itch.io

Hello Tomodev!

What richly detailed feedback, I appreciate you taking the time.

That is an interesting detail regarding the RAM usage, I had not considered such matters.  I shall look into optimizing this.  I would be happy to zip the files as well if that is the preferred method.

Yes, much of the UI is a default settings placeholder.  I intend to revise the retinue management screen to better represent the "Home Base" aesthetic.  I am doing my best to prevent myself from adding in an entire base building mechanic to take this menu's place, but the temptation is very strong to live up to my Factorio + Warcraft 3 initial vision for the game.  Regarding the mission select screen, I drew inspiration from Mechanicus' mission select, as I intend to have a variety of B-plot quest lines for each act to accompany the main quest line.  I intend to put some "Throne Room" flavour into this menu as well however.

I am pleased to hear you enjoyed the lore tidbits, I found much enjoyment in writing them.

There's a "Keybinding Menu" available when one presses Esc (per the request of the crab themed streamer a few demo days ago) which shows all the controls information I presented on the title screen.  I suppose I had aught to mention that somewhere though haha.

I shall experiment further with the combat log, I've set it to various sizes but when it is larger it takes up too much screen space, and when just the font is scaled up there's too much text wrapping for my taste.  Perhaps it needs to be collapsable and only opened when the player cares to figure out what happened in a rapid exchange?  This is most likely the best of my ideas at the moment.

Regarding the deployment screen, each Hero can lead a formation of their own.  The player must to select which hero they wish to add the generic units to.  Perhaps the prince had aught to be selected by default on the first level though, to make this easier on the newbs.

I am glad to hear you found the first level difficult, as I took design inspiration from Dark Souls and the "Hardest Map Ever" combat-puzzle custom maps from Starcraft Broodwar.  I'm still working on tutorialization of the core mechanics though.  I most likely need to find a better way of revealing the game controls to the player and set the expectation that the player is intended to scout out encounters and carefully plan their engagements.  I was hoping the hunting wolves and fire-familiar spell would help encourage this sort of thinking early on, but I believe it still needs work.

My condolences regarding your lost wolf, but I assure you he died doing what he loved.

Did you embark on the second mission with the maximum available manpower?  For the larger scale maps I took quite a bit of inspiration from the Total War series, although I've only ever watched people play those games.  I also drew inspiration from Napoleonic formation warfare with the enfilade and denial arrangement options.  I am glad to hear you got Age of Empires vibes, that is among the sort of RTS games I was thinking of when I initially conceived of the game.

Regarding the loot management at scale, I am planning some quality of life features to enable auto looting and refitting from a supply depot based upon a template (sort of how Factorio's Spidertrons work).  I also have a "loot review" feature in mind for the end of the level so you can pick out any rare items your soldiers may have auto looted before converting the rest to generic war material per usual.  I expect this will help immensely.

The loot window question has been quite the dilemma.  Anchoring it to a particular part of the screen feels like an easy solution, but when I've done that it becomes very unmanageable when handling large amount of individual inventories, as it is quite hard to determine whose inventory is whose.  I've contemplated a "trade" screen where two units are trading with each other in a fixed place, but this also feels somewhat inefficient.  I may gravitate to something along the lines of how Dungeon Siege handle's the party's inventory.  I'll most certainly revisit this once I've gotten some of those auto looting quality of life features in place, as the inclusion of gear templates and supply depots might make a good solution more obvious.

I'm impressed you've managed to play on a trackpad, I tried a few times and found it rather painful.  I recommend keyboard and mouse.

30-60 minutes per mission is about what it takes me, so you're charging through with the best of them.

My thanks for the thorough and thoughtful feedback, it has been quite a motivating read.

Wishing you wellness and prosperity,

- Eldritch

I'm glad you enjoyed the art, it was all produced by a mysterious artist I am collaborating with.  I am rather pleased with it as well.

A tutorial is a good idea, I hope to have one soon.  I always seem to neglect the tutorialization of my games.

I have also contemplated a single player mode, I shall likely implement some sort of decision tree based A.I. to play against in a campaign mode.  I've also contemplated a matchmaking system for those too shy to host their own lobby or jump in to a stranger's lobby, but in the meantime I would be happy to play with you personally if you are up for it.  I am in the PST time zone, and will gladly make myself available any time after noon until the late evening.  I am surprised to see that New Zealand is not so far ahead, I suppose the pacific must not be so large as I had imagined haha.

It has!  I have been contemplating a 3D game experiment, and find your crisp mechanics motivating.  I will aspire to this standard in my own works.

I often contemplate how games impact the player, particularly on the aesthetic dimension.  I am especially fond of Aristotle's conception of virtues existing between complementary vices of excess and deficiency.  For example: Courage found between Cowardice and Brashness.

