itch.io

Hey, quick question: would it be possible for you to include (or separately publish) a changelog for new versions of the rules? For example, it's currently not possible to see, whether an update was just fixing a typo or whether game mechanics were changed.

Cheers.

Hey, thanks for your response. I finished the book and really enjoyed the lore chapters. Looking forward to giving it a go.

If you don't mind, I have some more comments and suggestions about the rules :)

There is a typo on p. 55:

Drives and goals and goals

About the correction for Sinner (and sorry about not noticing this before):

Sinner may be marked when you are Starving, at 0 blood and consume blood.

and further below

When this impact is marked, you have 0 blood and you consume more blood

I would interpret consuming as drinking, i.e. increasing blood from 0 to something higher, but I think you mean pay/spend/lose blood points, correct?

Elegies

Without reading Ironsworn and being familiar with iron vows it might be difficult to imagine what elegies should look like. A few examples or even faction/lineage-based starting elegies to choose from could help with that.

Blood usage

On p. 10 it says

Power assets are vampiric abilities that always consume blood when used.

and further down in the comments you mentioned

You always expend 1 point of blood when you [...] use a supernatural power or heal yourself

However, this could be made clearer in the book. It would be nice to have a short section "Using powers" in chapter 3 ("Playing the Game") that explicitely

• mentions "Activating a power always costs 1 blood in addition to any points mentioned in the power's asset text" (e.g., 1-5 blood points for Acute Senses for a total of 2-6)
• differentiates using Power, Nature and "other" assets (I believe there is no category name for non-power non-nature assets like Marked)
• makes clear, that it is possible to put yourself at Starving or even Sinner when using a power (waking up + activating Acute Senses + deciding to spend 5 blood points = 7 in total)
• warns about the fact that you lose the game, when you go to sleep as Sinner and with 0 blood ;)

Moves

I noticed that there are no moves in your game. This reminds me of World of Dungeons, where practically everything is Dungeon World's Defy Danger move, which is formulated similar to your Action Rolls. Do you plan on creating specific moves in the future or did you specifically decide against them? I always find moves to be a good way to introduce more structure to the game and especially to capture the atmosphere of the genre you play in.

Health

Last but not least, I would be interested to know what you think about and if you ever thought about replacing health and blood with only one Blood resource that represents both health and a character's pool to spend on powers. This would further increase the impact of the decision when to use blood and for what.

Cheers!

I've not read completely through, yet, but it looks great so far. Definitely great work on the layout and art! 

Quick question (p. 26):

Sinner may be marked when you are Starving, at 0 spirit and consumes blood.

It's compatible with Old School Renaissance and original D&D monsters, dungeons, and adventure modules.

Let's take a hill giant from 1e:
AC 5, HD 8 (i.e. also attack bonus)

How does the skill system from WoD work with those values? Do I take AC as armor points and light weapons (d6) only do damage on a 6?

And the other way around: does the hill giant always hit me (lowest roll 2 plus 8 attack bonus >= 10, always a full success)?

Very helpful, thanks for porting this from Solitary Defilement. I have a question though: while the 2d20 system is very nice for keeping the story going, it doesn't mention handling critical rolls (1 or 20). Do both dice have to show a 1 or 20 in this case? 

How would you handle fumbling? Changing a fumble to only occur when both dice show a 1 makes it much less likely/dangerous. Conversely, having a fumble when at least one dice shows a 1 doubles the chance to get one in comparison to the core rules.

I think this game needs another mechanic in order to produce more enjoyable gameplay. Maybe requiring a specific type of item to buy (1 fruit, 1 furniture etc) would be an improvement. At the moment it's too easy to just choose x items with the lowest price. Nevertheless, well done for finishing in 3 hours!

A bit more control would be nice. At the moment the carts are so quick, that you cannot really aim but have to click and pray that RNG is on your side. Very clean graphics!

Funny idea and very stylish graphics. I found two issues: on PC the game area does not capture the mouse, making the controls unnecessary difficult sometimes and secondly the game does not work on mobile (iPhone 7 Safari - I get a warning that Unity WebGL builds are not supported on mobile).

Really cool idea. I like the simple art style, and collecting books feels satisfying, but the detection of the agents seems to be really unfair. I was not able to beat it.

Interesting take on the stealth genre. I managed to win and lose at the same time but both texts were behind the tutorial text for some reason. Nice idea to include the dev vlog btw, very interesting.

Having a graphical indicator for the fruits that are going bad would be good. Also, X and Z on a QWERTZ keyboard layout is not great. Other than that, cool idea, good execution, well done.

Very simple idea but quite fun. My highscore was 8.9 seconds. I would definitely disable the "hover over point detection" during level changes, though! It's frustrating if the scene change animation makes the mouse go over a point and causes game over.

It's not immediately obvious that the jello can bounce of everything (I though for example the clock was only decor - maybe choice of color or borders could help with that) but once it clicks it's enjoyable.

The idea is cute. I think moving the shelf further down would result in better gameplay since you wouldn't have so much wasted space in the lower half of the screen.

Your jam version only shows a dark square on white background when index.html is opened in the browser.

I think the upload might be bugged, I only see part of the screen and cannot go fullscreen either:

Wow, respect for playing a precision game on a trackball!

People eat 2 ''food' per day

Oh, ok that explains why I failed the first few times, which also means...

Btw have you seen the You ran out of food screen ?

...yes, I have :)

Figuring out a strategy for your game was fun, well done. Also the win screen lmao.

