Post by horbror in The Ingvanr Saga comments

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Moving the camera with the mouse is really nice, but I feel like you may want to slow it down just a little or make something you can set up in the options.

Items and equipment menu is solid and feels natural to use.

Am I crazy or does spamclicking on enemies kill them faster?

I am not entirely sure how I feel about the fact that your fireball can damage you as well, on one hand it is so easy to fuck it up and die, on the other hand it is kind of cool.

Game crashed while I was standing in the fire, don't know if this helps you. I did manage to repeat the crash doing the same thing again.

After firing a fireball, you sort of naturally run into the burn since you clicked where to aim it.

You need to more clearly convey to the player that equipment degrades, but I think overall this might need a tutorial.

One core strategy is to just spam the attach fire to the weapon ring, I think many players will miss this (I did at first) and die a lot.

Although this is realistic, I think you die too quickly once your shield breaks.

It seems to be more stable now, but did crash again while I was engaged in combat with multiple enemies and with multiple troops.

I am not sure how to juggle between using the abilities (items I guess) of the main party when you have many of them. Could be me just being stupid.

Anyhow, I still like it, and once its REALLY stable I think you will have something good going.

EldritchNaturalist1 year ago

Hey Horbror, thanks for the great feedback.

Glad you liked the camera & inventory system.

Spamclicking is probably just making your brain secrete more dopamine, which is fine.

Regarding the magic system:

I went back and forth with having friendly fire on the spells, especially with the Ultima Lich Bomb spell, trying to decide if I wanted the player to be able to accidentally necroblast their party into a bunch of zombies.
I ultimately decided that potentially having to kill an accidentally zombified favourite party member was just the sort of traumatic experience that would teach the player to exercise caution when using magic.
I also wanted the magic system to feel powerful but dangerously unstable. Much like the game itself, at present.

Regarding the equipment notifications:

I think sound effects will help with this.
I have a DJ State Machine planned that will track when units are in combat vs when they are "marching" or "camped". I could tie some reminder audio lines in to that as well:

"We had better replace our shields soon, M'Lord",
"No point in carrying around a broken shield, shall we discard them?".
"Our broken shields are needlessly slowing us down" - when giving a move order

This inspires me to throw in a whole banter system as in Mass Effect. I'll add that to the "Nice to have" features list.

Regarding the combat balance:

Having your shield break is a pretty gnarly situation indeed, especially if it is early in the fight when the weapons still have their edges causing them to deal bonus damage. When I'm play testing I'll often discard a shield even if it still has one or two durability points left for a fresh one, especially if I'm going into a tougher fight. Sometimes I'll just run away if the shield breaks though. It's a risk calculation.
I designed the core gameplay loop with 3 stages: Scouting, Fighting, & Recovery. I see checking your equipment and swapping shields out as part of that "Recovery" phase, as you're scoping out the next encounter and planning how to approach it.
It's also hard to balance the RTS style fights and the ARPG style fights at the same time. I don't want the more RTS-style fights to get too drawn out.
I'm glad you found the fire ring strategy.
- I included that to open the player's mind up to the notion that they could benefit from micro-ing the units.
- It also provides some more engaging gameplay when low on resources rather than just "watch units exchange blows".
- Eventually I'll limit the number of charges on that item, but only once I've included some re-charging mechanics.
- I plan on keeping it easy to re-charge this particular item once I do so.
With the items & spells, I've been pretty much relying on the Gambits for the party members and then micro the prince. Once I expose the gambits to the player for customization I think this will become a bit more obvious.
- On some runs I use him as a tactical spot healer and let the gambits control the rest of the party.
- Fristivar automatically attacks whichever unit the prince is attacking, for example,
- while Cauligen prioritizes whichever unit has the most HP, and casts his lighting spell at the furthest away units (trying to pick off ranged enemies) until it's out of charges. The player can conserve his lightning for tougher fights by un-equipping the spellbook.
- Alternatively, you can watch Koreans play starcraft and decide to maximize your APS (Actions Per Second)
I'm working on a spreadsheet to calculate "encounter difficulty" scores so I can better balance the difficulty.
- I do want most encounters to be pretty tough though, to encourage and reward scouting & skirmishing before fully engaging.
- I have been enjoying using the throwing weapons and critical hits from concealment to soften up some of the encounters before charging in.
- I shall continue to add to & improve the disengagement mechanics to open up this play style some more.

