With my time constraint I only got through the tutorial fight and the conversation about Cassius wanting to be captain. You're a bit verbose with your writing and I think it would make more sense to show some chemistry between Cassius and Evelyn's daughter rather than having Edmund explain the relationship to us.
Pretty nice gameplay, I played just a litte bit but I'll see if can beat the whole demo later.
There is a bug that after attacking sometimes the camera gets stuck and you can't select the unit anymore. Also something that annoyed me a bit is that sometimes I skipped text/tutorials by accident while clicking spacebar, you could add a bit of delay so that you can't skip it before even the prompt appears on screen.
Another thing, Enemy health bars should be of a different color, so you can easily see who's an enemy.
I'll tell you the truth, when I heard the game over music I laughed, I wasn't expecting that. Phase 2 never...
That said, I really think you should invest more time on the art. Even if you're going for a "looks amateurish but full of soul", your art is still kinda lacking.
I'll give you a more thought out review after I beat it.
Your game otherwise looks pretty polished, but the character portraits are absolutely out of place. I'm guessing you are going for something that looks bad in a charming way, as I see what you have going on there with Lucerne and these backgrounds. But beware that, if these are not placeholders, you are going to filter most of your potential players.
Please use typewriter effects for your dialogue. It's disorienting when there's something happening but the characters speak in normal speed, their pictures don't move and there's no sfx.
It's hard to tell at a glance friendly units from enemies, and that hurts legibility.
Being able to use the mouse to navigate menus but not to flip dialogue is weird. It should be possible to get through combat menus with keyboard only as well. With SRPGs I usually get into a muscle memory mode where I quickly input a combination of buttons to get to a given command from generic menus, but that's not possible here due to the mouse pointer being required.
I have currently put this game on hold after, during the first mission, I became unable to select any units and moving my selection no longer got the camera follow it. I couldn't figure out how to get out of that state or what it was, if it wasn't a glitch. Some part of the game might be thinking I'm in an unit selected state when I'm not, as the camera is centered on an unit I think I was trying to select. I might come back to it later, though.
Thank you for taking the time to play Eclipse War and leave a detailed review!
The current plan is for character portraits to get replaced with an actual artist eventually, though I'd prefer to do that when the project is much further along. I do have a soft spot for "bad in a charming way" things myself and I definitely was trying to channel some higurashi sprite energy into my demo but I'd ideally like to phase that out for the full game. I've already decided that if I opt to not hire an artist and keep going with my own art the full game is going to be free.
The UI navigation seemed to be the biggest issue people are having so it's my #1 action item going forward.
Sorry to hear you encountered technical issues. I had discovered that bug myself but could not for the life of me reproduce it no matter what I tried so I figured it must be so rare that nobody will ever encounter it. Knowing that somebody has encountered it in the wild definitely bumps it up on the priority list.
Cool game! Played halfway through mission 2 then one of the green guys oneshotted archer girl from full health with a crit, which was funny.
I'd say my biggest complaint would be that retaliation rules are really unclear to me. Clearly the game is taking them into account when showing damage calculations but sometimes you can hit someone with a bow without suffering retaliation and sometimes you can't, I assume it's a stat thing but I wish it were explained somewhere. Can you even see stats outside of the level up screen? Because I assume the vomit effect in mission 2 is a debuff but I've got no clue what it does or how long it lasts for. Also the control scheme is a little clunky, the mouse being needed solely to select the unit actions is odd.
One last thing, the river in level 2 was pathable for me while it isn't in your screenshots so I assume it's a bug
Either way, good game from what I've seen, I hope to play more of this in future DDs!
Thanks for taking the time to play Eclipse War! I appreciate the feedback.
Retaliation rules are based on the range of a unit's equipped weapon, so a 2 range weapon like a bow can't counterattack a 1 range weapon like a sword and vice versa, while some weapons have multiple ranges they work from like the fire tome which can attack at one or two range.
Stats & Inventory can be checked with middle mouse click which is a little intuitive, but I'm surprised people are getting most of the way through without knowing that. I hotpatched that into the tutorial last night but if you downloaded before then you would've missed it.
