Witchcrafter: Empire Legends

Hi!
Today I’ve released a totally new demo of my game! It’s available to play on itch.io of course, so enjoy! :wink:
There is also a whole new description, a new devlog and it is submitted to Fragment Jam 2019, as it’s a new fragment of my game - a very beginning of the story with actually a teaser of an intro trailer :smiley:
Feedbacks are valuable as always! :wink:

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an atlas padding mistake?

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Wow!! It is getting better and better. Intro sequences are awesome.
Just a few thought:

  • Skip intro
  • Show movement keys when intro dialogs over in the house (move left right keys ). And maybe jump button at first rock or platform.
  • Maybe little less camera zoom when action occur. It is bit too much for me.
  • I wasn’t able to run away from spider in the cave. Game is hang and spider beat me.
  • There is a little collision problem on platform:

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Oh, I don’t have such gap o.O Could be, I’ll investigate it, thanks! :wink:

Thank you for your valuable comments! :smiley: That spider should be automatically beaten by the hero, like a cutscene, and then should appear an ending screen, so you spotted clearly a bug, thanks!

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I’ve wondered how this project was going, cool to see it in action!

Some more bug reports. :smiley:

  • At the end of the beginning conversation, when I clicked on “sure let’s go outside…”, Fasteus and Tris-whatsisname walked outside, but I did not, and the last few dialog options repeated. The second time around I did walk out though.
  • I was beating up a mandrake and by mistake fell into some spider hole? Then it got kind of weird. I was moving in slow motion for a bit, then went down a ledge and somehow got stuck. I couldn’t move side to side or attack, only jump (had to refresh the game).

Also, I would put a dark outline, shadow, or background on the text. A lot of the time there is text that is impossible to read against the light background.

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Thanks @ross.grams! Doubled dialogs are certainly a bug, I’ll try to avoid such situations in future. To be honest, I set the flag that moves the quest forward too early, before the dialog is over, because I had some other bugs yesterday, normally, it should be done at the end of the dialog, so I’ll try to fix it :wink: the last spider nest location has some scripts that slows the motion just after the fall, but then it should get back to normal, and then the last encounter with the spider is scripted, so Estel should perform attacks and then the ending screen should appear, so any other behavior was not considered, so I’ll try to fix the cinematic moments too and ensure that the hero is in proper state and at the end of the cutscene everything is back to normal. Thank you for your report! :wink:
P. S. I now understand why developers shows gameplay played and totally controlled by them and not release any demo to the public :smiley: but in my case the feedback is the best what I can get from community, so thank you once again! :heart:

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Ahh, hahaha, OK. Yeah, I thought maybe I was stuck in webs so that’s why it was slow, but jumping was in slow-motion too, so that didn’t make a lot of sense. But yeah, it did go back to real-time, but something went wrong with the spider cinematic. I tried it again and it seemed to work fine. The bug with the ground collision that Selim reported was intermittent for me too.

Haha, now you see why devs need to do 10x as much playtesting as they think!!! It’s sad when you see otherwise good games released with bugs which then get hammered with negative reviews and never recover. Or, games that people rave about gifs of, but then are disappointed by the gameplay on release.

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Ah! I think you have to prevent Estel to move. I did try to run away when it is slow-mo :smiley:

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I fixed almost all the mentioned bugs, so I would like to thank you once again for those feedbacks, @selimanac, @Dragosha , @ross.grams! :heart:

It was a gap made by a script in a parallax background algorithm.

Added more hints :wink:

I tested all the dialogs and there shouldn’t be more errors, so it could be enjoyable now, thanks! :wink:

The problems in the cave of the spider are fixed and you should be able to see the last cutscene properly and then the ending screen :wink:

It is a problem with onewayplatform from Platypus, so I hope @britzl would be able to help in this case:

onewayplatformproblem

The problem occurs only when the hero’s collision object is actually colliding with the onewayplatform collision shape and the user clicks ‘Jump’. I will try to look into Platypus to find out how to handle this.

P.S. I’ve updated a main image at itch.io to make it look more eye-catching, let me know if this works at all :smiley: Soon, I will create a page on Defold’s community pages too :wink: For now, I think it’s enough if it’s come to the visibilit - I have a demo, I’m not ashamed of, that people can see. I will now focus on adding new stuff I want to see in the Prolog - continue the story, add more quests, add non-linearity for them, add typical RPG gui features: stats, skills and inventory and add alchemy module.