Regarding the crashes:

I'm quite frustrated about this, I spent about 3 hours this morning play testing and finally got it to a point where it wasn't crashing for about an hour. Then, immediately after uploading v0.1.5 I found 3 bugs in about 15 minutes. Deeply frustrating.
I have a vague feeling that the Godot export utility is introducing bugs, because as I said, I play tested for hours this morning, and then when I downloaded it from Itch to verify everything, it immediately crashed on the first level. This might just be me coping and seething though...
Maybe there's still an issue with the save system. I hope it's that, since that's something I have agency over. Are you starting a new game with each version, or are you hitting continue? That wouldn't explain the crashes when walking into the fire. I just did this a few times and wasn't able to re-produce what you're talking about there. Which enemies were you fighting when this happened?

That was quite a bit of a blogpost, but it is helpful to write my thoughts down. I appreciate your attention.

I was watching that lad playing your game on his stream earlier, it looks pretty cool. I'm looking forward to playing it soon as well.

horbror1 year ago (1 edit)

Seems you have most of these figured out to hell and back, feels very promising. I don´t remember what enemies I faced during the burning crash, second time was just the wolves in the beginning of the first mission. I just wanted to quickly see if I could reproduce the bug. I am afraid I did not use continue, as I restarted each time I went from the beginning to see if I could break it some more (sorry).

There seems to be a lot of depth to the combat according to your descriptions which is hard to notice at first glance, this makes me think this is gonna be real fucking good.

Once it is more stable you should perhaps be giving the functionality of some of the mechanics away early, this is something I have struggled with myself since I love secrecy in games, but the biggest lesson I learnt from the jam was that to much lack of almost idiotic transparency will just lead to confusion for most people.

EldritchNaturalist1 year ago

It is naught to worry for aiming to crash the game, that is what I do too. The feedback on this front is very helpful and much appreciated.

When I was writing my design document, I had an intent in mind of designing "unfolding complexity":

Initially, you can basically pretend you're playing a classic MOBA style ARPG.
Then, the player should realize that they can customize their abilities by changing their equipped "trinkets" (Spellbooks, Rings, Flasks).
Then, they get comfortable with commanding multiple simple units as a party.
The gambit system is then revealed to them, to help scale up to control larger and more complex parties.
Eventually they will pick up on the armour & weapon degradation mechanics and begin to manage their resources accordingly.
Lastly, there are also formation specific gambits that allow the player to design integrated multi-unit formations with healers, archers, & fighters coordinating their abilities.

I had many more ideas in the design phase that I would love to implement, but I deemed that I must limit the scope to a 3 month project. There will most likely have to be an Ingvanr Saga 2 to fully satiate my creativity. But, that is a hungry fire to feed...

Regarding your thoughts on tutorialization, I am hoping to unfold those mechanics one mission at a time. I only have 3 arcs with 9 missions each planned at the moment however, so it would kind of suck to have half of the first arc be tutorials. Perhaps it could be condensed into two missions, but on the other hand I'd like the player to be able to take their time to familiarize with one mechanic before contemplating the next. I shall continue to meditate upon this.

I have also been experimenting with revealing mechanics through item descriptions, so that more casual players don't have to think about it too much and can just go for the "biggest sword & heaviest armour" play style, while more detail oriented players can gradually soak up the information and develop a more complex gameplay experience for themselves, or they can systematically seek out and read every item to create a highly optimized or creative build for their party. Loading screens with items & descriptions would also be cool for revelations of this nature.

There is much more which could be said on these topics, but I shall restrain myself for now.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.

horbror1 year ago

Sounds like a good plan to be honest, if you are aiming for more hardcore players that sounds perfect. Perhaps a description of the nature of the game is more proper for a finished product down the line, instead of a whole lot of obvious tutorials. Maybe a message at the beginning, or something, but then again, people figured out the fromsoft games, it took some time, but people figured out fear and hunger too.

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