When you say the river was pathable do you mean you could completely walk right through it or were just a couple of tiles pathable? There are a few tiles that look like they probably shoud've been water tiles but are actually normal tiles, but you shouldn't be able to walk straight across the river.
Okay knowing retaliation rules helped finish the second level too.
By pathable river I think I meant I saw enemies standing on water but now that I think of it they were those couple of walkable river tiles next to some bridges.
Controls seem to be the #1 problem people have been having, so that's going to be my #1 priority to change.
Sorry to hear that you encountered a technical issue. If you don't mind posting the contents of %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Kurikaeshi Studios\Eclipse War_ Fetters of the World Soul\Player.log (or Player-prev.log if you've booted the game after encountering the issue) I could look into the issue. If you do I would delete the first couple lines with filepath info.
Aeaea for the Continent name? Thats a rather weird and unintuitive one. I'm just going to assume its a Placeholder.
New Game should be above Load Game I think, at least when theres no Game to be loaded yet. I'd usually think of Continue - New - Load - Options - Exit for Menupoints.
RMB to back out of Menues is nice, but why can't I LMB to continue the Dialogue? Its a tactics game on the PC, it should be easily fully mouse controllable.
Overall, the Controls are a super weird mix of Mouse and Keyboard. Why do I back out of Menues with RMB and get stats with MMB, but have to move the cursor with WASD, and then confirm my selection with Space, but have to select Attack with LMB again? And then confirm the Attack target with Space again?
If I'm Team Blue Mercenaries, why is my Priest wearing a Red Cape? And my Mage a purpel one with red lining?
The Hairstyle of the Green haired Girl doesn't seem to fit her Personality.
I'd like the Camp to be a more interactive kind of menu. A proper Scene with the People standing around doing whatever, and you clicking on them to initiate dialogue, instead of clicking through some menues or something.
Instead of one short tutorial, explaining concept and units over time as you aquire them might be better and more immersive. But I understand that its not something needed this early in development.
Why is Simone dying instantly? At least let me use her in battle once. Ideally, have her charge ahead in the Intro, then start the combat with her being surrounded and clubbed to death somewhere unreachable during the Actual mission. Bonus if I can actually safe her if I play the mission right.
Why are enemy and ally Healthbars both blue? You should have clear colorcoding between units and healthbars. Make Enemy Healthbars red, aswell as the barbarians Armor or something, so its clear their Evil.
Barbarians with melee Iron axe can counterattack my ranger with bow? Really? Or did he have a Bow thats not shown in the world sprite?
Turns don't automatically end when I've used every unit?
Load Game screen starts at roughly half the window height, not at its top, wasting a lot of space.
Skip should skip immediately, not rush through all the Dialogue.
Additional enemies should appear during enemies Turn, not during Players turn. Combined with your Color issues, it makes it seem like they are my barbarians.
Theres already one dead member right before the mission, why does it fail me if any other member dies?
A small tooltip in the corner which weapons a unit has could also help, especially since all barbarian sprites have Axes, even if they cary Bows.
Camera is also too zoomed in at the beginning. I know I can zoom out, but having to do this over and over again is annoying.
Your selection cursor disappears under the Houses. It should always be visible on top.
Nearly finished mission 2 when one of the enemies decided to just walk over Water and kill my Healer.
Shouldn't water be unwalkable?
Healstaff selection should, when choosing heal, immediately jump to the first bullet point, allowing me to reselect from there, not to the one that the mouse is on thanks to clicking heal.
Skipping the enemies turn should just speed it up but still show whats happening.
Cassius is an Ass. Hes utterly weak, constantly required Babysitting, and then demands position of the Leader? Not Hero or Maincharacter Material at all. Not to mention not a single care was taken for the Dead Teammember by him. And then he just goes ahead and marrys Lucerne to enforce his Position as the Armies Captain, even tho he not only is incapable and doesn't deserve it, he also apparently is in love with someone else?
And don't describe whats happening in Text. You have a giant Screenspace dedicated to Background Imagery and Portraits. Show them sitting and crying, not just write some Text about it.
Gameplay itself was function and Fun tho, didn't really encounter any Bugs.
Thanks for playing Eclipse War and taking the time to leave thoughtful feedback!
Aeaea wasn't intended to be a placeholder name it relates to a collection of greek myths that a lot of other things in the game take names from.