My "Main Project", Ingvanr Saga, has been an experiment in building a game that can deliver these philosophical notions to the player.  I mostly achieve this through the visual novel style mission briefings (inspired by Fire Emblem) which I included, but I also think the gameplay mechanics enforce some contemplation upon the virtues of a competent Captain of Men, through the high risk combat puzzles, rewards based upon how many of your soldiers survive the level, and gear durability mechanics.  Ratfall contains a similar attempt at expressing virtues through the gotcha system, but the narrative elements there are still underdeveloped.

I am curious to hear what virtues you might consider worthy of elevating in your game?  How might you subtly enhance the (already excellent) core mechanics to elucidate these virtues for your players?  I sense that you may be the sort of person who contemplates these types of questions.

Be well,

- Eldritch

A well executed boomer shooter.  Does what it says on the tin.

Well done obviating your crouch mechanic by placing the key in the duct, I hadn't realized crouching was an option until that point.

I also enjoyed inspecting the paintings, statues, and miscellaneous textures, they were a nice touch.  I recommend an art gallery/museum level.

I also admire your ambitious statements regarding your goal to create life changing experiences.  It is virtuous to embark with lofty goals in mind.  I'm looking forward to seeing how it comes along.

This is an excellent game.

I broadly affirm most of the feedback, but I would like to specifically denounce the complaints regarding the "bad" weapons, as it is in fact good game design to have them.  Spawning with the cheap blade is indeed a near certain loss, but it is a bit fun to desperately scramble across the map evading monsters and looking for a legitimate weapon.  This adds a bit of variety to the opening strategy employed.

Also, the shite weapons add to the lovecraftian sense of tension when getting a weapon box.  What's in the box?  Will it be some arcane viscera?  The red shotgun?  Oh no, it's a wrench...  It really could be anything...

One thought along these lines is that there had aught to be some powerful melee weapon.  Then the shoddier melee weapons might open the player up to a build focussed on melee, in so far as one has control of their build (perhaps the buff braziers could offer one of three upgrades, permitting some choice?  A number of similar games have done this well.)

Looking forward to seeing your continued success!

Hello again WebCough!

Ah, you are right, thanks for reminding me.  I had forgotten to upload the latest build.  Admittedly not much has changed since last time, as most of my limited efforts over the holidays have been dedicated to the other game I submitted.

I am quite keen to hear your thoughts on the revised first level however, as your feedback last demo day was a great help in reformulating it.  I expect the ability to bring a few hunting hounds along on the first mission will better feature the formation/RTS aspect of the game on the "Tutorial" level.

I am glad you like the new itch page, my aim is that the gifs will suffice for a tutorial until I implement something more thorough in the game itself.

Wishing you wellness and prosperity,

- Eldritch

Hey WebCough!

I actually watched your video right when you posted it in the thread haha.  It was exceedingly helpful to see where things weren't as intuitive as I thought they were, so I have spent my day today revising the first level.  I also added some tooltip hints to the deployment interface.

Thanks again for recording the feedback!

Thanks for playing, and for hosting a cozy stream the other day.

Regarding the crashes, I'm about 80% sure I have at last tracked down the root cause of the crashes people are coming across.  It appears that Godot has a bug in their windows exporter that only appears when exporting with debug disabled.  You might imagine how difficult that would make debugging on my end haha.

I don't think I would have been able to figure that one out without watching you break it, so I appreciate it quite a bit.

The Godot forums indicate that I can do some refactoring to work around this, but for now I've uploaded a "debug enabled" version until I make time to do so.

Thanks again!

Ah, those are very interesting thoughts.  As an aside, Dungeon Siege II was precisely the game I had in mind when making the character portraits and formation mechanics.  WC3 was also a major influence.  Sounds like you're exactly the sort of person I made this game for!

The bats are working as intended if you didn't expect them to be tough, as this is more of the Dark Souls design influence at play.  In fact, I only put the weak little wolves before them to lull the player into a false sense of security hahaha!

Regarding the difficulty curve of the tutorial level, perhaps I could sequence the encounters a bit better.  I still want to hit the player with the bats right away to establish that the game is meant to be challenging, but I could go for more of an "unfolding" aspect with regards to the items.  I could expand the snowy area in the northern part of the map to have some frozen skeleton enemies that are vulnerable to fire, and include the ring of frost spell as a loot drop.  Then I could move the bat encounter to be unskippable, and use it to teach the player to look for additional resources on the side paths as well as spanking the newbs.

Regarding the notion of a "hardcore mode", this is why I placed about 2/3 of the encounters off of the main path, so that players are able to skip fights.  Most of those little "side paths" have rewards at their end to make them worth the effort, but they are meant to be optional.  I designed it in this way to introduce "risk vs greed" calculations to the scouting phase of the core gameplay loop.  Perhaps I could even pander to speedrunners by placing some shortcuts in to some of those side paths...

