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KickStarter Himeko Sutori, tactical JRPG, 100+ unit armies

CyberWhale

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I've been thinking a lot about that lately: I am working on a project MUCH bigger than can reasonably be finished by a single developer (even with contracted music and art). Most successful indie games have delivered a small, focused, and highly polished experience. I'm doing the opposite.

I hope you also realized that you're the one who has made a mistake. Either way, I hope the game is moderately successful and you end up doing more titles in the future.
 
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Thac0

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Nathaniel3W

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Thanks so much! I'm really struggling to keep up with all the marketing and promotion. And I have this bug fix I really want to work on too... I think I figured out what I need to do.

We had a HUGE day yesterday. Most devs I spoke to said that their transition from Early Access to full release was mostly a non-event. Himeko Sutori seems to be the exception. Things are really blowing up right now. At the top of both Popular New Releases and New and Trending. I guess I should try to keep the momentum going.

Did you read that Reddit post though? It did not go well at all. I like the crowd at /r/StrategyRPG, but they're not even 1/10th the size of /r/JRPG. I guess maybe I should try another post at JRPG, and I'll be careful this time. Thanks for the recommendation!
 
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Thac0

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Thanks so much! I'm really struggling to keep up with all the marketing and promotion. And I have this bug fix I really want to work on too... I think I figured out what I need to do.

We had a HUGE day yesterday. Most devs I spoke to said that their transition from Early Access to full release was mostly a non-event. Himeko Sutori seems to be the exception. Things are really blowing up right now. At the top of both Popular New Releases and New and Trending. I guess I should try to keep the momentum going.

Did you read that Reddit post though? It did not go well at all. I like the crowd at /r/StrategyRPG, but they're not even 1/10th the size of /r/JRPG. I guess maybe I should try another post at JRPG, and I'll be careful this time. Thanks for the recommendation!

Still that thing overall has 100 likes. If you go in with a similarily humble post, now with a finished (and hopefully good) product to show for you are trading a bit of online hate for maybe 30-50 reviews more, and those can really kickstart the algorithm on Steam. I think it would be wise, but it is your decision if you want to deal with the smartasses on reddit. Very annoying crowd.

Otherwise you can try to get a post on /r/games, maybe even a release AMA they do these for quite small developers at times. The people there are even bigger faggots than the one on /r/JRPG tho, by reddit standards that sub is quite ok.

Another idea would be gifting a few free keys to JRPG youtubers.

Resonant Arc is one I like, and he has done similar videos for promising retro indies.
The entire circle he collabs with might appreciate a key for some free promo, people like https://www.youtube.com/c/TheNightSkyPrince/featured are starving for content with how drie the JRPG market is atm.
 

Nathaniel3W

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Thanks for the advice! I guess I hadn't though of it in the exact terms of how many likes, clicks, purchases, and snowballing purchases I could get from a post. I'll head over there and start typing in just a minute.

And I'm also pretty clueless when it comes to finding Youtubers and Twitch streamers. Thanks for the recommendations. I'll contact these guys too.
 
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Thac0

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Good job Nathaniel3W , started your game to see how good whatever I am shilling actually is, and I couldn't put it down for three hours. Developing my little toons is very addictive.
Why are the portraits so strangely drawn tho? Did you get porn game assets for free? If you unequip the armor the spritework in underwear looks fine but the portrait looks like I am playing some 2000s erotic flash game.

A few small things:
- Is it possible to enable smooth camera rotation? Only being able to rotate the camera in 8x45° steps gave me cancer.
- Maybe in the early game when all NPCs tell you where you can rebind your keys also tell that you do it in the pause menu, which opens with escape. When first playing the game the escape key was lagging when I pressed it, so I pressed every key on my keyboard to find the pause menu. You probably know about that occasional input denial already, but it happens rare enough to not be a big problem. Except in the tutorial when you don't know what button does what yet.
- Can we have a counter for movement points somewhere? If I understand the system right you always need 1 movement point to attack, and everyone starts with three as seen by the faint highlight on the grid. Having a small numeric counter would help.
- The UI nicely gives a lot of info for skills on mouseover, but some critical info for buffs and debuffs is missing. The game tells me my druid gives Terra Blessing, but idk what Terra Blessing does.
- Maybe do something about the overlapping dialogue boxes. Somehow the automatic background dialog boxes overlay with the manual dialogue for screen space, which looks really ugly. Putting all manually triggered dialogue on the lower end of the screen for example would solve that.

Since I am not a dev I do not know how possible or easy some of these things are in UE 3. But all would be cool to see eventually.

This game really deserves the hype, this might be the best western made tacticool JRPG, beating out Fell Seal, depending on how good the late game is.
 