Controls seems like one of the biggest complaints so that's probably on the top of my list of what to do next, Along with tooltips for staffs so you know what a staff does without just trying it and seeing what happens.
I had enemies spawn during player turn so it was clear that they weren't going to be able to move that turn, but I guess I can achieve the same thing if I just have them spawn at the very end of the turn.
The comment about the enemy walking over water worries me a little, water is unwalkable, but I think there two tiles that aren't exactly clear if they should be a "water" or "plains" tiles since they look pretty half and half just looking at them. Hopefully it's that and not a pathfinding but because a pathfinding bug would be much harder to fix.
Cassius is supposed to be an ass and extremely selfish but hopefully it wasn't too grating. I personally like heavily flawed protagonists but I also know a lot of games where it's taken too far, so I'll maybe dial it back if I've ventured into that territory and I get similar feedback from others. Funnily, Lucerne actually wasn't in early plot drafts at all and I added her within the last month just for game balance reason but when I started writing her in I started liking her so much I've considered having her usurp the main character status.
Generally I would've preferred to have less narration and more visuals but art is hard for me so it takes me a lot of time to make stuff so the narration was a bit of a compromise to get it out on time.
Again, thanks for taking the time to play and write all this out it is very helpful!
I guess it mustve been an unclear Tile, it only happened once, right next to the Bridge, if it was a pathfinding Issue, it should've happened more often.
Flawed Protagonists are fine, but Cassius reminds me more of a Griffith-Lite, and thats a bad Thing. If I didn't know hes supposed to be the Protagonist from the Tutorial centering on him, and the reckless charge being Protagonist like, I would suspect him to desert the Mercenaries and become the Antagonist after the forced Marriage Scene. And you then leading the Mercenaries to free his Wife while also taking on the Eclipse.
Comments
Hey. I played your game as part of a Demo Day stream. If you didn't catch the stream live, here's a link to the video:
You can see my other demo day 46 streams as well on my channel.
With my time constraint I only got through the tutorial fight and the conversation about Cassius wanting to be captain. You're a bit verbose with your writing and I think it would make more sense to show some chemistry between Cassius and Evelyn's daughter rather than having Edmund explain the relationship to us.
Pretty nice gameplay, I played just a litte bit but I'll see if can beat the whole demo later.
There is a bug that after attacking sometimes the camera gets stuck and you can't select the unit anymore. Also something that annoyed me a bit is that sometimes I skipped text/tutorials by accident while clicking spacebar, you could add a bit of delay so that you can't skip it before even the prompt appears on screen.
Another thing, Enemy health bars should be of a different color, so you can easily see who's an enemy.
I'll tell you the truth, when I heard the game over music I laughed, I wasn't expecting that. Phase 2 never...
That said, I really think you should invest more time on the art. Even if you're going for a "looks amateurish but full of soul", your art is still kinda lacking.
I'll give you a more thought out review after I beat it.
Your game otherwise looks pretty polished, but the character portraits are absolutely out of place. I'm guessing you are going for something that looks bad in a charming way, as I see what you have going on there with Lucerne and these backgrounds. But beware that, if these are not placeholders, you are going to filter most of your potential players.
Please use typewriter effects for your dialogue. It's disorienting when there's something happening but the characters speak in normal speed, their pictures don't move and there's no sfx.
It's hard to tell at a glance friendly units from enemies, and that hurts legibility.
Being able to use the mouse to navigate menus but not to flip dialogue is weird. It should be possible to get through combat menus with keyboard only as well. With SRPGs I usually get into a muscle memory mode where I quickly input a combination of buttons to get to a given command from generic menus, but that's not possible here due to the mouse pointer being required.
I have currently put this game on hold after, during the first mission, I became unable to select any units and moving my selection no longer got the camera follow it. I couldn't figure out how to get out of that state or what it was, if it wasn't a glitch. Some part of the game might be thinking I'm in an unit selected state when I'm not, as the camera is centered on an unit I think I was trying to select. I might come back to it later, though.
Thank you for taking the time to play Eclipse War and leave a detailed review!