This has been especially valuable feedback, thanks a bunch!

Haha the bats are indeed a pretty tough fight.

When designing the game, I was fondly reminiscing upon the "Hardest Map Ever" custom maps from Starcraft Broodwar.  The makers of those maps combined the terrain and units abilities to create "combat puzzles" that required the player to plan out a sequence of abilities and timings to overcome the encounter.

In these "puzzles" you often had multiple siege tanks with a huge positional advantage going up against 3-6 light infantry units, so it wasn't terribly uncommon for units to get focus-fired or one-shotted due to a mistake.  The bats encounter is an example of this design in practice: the "Ring of Frost" spell you start with applies knock back & slow to the swarm of bats, which spreads them out and allows you to pick them off one at a time, but you have to time it just right and reposition yourself for that tactic to work.

Reflecting upon your feedback here, perhaps the "Roguelike" aspect of restarting the level doesn't mesh well with that "Combat-Puzzle" aspiration due to the long reset time?  I had at one point considered adding frequent dark-souls-bonfire-style checkpoints every few encounters, but I didn't include those because I found myself enjoying the "high stakes" aspect of the long resets.

Thanks for the details!

No pressure, you are an artisan of well made feedback.

A good guest is welcome whenever he arrives, as the ancients say.

Well, I did another 3 hours of play testing & regression testing yesterday and wasn't able to produce any bugs or crashes.

None the less, I have uploaded a (Windows) debug version in case anyone comes across a bug and wishes to screenshot the console.

Thanks for playing Mohagged!

The first level is a solo mission for lore reasons, but I've been considering adding some hunting hounds to make it a bit easier and to better showcase the RTS mechanics.

In the later missions, you can add "Heroes" to your party, and add "Host" units to their formations by clicking the Hero's portrait in the deployment section to select them, and then clicking the Host units in the upper right, if you have enough War Material.  I suppose that aught to be written somewhere on that screen haha.

Thanks for the feedback!

Damn...

Would you be willing to run a version with debug for me?

Very fun simple game.  I could imagine it doing quite well on mobile.

I bet this would do really well at one of those games showcase conferences, it would be really easy to approach people with an iPad and demo it.

Observing the shifting and settling of the orbs was quite inspiring from a GameDev perspective.  I was imagining a "Super Smash Bros", or perhaps more of a "Risk of Rain"-style arena battler going on over the shifting terrain.  Someone aught to make such a game.

Thanks for making this!

Very Apollonian!  Some "Music of the Spheres"/pythagorean mathematics would complement that theme well.

Whoah!  What a tremendous honour!

The solar imagery on your tarot card is spot on for the character too, well done!  I like the depiction.

I've been meditating quite a bit upon lore & world building lately, I'm eager to take a look at your game from that perspective this demo day.

Wishing you well

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.

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.

Much appreciated!  Hopefully I shall have some time to try out the other submissions now if the latest build is as stable as I think it is.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts again.

Hey Hobror, nice to see you.  Thanks for playing.

Regarding the writing, this is a fun idea.  I've been easing into this by trying to make a distinction between the commoners and nobility with Anglish / Norman vocabularies.  Some Thee's, Thy's and Thou's would be pretty fun too in the style of Dark Souls.  I'll experiment with this next time I'm writing dialogue.

I am glad you like the animations.

Regarding these requests:

• I do plan on overhauling the visuals, I'd like to go for something a little more like fire emblem meets dungeon siege.  I don't want to go particularly desaturated though, since the bright colours make my neurons go brr.
• The camera controls seem to be a sticking point for many people, I am contemplating solutions.  It is a thorny problem because of the hybrid RTS/RPG nature of the game.  For the dungeon crawling sequences the camera lock is preferable, but for the mass combat sequences you will definitely want a traditional RTS camera.  I liked the idea of pressing space to toggle a camera lock on the prince.  I also think maybe a zoom in/out function would make it a little easier on people as well.  I shall continue to meditate upon this.
• Regarding speech bubbles and sound effects, I plan on having some "order confirmation" effects, as seen in warcraft/starcraft.  This is essentially what you were talking about, but with audio in the stead of speech bubbles.  I'd also like to have some warcries as you see in Total War, so there's a nice din of battle when the camera is panned over.
• I was considering making the entire magic system based upon riddles, poems, & songs, (I suppose it already is if I just say the spell books are songbooks, and add singing sound effects for each spell) and having morale mechanics based around standard bearers and marching music, but I haven't implemented those ideas yet.  These ideas are currently in the "probably not going to be included in the first release" pile unless I find some awesome musicians to collaborate with.
  
