings stuff to the table that a plain insect species couldn't. If this species started out as a pure insect, it probably wouldn't be heavy-armour focused with high invoc+evoc, both of which I consider a defining feature of the species. In addition, it gives us an opportunity to come up with a completely unique flavour found only in Crawl: we can give the silly idea a serious backstory.
I can understand not everybody liking the Dwarf aspect, so here's a poll to gauge how people feel:
http://poll.pollcode.com/1cbvi <<<
Fill this outAssume that this poll would only affect the outcome of flavour and that the Dwant mechanics would stay the same.
To that end, I'd also make them more insect like. Perhaps they could also have other insect like features/mutations? I thought thin skeletal structure (also increasing over time) could be a good one, or a beak (could be renamed something like maw) to separate them further.
The mutation screen is already at 7 lines, I'm really concerned to add much more. I can add effects to their chitin skin though, such as stealth.
The best hope is finding someone who's willing to host the build on a server. In the past this is how a lot of new features have been tested. I do think it'd be nice to make putting experimental builds on the servers easier, because it's a fairly common situation that stuff in branches/forks needs playtesting but nobody wants to compile it themselves (and online play does have a significant bonus that designers/devs can spectate which is really really useful when polishing a new feature).
I was talking to gammafunk about hosting Dwants on his server, but I don't know if it will happen. Still, I wouldn't consider anything but trunk to be actual testing as people play trunk much differently than they do test repos. Trunk attracts the whole community while testing repos only attract those in favor of the idea in the first place. Trunk has people playing to win, while testing repos has people playing to try out every new ability on D:1.
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Anyway, I coded up some Dwant monsters: two fighters and a mage. They have all the defining features of dwants: digging, shafting, 4 arms, stasis, etc.
The 'dwant venom mage' has a funny spell list:
- Code:
SPELL_OLGREBS_TOXIC_RADIANCE,
SPELL_OLGREBS_TOXIC_RADIANCE,
SPELL_NO_SPELL,
SPELL_MASS_CURE_POISON,
SPELL_DIG,
SPELL_SHAFT_SELF,
It spams Olgrebs and poisons everything, then a few turns later it casts a new monster spell, 'Mass Cure Poison', which removes the poison from every ally in its LOS! It's probably too gimmicky of a monster to be used often, but it would work nicely in a special vault or two. (also, they're fun to enslave and have them heal you instead)