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The Ancient

Hearthstone-like turn-based two-players strategy game. · By Unic

Quick "Tutorial" and Thoughts About the Game

A topic by Whalicorn created Aug 01, 2016 Views: 456 Replies: 2
Viewing posts 1 to 2
(1 edit)

For anyone struggling to pick up the game and understand how to play, here's a short tutorial that I've made up after about 10 minutes of play.

Obviously, you need 2 people. (Unless you like playing against yourself) There is no AI at the moment.

GOAL:
The goal of the game is to raise the Ancient's awakening level to 100 or above. It works like a tug of war, if its in your color, yellow or blue, then your currently winning. You raise this awakening level by the awakening factor on ALL of your active minions, and by special awakening tiles. The game will end if all red tiles are picked up, and victory will go to whoever has control of the Ancient's awakening level.

MINIONS:
Minions are represented by RED tiles on the board. Once you land on a minion tile, a minion will be spawned on your starting side of the board. Your first minion is placed near the bottom, that is your CURRENT minion (as it is referred to by certain tiles on the board), and the following minions are placed further up the side of the board. Once your current minion dies, the line moves down one. ALL of your active minions can add their awakening factor (aka the eye icon) to the Ancient's awakening level, not just the current minion. However, your CURRENT minion, is the only minion capable of attacking or defending. At the end of each turn, the current minions on both sides with attack each other, using their attack factor (aka the trident icon) to lower the defense factor (aka the shield icon) of the enemy. Once the defense factor reaches 0, the minion dies. Minions attack at the SAME TIME, not one after the other. The stats on the minions are as follows: Attack/Defense/Awakening.

TILES:
YELLOW tiles have a wide variety of abilities. Some can damage the current minion, others can damage all minions. Some can heal, and give bonus factors to your minions, and lower the factors of enemy minions. Some can even raise the awakening level of the Ancient. The RED tiles, as I said before, spawn minions. While going for only red tiles may seem like a great plan, remember to make good use of the yellow tiles as well. Also, don't focus on only the tiles next to you, look across the whole board and plan your movements. BTW the Poison tile says -1 health, BUT if the enemy minion has only 1 health, then it won't kill them.

I think I covered everything important. Now onto my thoughts on the game. It is amazing. I love the art style, music, the strategy, everything. I would like it if it had a touch more sound effects and animations. Like when the tiles move, they slide to the next tile, with a grinding stone sound, not just teleport. And when the minions fight, some animation and sound would be nice there too. Also, adding some form of animation to the Ancient when it wakes up would be awesome. Something that makes winning really satisfying. Other than that, this game is great.

Developer (2 edits)

Thank you for nice tutorial and warm feedback!

I'd like to add some other things / features you can find in this game.

1. You can have no more than 4 minions; if you try to spawn the 5th one, it won't be spawned and corresponding red tile won't be activated (it will remain RED); it makes player not to spawn only battle minions with zero-awakening, but also to improve them with spells or to spawn minions with big "awakening" value.

2. You can skip move if you're in the very corner of triangle.

3. There are two conditions for game end:
a) the ancient has 100 awakening points;
b) there are no more minion tiles on the triangle AND one of players has no more minions in their queue. This condition makes players to think when exactly they should activate the very last minion tile. And it's very funny when you activate the last minion tile and lose instead of waiting for several moves and winning (:

Sure, there are lack of effects that could make gameplay much more comprehensive. I had big plans about visual effects, but I've decided to concentrate on gameplay and make the game maximum playable. So, guys, sorry for "teleports" and out-of-design popup messages (: I planned to make player's victory epic by adding animation to the awakening ancient and collapsing mountains. It also would be nice to have multiplayer; though, it's playable even by Skype with screen sharing (:

In general, I enjoyed the jam very much and developing of this game was great pleasure for me.

Thanks for playing! (:

I knew about the 4 minion limit but I forgot to put it in there. The turn skipping was a complete mystery to me. XD I must have missed that. And the second condition on the second win condition (that makes perfect logical sense but it sounds so stupid XD), I didn't know about that. I TRIED testing it but I couldn't keep the minions alive long enough to see what would happen, so I assumed it wasn't a thing. But anyway, I enjoyed the game and I'm probably going to keep playing it a couple times a day for the next few months. I almost never get that attached to games.