Some points of criticism:

• I hate that you are not warned before you replace an existing building
• White text on gray background is an absolute no-go
• I would have liked to see some statistics at the end of the game
• Don't automatically move away from the win screen if you spent time making it funny!
• The economy is very hard to understand and I still don't think I fully do, e.g.: castles house 750 people but according to the daily popup numbers they also produce 750g? Food x (y/day), is x my stash? Is y the amount of food I need or the amount I produce?

The idea is interesting, but the execution is lacking, unfortunately. I'd like to see a full/successful playthrough of this. In my tries, I was able to set ~10 houses or trees on fire at most before I lose. Is there some trick to recharging or spreading the fire faster?

I like the idea, it reminds me of Supaplex meets Pacman meets Snake. The difficulty could increase a little bit slower and not being able to hold down a key to run in a direction (without having to wait for the key-repeat delay) is hindering the fun, though.

Mechanically, this game is great: graphics work fine, the music supports the game (and does not get annoying) and jumping feels good, although I wish I could freely aim while charging.

On the other hand I think the game is too difficult and I was not able to survive day two:

• the frogs should have some features that I can use to differentiate them. Tracking all of them is tedious and not fun at all
• losing the full game when jumping into water is frustrating af (you want to tell me that frogs can't swim?!) - at least have the frog respawn on the first leaf

Each game starts with the orange cell facing upwards, forcing you to make a very wide turn (the controls could be more snappy, I think). Meanwhile the red cell directly goes for you and starts with perfect direction. All cells grow even without eating, which I found confusing. And at some point (that comes very quickly), touching a red cell is instant death. I think in order to be fun, there would have to be something I could do to prevent getting eaten or at least delaying it more effectively than running away. As far as I can tell, there is no scoring, so I don't know how good or bad I did.

I like the minimalistic graphics and controlling the flows is fun. The difficulty could increase a bit more with time. I lost on purpose at 7:58 but I could've kept going since even if a few balls get into the wrong factory, it wasn't that much of a challenge.

Ah, ok I get it, thank you. Maybe having 1-2 images for an explanation on your page would help.

As for the bugs: I think fixing game breaking bugs is absolutely something you are allowed to do post-jam. I mean, you're over the 3h already, so no harm done.

I think the concept is cool and the first 5 levels are very fun. However, the 6th level is mostly impossible: for a population of 320 I need to place 32 houses. The randomisation of the tiles prevented that and only gave me 17 houses out of 51 visible tiles:

Note, that even though my building strategy was flawed (at an optimum I only could have placed 24 houses), what strategy you can actually play heavily depends on the randomisation.

Two additional things I noticed:

• this is not true: "Once the house fulfills these conditions, its appearance changes"
• the music only plays on the left stereo channel

Either I don't understand something or there is a bug that prevents me from playing correctly: the detection for the number of neighbours does not seem to work consistently.

Examples

This is wrong either way: the number of neighbouring houses does not change, only the number of neighbouring tiles:

Here both solutions should be accepted, but I have to switch two houses:

Interesting idea. I think the unconnected houses could be marked a bit more flashy - at the moment it's a bit hard to identiy just one unconnected house in a sea of connected ones, because orange and yellow are so silimar. Also the connection sound a) feels a bit delayed (I think there is silence a the start of the sample) and b) gets annoying quite quickly.

Some notes:

• Due to the small time frame for typing, the eyes always have to be pointed to the right of the screen. It would have been nicer to put the characters in the middle. This feels a bit awkward currently. Same for the timer, and if it were a (progress)bar, it would also be "readable" while typing.
• Screw ups are not recognizable (fast) enough: if you type one letter wrong, changing the characters takes to long and in the meantime you can already type another wrong letter, leading to another screw up
• It's very easy to accidentally skip the end screen
• The game would be more fun if you had to type real words, not random combinations

"Mouse - Aim frog teleporter" is wrong, but arrow keys work.

The idea is nice and cleaning up is at least a little satisfying, but the control delay on the circle is a bit annoying.

Quite tricky AI behavior which makes for challenging gameplay. Squishing the frogs feels satisfying.

Very fun puzzle/problem game. It should be mentioned somewhere, that each group of people need adjacent water and trees, which is not immediately obvious from the current description.

The year is 3128. Humanity has built on every free available space. Recurring outbreaks of the sickman virus prevent overpopulation and high birth rates prevent extinction.  You cannot lose. The only winning move is not to play.

You definitely got the Wuselfaktor right which is great for such a short time frame. It's not very clear what causes outbreaks and sick people die out too quickly which makes it useless to build hospitals. In my game above I really cannot lose (I've let it run for ~30 minutes now and had multiple outbreaks). Also the UI should always be above all game elements and leaving out "capacity" for buildings would still work and prevent the screen being so crowded with words. Well done!

I made a speedrun of your game in 1:35.00. I'm sure there is a better route for the last level, but I'm happy with it for now.

A fun game to speedrun. A few more levels would've been nice, but I like it.

I think I might have the speedrun world record in this game with a bit less than 40 seconds :D Playing normally or as intended feels very rough, though.

Well, the web page (including the cover image) was not covered in the 3 hours, so you could've taken your time with it. Maybe next time.

The game is missing a challenging aspect at the moment. The graphics are cool, though. The font in the main menu is absolutely unreadable.

Yeah, hence the shittyness of the sprites :D

You won't be able to heal, if the cleric (white guy at the top) dies.

This is pretty cool. And it gets hard very fast. My highscore is 22. I think the cover image could've been choosen more wisely in order to attract more people, though ;) What do the yellow things mean, that are spawned from the white thing on the top?