Cleveland Mark Blakemore
Golden Era Games
This is a very impressive piece of work, Cleve.
Your demo is humiliating me in the sense it is now easy to notice how "spoiled" we have been today's RPGs. I have played your demo 30 minutes and was not able to achieve much (the most complex RPGs I played were the Might&Magic series... never really touched Wizardry). Your game tells straight away that you need to invest time and effort to get anywhere. I like that.
Right now, I don't feel spending too much time playing the demo, but I am definitely looking forward the final product.
I liked the story blurb.
Congratulations, and good luck with the Indie Gogo.
Yeah, I agree. I was on a supposedly old school gaming forum talking about Grimoire, and I was surprised to say the least. One person was complaining that there weren't tutorial pop ups to explain all the options, and many were agreeing that those additional features were just relics of a bygone era that only bitter dorks would care about, and Bethesda made RPGs much better. Literally a majority of John Walkers, trying to justify why cinematic RPGs like Mass Effect were much better than number crunching.
And this is the exact crowd who played computer games before many of us were born, and used to relish at games like Falcon 4.0 and its gigantic manual and complexity.
I thought that the Codex was exaggerating at times with its apologism, but man I didn't know things had gotten that bad. Even most old school fans have been burned out/spoiled beyond belief.
One design idea of Grimoire is that this game should not try to be Call of Duty with autoregeneration, hand-holding tutorial and popamole softshoe rail shooting/gameplay. For 17 years I have had the attitude if the player doesn't like a game to be a little more challenging, requiring some critical thinking, a little bit of inventory shifting and analysis, even avoidance of certain areas until they are ready to handle them, that's just the style of the game and they should not be playing. There is plenty of drooling popamole out there for all who desire complete mental shutdown when playing computer games. That is not this kind of game.
I also was not averse to party death/defeat. It is not the worst thing in the world and fearing it will scare the player off if they discover they can drown in water if they have no swimming skill is too timid in design. This is why you have savegames, after all. For example, if Shiva-Han-Goromu and his bat army defeat you, maybe the player will now hesitate and think about that strange room above with the dials, the inscriptions in the Causeway. If they can be bothered they will discover that nearly every single boss encounter in Grimoire has a kryptonite that can be exploited by the player willing to think about the problem. If they can't be bothered and their OCD/ADD prevents them from thinking about anything longer than 3 seconds, they will find this game is not for them.