The current plan is for character portraits to get replaced with an actual artist eventually, though I'd prefer to do that when the project is much further along. I do have a soft spot for "bad in a charming way" things myself and I definitely was trying to channel some higurashi sprite energy into my demo but I'd ideally like to phase that out for the full game. I've already decided that if I opt to not hire an artist and keep going with my own art the full game is going to be free.
The UI navigation seemed to be the biggest issue people are having so it's my #1 action item going forward.
Sorry to hear you encountered technical issues. I had discovered that bug myself but could not for the life of me reproduce it no matter what I tried so I figured it must be so rare that nobody will ever encounter it. Knowing that somebody has encountered it in the wild definitely bumps it up on the priority list.
Cool game!
Played halfway through mission 2 then one of the green guys oneshotted archer girl from full health with a crit, which was funny.
I'd say my biggest complaint would be that retaliation rules are really unclear to me.
Clearly the game is taking them into account when showing damage calculations but sometimes you can hit someone with a bow without suffering retaliation and sometimes you can't, I assume it's a stat thing but I wish it were explained somewhere.
Can you even see stats outside of the level up screen? Because I assume the vomit effect in mission 2 is a debuff but I've got no clue what it does or how long it lasts for.
Also the control scheme is a little clunky, the mouse being needed solely to select the unit actions is odd.
One last thing, the river in level 2 was pathable for me while it isn't in your screenshots so I assume it's a bug
Either way, good game from what I've seen, I hope to play more of this in future DDs!
Thanks for taking the time to play Eclipse War! I appreciate the feedback.
Retaliation rules are based on the range of a unit's equipped weapon, so a 2 range weapon like a bow can't counterattack a 1 range weapon like a sword and vice versa, while some weapons have multiple ranges they work from like the fire tome which can attack at one or two range.
Stats & Inventory can be checked with middle mouse click which is a little intuitive, but I'm surprised people are getting most of the way through without knowing that. I hotpatched that into the tutorial last night but if you downloaded before then you would've missed it.
When you say the river was pathable do you mean you could completely walk right through it or were just a couple of tiles pathable? There are a few tiles that look like they probably shoud've been water tiles but are actually normal tiles, but you shouldn't be able to walk straight across the river.
Okay knowing retaliation rules helped finish the second level too.
By pathable river I think I meant I saw enemies standing on water but now that I think of it they were those couple of walkable river tiles next to some bridges.
RIP Simone.
Big problem with the controls. Some parts seem to be mouse only and others keyboard online.
Example 1: I cannot advance dialogue with LMB.
Example 2: I move a unit using WASD but then need my mouse to select the action.
The way you open the combat menu by selecting an empty tile also is weird.
Why not just ESC / RMB?
At some point during the battle I lost the ability to select my units and could no longer act.
Thanks for taking the time to play Eclipse War!
Controls seem to be the #1 problem people have been having, so that's going to be my #1 priority to change.
Sorry to hear that you encountered a technical issue. If you don't mind posting the contents of %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Kurikaeshi Studios\Eclipse War_ Fetters of the World Soul\Player.log (or Player-prev.log if you've booted the game after encountering the issue) I could look into the issue. If you do I would delete the first couple lines with filepath info.
https://pastebin.com/n5fqDEU3
Aeaea for the Continent name? Thats a rather weird and unintuitive one. I'm just going to assume its a Placeholder.
New Game should be above Load Game I think, at least when theres no Game to be loaded yet. I'd usually think of Continue - New - Load - Options - Exit for Menupoints.
RMB to back out of Menues is nice, but why can't I LMB to continue the Dialogue? Its a tactics game on the PC, it should be easily fully mouse controllable.
Overall, the Controls are a super weird mix of Mouse and Keyboard. Why do I back out of Menues with RMB and get stats with MMB, but have to move the cursor with WASD, and then confirm my selection with Space, but have to select Attack with LMB again? And then confirm the Attack target with Space again?
If I'm Team Blue Mercenaries, why is my Priest wearing a Red Cape? And my Mage a purpel one with red lining?
The Hairstyle of the Green haired Girl doesn't seem to fit her Personality.
I'd like the Camp to be a more interactive kind of menu. A proper Scene with the People standing around doing whatever, and you clicking on them to initiate dialogue, instead of clicking through some menues or something.
