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Lofty195 days ago

I like a lot about this demo so far.

There's a lot of feedback to provide on this one- it's difficult to try to organize it all.

Command card options should all have hotkeys. Extra points if those hotkeys are customizable.
Shift Queue for moves and attacks feels a little weird and doesn't always seem to resolve correctly.
Determining the edge of the map from the fog of war is very weird - I'd recommend different colors for this.
Losing an entire coven's production uptime for upgrades is very harsh.
Populations being per coven is extremely weird to keep track of - needs some kind of UI in the corner like SC2.
Witch King doesn't appear to benefit from any upgrades which makes him slow and clunky as you upgrade harder.
Unsure if upgrades have an upper limit.
Ranged units bodyblock each other a lot.
Evil Eye is cute.
Getting an explanation of what the upgrade does only after investing in the upgrade is weird.
Being able to sacrifice upgrade structures for more powerful units would be cool.
Select all army hotkey would be useful instead of doing it through command cards.
Select all army through command cards seems to be limited to only units from that particular coven, feels weird.
I hope the pixel artstyle is the winner in this battle of styles.
It feels like this game rewards passive play instead of active, aggressive play? Waiting for units to spawn hurts me - can I sacrifice Witch King HP to turbocharge my summoning rates or something?
Maybe I simply missed it, but it's kind of unclear what benefits any particular artifact bestows upon a particular coven.
Some kind of jump between bases with the camera hotkey would be cool.
Summoning Circle rally points do not seem to take effect for the currently-summoning unit; only the next one?
Effectively scouting the scrolling worldspace as it wraps in on itself is extremely weird.
Main screen with options is absolutely adorable but not being able to adjust music volume in-game feels bad.
Probably more stuff - I recorded a blind play! It'll be over here when it's done processing: 

Cheers
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Filmstars194 days ago

Hey there. You’re probably the first player ever to use the command queue feature…

Command card options should all have hotkeys.

They do. It’s the grid on left side of keyboard. Bottom row is on zxcv in US layout. When opening a submenu via v, all entries also have the respective grid hotkey.

It feels like this game rewards passive play instead of active, aggressive play? Waiting for units to spawn hurts me - can I sacrifice Witch King HP to turbocharge my summoning rates or something?

Current options for sacrifice are "Deplete 1" via the King, which gives up one Summoning Circle, and "Hyper Boost" on Artifacts which uses up charges more quickly. Idk if you found those -- it felt like it was too much detail to include in the tutorial.

Generally the current singleplayer mode is meant to be on the more relaxed side of things. The initial motivation to leave your base would be to scout for Outposts -> accumulate a small army to destroy it -> claim the Artifact to make stronger units. But obviously it’s super easy to just sit back for 10 minutes and max out all 3 upgrades and army size and then get rolling. The only reason not to is that it’s slower (hopefully) and more boring.

Main screen with options is absolutely adorable but not being able to adjust music volume in-game feels bad.

You can toggle the menu/main screen any time via Backspace. (Yes, it’s clunky.)

Getting an explanation of what the upgrade does only after investing in the upgrade is weird.

There are 7 stats and they have static explanations in the UI, doesn’t matter which Coven they are built with. But I think I will now move those explanations into mouseover tooltips. That would also help with explaning what benefit an Artifact gives. (It’s just those same stats.)

Notes taken on all other points, too. Thanks a lot for the  the detailed feedback and the recording.

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Filmstars193 days ago (2 edits)

Ah, wrote the first response before watching the video.

Shame about the Windows version not working, and the stutters. It runs fine on my machines, but they are quite strong and I mostly test the native versions. Wasm32 by itself is probably already slower on the pathfinding code. What makes it even worse is that the web version has rendering and logic code on the same thread, and rendering in the browser takes about 10x as much CPU compared to native.

If you have the time, could you download HyperCoven and Sdlcoven and test if they run natively on your Windows version? - You will have to run hcv.exe directly, the launcher is the same in all cases. - It would help me decide which version to focus on. The FrontierCoven build is actually no longer using SDL at all, but some bleeding edge hipster libraries.

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Filmstars188 days ago

Ah, turns out the Rust programming language as a whole has dropped support for Windows versions earlier than 10.

So I guess the other versions won’t work either. Too bad.

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