Witchcrafter: Empire Legends

I certainly will play it and I think I’ll record my gameplay with shared ideas.

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It would be very appreciated! Thanks in advance! :wink:

Video
I came to the conclusion that in full release you should give a proper introduction to focus table especially add something shiny after all 4 moves on those element choice buttons because I didn’t know for a moment I need to choose. I was thinking it will make an element combination or automatically choose for me depending on points.
There were some moments of player object freeze and didn’t move. Also seems something is not working with stone magics (didn’t do trap and missile ones)

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:heart:

Thaaaank you so much for this :smiley: It’s a very deep analysis and a great review! The work is ongoing, most of the bugs you encountered here are found and fixed, I’ll add of course more tutorials, balance and content and then release another part. I’ll think about a Focus board too! I really, really appreciate it, @NeZvers! :wink:

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You are welcome!
For tutorials try not to do “click here to do this” type tutorials. If you can visually guide player eyes without telling, it goes towards great gameplay.

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It’s been almost 2 months since last dev log :smiley: I feel guilty for this, but instead writing, I spend my whole time, well… writing.

I did refactored a terrible mess after a quick&dirty demo release for UDGJ#1. I also had to rest from this and made a game for LD#44 - Lifeless Space. Nonetheless, it was somehow connected with my project, as I was reconsidering and designing elements interaction - e.g. contact with fire will conclude as burning, melting or evaporating the touched object, depending on its properties. Some of them are present in the submission.

Well, feedback from UDGJ also involved my thoughts about a magic system - for now I’m focusing on interaction instead of the source of the elements. And when it comes to source…

It’s the theme for next UDGJ, that I’m planning to participate too :smiley: I have an idea to use my Defluid to both Witchcrafter and my submission for the jam! That would be a win-win situation, resulting in neat water elements simulation in my both games. That’s a plan, so I have nothing to tease for now, but believe me, during the jam, you’ll see what I’m thinking about :wink:

Next of my assets I want to utilize is of course Defork - that I will use as a dialog base for my game. I polished it, and there are handled Twine “nodes”/“tags” such as: “next” - to skip displaying options to choose and only go for the next text node/ next speech, “exit” - to end the conversation and some tagged with “!” that will indicate important events that I want to save, because they will shape the world, events and characters.

I’ve managed to learn Defold and Lua at that level, that I’m encouraged to create a…

Non-linear quest system. I was working on it a lot, it’s quite generic, but it’s tuned for my RPG and Defork. I was even trying to create quest’s time-line in Twine! :smiley: I read a lot about quests, systems and dialogs design, so I hope it will be fruitful. The scenario for the prolog is created long time ago, so I started with this. It is a proper tutorial and story introduction, so as soon as it will be polished I will release it in place of my current demo, that has no tutorial.

So, be prepared :wink:

Keep your fingers crossed, guys! Cheers! :wink:

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Any chance to go a bit in depth with this or share some useful links? :smiley: It sounds amazing!

Oh, it’s a long story, long road :smiley: In short, I have some basic types of quests that are essential, like: talk_to, kill, gather, go_to, defend. Those basic types are simple blocks to build strongholds :smiley:

For example, when someone wants you to get rid of someone from the village you have many ways to do that:

  • you can go and kill him, but along the way you could be stopped by someone, you could have an offer or a bribe to not kill him, or another quest that is more rewarding
  • you can go and convince him to leave the village, that could result in having to do him a favor or give him money for that
  • you could at last convince someone else to get rid of him (and that person could do this in different ways, or not did it all).
  • you can use magic or alchemy to imprison, intoxicate or snow him and take him out of the village

And I’m trying to allow all those ways I can think of by designing small possibilities with those blocks, that will at the end give result - an important event (those “!”) is saved to be completed or failed. Along the way of course, many other events could be modified. I’m holding all of them in single ordered list, that any of the quest-blocks can access.

Some links I was able to find again:

https://levivisser.nl/non-linear-quest-system/

http://howtomakeanrpg.com/a/the-witcher-3-conversation-breakdown.html

And some about combat:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140801081037/http:/www.altdev.co/2011/05/20/how-to-design-enemies-tips-from-a-combat-designer/

http://howtomakeanrpg.com/a/designing-a-realtime-combat-system.html

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Thanks a lot! Tonight’s bedtime reading is gonna be awesome :grimacing:

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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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