Instead of one short tutorial, explaining concept and units over time as you aquire them might be better and more immersive. But I understand that its not something needed this early in development.
Why is Simone dying instantly? At least let me use her in battle once. Ideally, have her charge ahead in the Intro, then start the combat with her being surrounded and clubbed to death somewhere unreachable during the Actual mission. Bonus if I can actually safe her if I play the mission right.
Why are enemy and ally Healthbars both blue? You should have clear colorcoding between units and healthbars. Make Enemy Healthbars red, aswell as the barbarians Armor or something, so its clear their Evil.
Barbarians with melee Iron axe can counterattack my ranger with bow? Really? Or did he have a Bow thats not shown in the world sprite?
Turns don't automatically end when I've used every unit?
Load Game screen starts at roughly half the window height, not at its top, wasting a lot of space.
Skip should skip immediately, not rush through all the Dialogue.
Additional enemies should appear during enemies Turn, not during Players turn. Combined with your Color issues, it makes it seem like they are my barbarians.
Theres already one dead member right before the mission, why does it fail me if any other member dies?
A small tooltip in the corner which weapons a unit has could also help, especially since all barbarian sprites have Axes, even if they cary Bows.
Camera is also too zoomed in at the beginning. I know I can zoom out, but having to do this over and over again is annoying.
Your selection cursor disappears under the Houses. It should always be visible on top.
Nearly finished mission 2 when one of the enemies decided to just walk over Water and kill my Healer.
Shouldn't water be unwalkable?
Healstaff selection should, when choosing heal, immediately jump to the first bullet point, allowing me to reselect from there, not to the one that the mouse is on thanks to clicking heal.
Skipping the enemies turn should just speed it up but still show whats happening.
Cassius is an Ass. Hes utterly weak, constantly required Babysitting, and then demands position of the Leader? Not Hero or Maincharacter Material at all. Not to mention not a single care was taken for the Dead Teammember by him. And then he just goes ahead and marrys Lucerne to enforce his Position as the Armies Captain, even tho he not only is incapable and doesn't deserve it, he also apparently is in love with someone else?
And don't describe whats happening in Text. You have a giant Screenspace dedicated to Background Imagery and Portraits. Show them sitting and crying, not just write some Text about it.
Gameplay itself was function and Fun tho, didn't really encounter any Bugs.
Thanks for playing Eclipse War and taking the time to leave thoughtful feedback!
Aeaea wasn't intended to be a placeholder name it relates to a collection of greek myths that a lot of other things in the game take names from.
Controls seems like one of the biggest complaints so that's probably on the top of my list of what to do next, Along with tooltips for staffs so you know what a staff does without just trying it and seeing what happens.
I had enemies spawn during player turn so it was clear that they weren't going to be able to move that turn, but I guess I can achieve the same thing if I just have them spawn at the very end of the turn.
The comment about the enemy walking over water worries me a little, water is unwalkable, but I think there two tiles that aren't exactly clear if they should be a "water" or "plains" tiles since they look pretty half and half just looking at them. Hopefully it's that and not a pathfinding but because a pathfinding bug would be much harder to fix.
Cassius is supposed to be an ass and extremely selfish but hopefully it wasn't too grating. I personally like heavily flawed protagonists but I also know a lot of games where it's taken too far, so I'll maybe dial it back if I've ventured into that territory and I get similar feedback from others. Funnily, Lucerne actually wasn't in early plot drafts at all and I added her within the last month just for game balance reason but when I started writing her in I started liking her so much I've considered having her usurp the main character status.
Generally I would've preferred to have less narration and more visuals but art is hard for me so it takes me a lot of time to make stuff so the narration was a bit of a compromise to get it out on time.
Again, thanks for taking the time to play and write all this out it is very helpful!
I guess it mustve been an unclear Tile, it only happened once, right next to the Bridge, if it was a pathfinding Issue, it should've happened more often.
Flawed Protagonists are fine, but Cassius reminds me more of a Griffith-Lite, and thats a bad Thing. If I didn't know hes supposed to be the Protagonist from the Tutorial centering on him, and the reckless charge being Protagonist like, I would suspect him to desert the Mercenaries and become the Antagonist after the forced Marriage Scene. And you then leading the Mercenaries to free his Wife while also taking on the Eclipse.