Thank you for your support! :wink:


Edit: And it’s live: https://www.defold.com/community/projects/149790/

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Lazy dev solution: remove that platform :smile:

This time, I stuck with spider :slight_smile:

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Sorry! I’ve fixed this too. I’ve added new spell animation in last minute and forgot that in that particular moment I hard-coded its name :confused: Shame on me, it’s now dynamic. And the intro is skipable :wink:

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No worries. We know how things work (and sometimes not).

:space_invader:

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Hello!

I would like to present to you a short narration set in the world of Witchcrafter !

It tells a story of a village in the outskirts of Emporia, invaded by the Emperor of Navia - Mordon with his army, just before the events from the game. It’s rather not for the faint-hearted, as my brother has a specific sincere and crude style and cruelty of Navians is unimaginable. It was my first translation on such scale, so if there are mistakes that you’ll spot, please report them to me, I would be more than thankful! :wink:

Also, many reported bugs was fixed and many suggested solutions was implemented to the last demo, so I’ll also encourage you to check it out once again! :wink: Me and my brother are working on adding more content to the prologue, but you might know it’s a hard task. I’m also trying to add more RPG features - soon there will be a menu with inventory, a journal with logs, quests, bestiary, conversations and some more lore! :smiley:

So, enjoy your reading and enjoy playing the demo!

Keep your fingers crossed!

Best wishes,
Paweł & Łukasz

P. S. Really, if someone with native English would just check if it’s correct I would be really, really grateful! :heart:

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During last two weeks I was working on GUI - Inventory and Skills and here you can see some initial outcome (great icons from DGHZ, some of them are modified, some of them are new)):


It provokes me to revise my skill tree and now I’m working on creating a system, where skills will be unlocked - it’s a part of a bigger RPG system I’m creating - that will take into account experience and some other aspects - it’s not a big deal for players - something ‘must have’ in an RPG, but for me it’s something giant - to write it from scratch, make mistakes, correct them and learn a lot :wink:

One useful result is also a new capability to control input focus in Monarch to perform switching tabs in pause menu - thanks again @britzl! :smiley:

It also has another outcome - I was encouraged to work on elements interaction - it all was only in my head (and only a glimpse at burning bushes in the first demo) until now :

freezing_grass

:sweat_drops: A wet bush is treated with a swift air push :dash: , so it’s getting really cold there and droplets are freezing :snowflake:
“Games” :crazy_face:
Still work in progress, but I hope you can see where I’m going :smiley:

When it comes to demo, I’m not updating it on my itch page as there is a pretty stable version - when it will be ready to release with a new elements interaction system and GUI - I will test it, fix it, repeat it several times and then release a demo :smiley: And I’m thinking about posting about it somewhere else too - there is a nice forum, but maybe you know some more?

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Twitter? It’s a good place to make the world know about your game.

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Tigsource is not very useful for building a fanbase, but you can get some good feedback from other devs there. Twitter is probably the best easy thing to do. I don’t think there’s a lot of normal gamers there, but a bunch of press people pick things up there, and lots of other developer folks.

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Certainly you need to do Twitter! That’s where I find awesome pixel art games.
Post your account link, so we can follow there too.

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So, here it is: https://twitter.com/WitchcrafterRPG :bird:
I’ll try to prepare some posts soon :smiley:

Interesting thing, that I achieved recently is the color modification for a sprite - it is, again, a simple shader that changes colors selected by me to those of my choice. I will use it to modify a look of my protagonist depending on his equipment :slight_smile:
Now, at this point, I must admit again, that I :heart: :defold:

  • hot reload to quickly make some change and see it in action
  • and also working render magic in Editor:

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I’m sliding down with new features! :smiley: That is, indeed, sliding:

After dealing with tilemaps issues I could finally prepare a small video, where I tried to show you how wall sliding works in Platypus :wink: I’m now clearing things up and soon will add a Pull Request with this feature on board. I hope it will be useful for you too! :heart:

I was making visual effects for fire and decided to advance its simulation by adding a :fire: fire propagation algorithm I was describing in that thread. So now, I need to reconsider world construct and decide on what type of destruction I want and will be able to allow.

There is a progress with GUI and inventory also and now I’m adding items to the game :wink:

Now I’m in the phase of refactoring, I need to tidy up my project, select and prepare features that are to show and create a new demo, which I wish to be good enough to present to a broader community.

I had an irresistible desire to apply directing projectiles - I tested that solution, but weren’t convinced with controls, though what if I would allow to target during slow-motion or even pause? :thinking: Also, in that case I would probably need to make animations for at least 8 directions (4 when ignoring flipped sprites) or create some not-so-beautiful rotation, like in games where hero carries a gun that you can rotate around him or her.

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me: @paweljarosz6
Twitter: This account doesn’t exist

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