• On the music front, I've been listening to Electromedieval playlists (it is quite hard to find good ones however), Wardruna/Amon Amarth/Corvus Corax, and the Dune & Mechanicus Soundtracks while coding, for inspiration.  I'll happily add the game of thrones soundtrack to the rotation and see how I feel.
• I'm also big fan of mass bagpipes.

The bugs have been driving me nuts.  I spent the past week, about 20% of the total time I've spent on this project, polishing it up to be nice and stable for testers, and never came across any of these.  I even set up a Windows partition on my Mac to test in that environment.  I must be subconsciously playing in a fashion that "avoids the skeletons" so to speak.

Did you play the version I uploaded last night?  I suppose you might not know, since I've been deleting the old versions as I upload the hotfixes.  I'll start including version numbers.  I'm open to feedback on how to better test my game for stability before handing it over to testers.

I lol'd at the "glow up" comment.

Thanks for the thoughtful suggestions, it is motivating to see your enthusiasm

Very Nice, I played for about an hour as well.

I built a fire based Arbiter/Priest/Paladin character with some frost resistance gear, and it was a nice experience.  I did end up dying however, because I was relying upon the "Glory" buff to survive, and it expired in the midst of combat.

• I enjoyed the skill tree.  I am overall a fan of large skill trees with dependancies such as yours. I would encourage something like a "Minimap" for it, or perhaps an option to zoom out and then back in on it, as I initially got a bit lost and confused before I noticed the arrows linking between classes.  I'm quite fond of the skill tree in path of exile, you might benefit from having a look at how they link and group skills visually.

• My bags were frequently full, I returned to the start of the game part way through to sell everything once.  It was a tragedy to pass up so much treasure.

• Do you plan on adding equipment sprites?  This might make the enemy types more readable, and it might be interesting to have a more visual sense of what classes you're going up against.  Having their class names match the class names in the skill tree might be interesting as well, as it seemed like they might have been drawing from the same pool of skills as the player.

Thanks for making this, I enjoyed it.

It does look a bit like a moose...   Perhaps some she-wolf came across an especially handsome moose?  I'm sure her father was disappointed.

I believe I've resolved the bugs with the game crashing when the prince is slain and when the mission is completed, and I've just re-uploaded a new version.

Regarding the inventory, I considered having it fold out from the character's portrait, but it becomes somewhat difficult to swap items between party members when handling it this way.  It's especially a nuisance if you're trying to re-equip an entire formation of men, which is why I went with attaching the inventory to the unit.  Such a formation still must be spread out for this to work though, so I'll probably have to contemplate a better solution on this front.

Regarding equipment durability & charge indicators, that's a great idea.  Perhaps I'll add some indicators on the character portraits and sound effects for "weapon dulled", "shield broken",  "armour broken", and "tome depleted" when I add sound.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Hey Kurikaeshi, thanks for playing.

I think I've now fixed the crashes with combat and completing the level.  Regarding the pathfinding issues, I'll add that to my todos.

I used a very nice tool called FireEmblemCharacterCreator to kit bash the FE GBA sprites.  They are indeed placeholders, I find it a lot easier to work on my games when the placeholders are a bit more high-fidelity.  I do quite like the Fire Emblem GBA art style so I'll probably go for something along those lines for the final release.  I'd even like to get some sprites that invoke that FE GBA sprite feel, but animated as you might see in a game like Ultima Online for isometric movement.

I made three levels for the demo.  The second level gives you command of an army to play around with the formation movement and controls.  The third level is a poison swamp that plays a bit more like a Dungeon Siege level with a small party of 3 characters.  I was experimenting with some different level designs to get a feel for what was fun and what wasn't.

I'm quite disappointed nobody was able to make it to those levels, as the first level was really just meant to quickly familiarize people with the base mechanics before going into what I considered to be the more interesting mechanics of mass combat and party management...

Oh well, maybe next demo day.

In any case, I appreciate you taking the time to play my game and provide feedback.

Hey Zorch, thanks for playing.

Maybe I just have an unusually large monitor here, I suppose it is pretty large.  None the less, I've just gone through and refactored all the UI for 1440x900 resolution and re-uploaded it.  I zoomed the camera out a bit as well, since with a screen that small it felt a bit too zoomed in.

Very peculiar about the crashing during combat.  Had you switched around the gear at all?  I haven't locked down the equipment slots yet, so I could imagine if you equipped a weapon as armour, or armour as a shield, something could go awry.  The icons in the top row may not be very clear I suppose.  The first row is Weapon - Shield/Torch - Armour.

Thanks for the feedback on the movement.  I've got the default move command working as an "Attack Move" command, but perhaps it would be better to move that to a hotkey as seen in games like Starcraft.