itch.io

I am up to 4,610 heroes in the family tree. Load times are getting a little slow, but the more difficult problem is keeping track of multiple branches. To try and foster multiple splits in the tree, I find myself jotting down the hero name and searching it in the hero save folder, and editing the save game to switch heroes to who I want to be active when I load in vs trying to find them in the tree. I started doing this after I completely lost one of the branches I was trying to keep alive in the hopes of making a super baby from multiple strong lines.

Auto-level: It would be nice if at least the children and spouse of the active hero were auto-leveled as gold becomes available. This would help with letting the game idle. We don't get enough gold to auto-level everyone, but also, leaving the game idle means that that one youngster you were excited to level up is 3-4 generations dead the next time you come back, if you try to truly idle the game. Plus, it at least feels like non-active heroes age faster than the active hero after leveling up the speed boost. I don't know if aging is tied to tickrate or if it's independent, but this last time I came back to the game, my active hero was 189 years old and all his children were seemingly dead of old age. My chosen one offspring with huge stat boosts died at 68 at level 1.

Powerful armor from arena: Do we ever get to use it? The logs go too fast to read what happens after winning the fight. The best hero (I can find anyway) is 88/1700 genetic power/seed strength. I beat the campaign about 2,000 heroes ago, but I'm still wearing common armor.

Quest interruptions: If you fight in the Arena, it cancels the active quest. Found this out the hard way after I canceled Chimera Conundrum and it put me back in the game with a fetch quest.

There's more, but I'm not sure this game isn't abandoned, so...what does everyone else have for suggestions?

Also wanted to mention for the thread, that downloading the itch launcher and choosing the setting to launch games in sandbox mode tackles the problem without needing to add the executable to antivirus/malware whitelist. The game runs fine in sandbox mode. What sandboxing does is run the executable in a separate, isolated "container" within the OS. Disclaimer: I have no idea how Itch implemented sandboxing under the hood and can't endorse it as actually secure, just saying that it's a feature in the launcher and it allows the game to run without being quarantined by AV/antimalware such as Defender.

I think that was related to him posting about getting booted from Steam for using AI-generated art. That started a few days of threads on the subreddit's stance on AI-generated art. I'm just speculating. Not sure if he removed them due to bad PR or if a mod sided with the people who are against for-profit games using AI-generated art instead of paying artists. I'm not stating any form of opinion on this matter, just speaking to what I observed on the subreddit. I do know that this game feels like a monumental undertaking to get to a well-polished end-state, and I would still gladly pay $5 for it without monster/hero art until it make sense to invest in the artwork to re-enable a major revenue stream such as Steam. I love the idea and I'd play it with even placeholders for the art.

I think level scales to character's age perhaps. If I switch to someone who is 16 and immediately level them up, they still get very low-level enemies. And I noticed quests also are low level when the character is younger even after immediately leveling them.  I don't think it scales to level as, like you said, you can get enemies that are way higher than you. I haven't tested, and I'm not 100% sure, but I do know that I see asymmetries between character level and enemy/quest level and age seems to be the most likely variable.