Nathaniel3W

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Thanks so much for the feedback Thac0 I've heard a few of those points from a few different people and I'll try to implement them soon. Everything you asked is doable. It's just a matter of how this lone programmer can spend his time.

The portraits are kind of generic. I hired an artist a long time ago to give me some reusable assets I can mix and match. I thought it was neato at the time, but I can see how quickly all the faces start to look the same.

A few months ago I looked into replacing the portraits and I went over to ArtStation. I found this great Korean art studio that had a bunch of great artists. They all seem to have the same kind of GranBlue Fantasy style of characters. I asked them about drawing some portraits for me... And just a few portraits with just a few facial variations would have bankrupted me. So the 2000s erotic flash game portraits stayed.

I really hope the games lives up to expectations. If I could have half the success of Fell Seal, I'd be pretty happy.
 

Nathaniel3W

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Also, thanks for the recommendation to put a post on /r/JRPG. It went way better than I thought it would. Only one comment was highly critical out of something like 70. It got some silver and hundreds of upvotes, and I'm pretty sure it resulted in a lot of sales. This introverted socially awkward developer would probably still be delaying a post on Reddit without your push.
 
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Thac0

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I just fought the big Siege at the beginning of Shadowlands. :shredder:

I denied the option of harrying them, since I was in the mood for a big fucking siege. This delivered on all fronts. I had four lances, an elite melee lance, a trash melee lance with a lot of adventurers, a single target range lance and an aoe range lance. The only units I lost was a healer from the single target range lance, maybe an adventurer from the trash lance. Everyone had a level up, tons of equipment all around. I was outnumbered probably 5 to 1, but the enemy broke before my walls under the constant stream of magic, arrows and gunshots from my walls. This was some Helm's Deep level shit.

Is there any point in multiclassing? I notice passives and attribute changes persist beyond class change, so it seems the best possible way is to almost max out all units in all classes, and only not take those skillcards which lower your main colour. Then swap back into your favorite maxed out class and enjoy insane stats.
For a second game it might be sensible to restrict the benefit you get from levelled classes to maybe 3-4 classes, like the FFT games do it.

Also that colour wheel looks like it employs some kind of hierarchy. Are certain elements effective against each other? I never really paid attention to that, but if that should be the case there really needs to be a way to show unit and enemy lance colour on the battlefield UI. Or are colours just this game's version of Strength/Dex/Int/Wis/Cha etc.
 

Nathaniel3W

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This was some Helm's Deep level shit.
That is probably the best feedback I've had on that battle! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

As for multiclassing, some people really like it. Others, not so much. It depends on how versatile or focused you want your characters to be. If you switch to another class, your characters will level-up faster and they'll pick up other useful abilities. If you stay in the same class, your characters will keep getting level-ups and they'll grow stronger in their one main attack. But they won't learn any more reactions, and level-ups will start getting harder to get. I designed the game so that multiclassing would be the preferred route for powerful characters, but there are some on the Steam forums who say focusing on one class is the best way to go. If you want to hear other opinions on it, probably the Discord is the best place to ask right now. https://discord.gg/ufp8HxxW

I was wondering about why with FFT and similar games you only get to assign a limited number of abilities. I always thought that was dumb. Why would you suddenly forget how to Time Mage when you become a Geomancer? I guess limitations are part of the fun and challenge. Maybe my next game will have limited skill slots or something. We'll see.

There is some sense to the color wheel, but it's not super important. Probably the most important thing that it does is limit the number of characters you can have in a lance. If one character has an element opposed to the lance leader's element, then it costs more to add that character to the lance. But once your leadership skill gets high enough, it doesn't really make a difference. I was going to add more than that, but it just ended up complicating the game without really adding any interesting choices.
 
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Thac0

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Blogposting a bit more, I just beat that fanatic chick at the crystal barrier, which feels like I am moving to the end of that area. Roughly 8 hours under the hood.
This area was tough. After the massive siege most fights on the map were hard to deadly, and I had to run around a bit and glaze the weaker forest horror packs.
The area was also annoying, because there is no equipment merchant at the outpost. However it is the only place where you can get fresh recruits at a sensible price, either buying them as adventurers/scholars for around 1500 or making Skeletons. So I ran around from Caravan (selling my loot to get cash) to outpost (recruiting and making Skellies) to caravan (outfit my new troops with decent gear)
Most annoyingly I just gathered all gear to make Druid rituals in the area before, as I wanted more fairies and pumpkin people in my army. I havn't found any druid groves in the Shadowlands yet, which means I should have completed that ritual before traveling on.

That said I do like the way in which the Shadowlands slowly grind up your fresh faced army, and the abundance of corpses forces you to abandon all decency and go full Necromancer.
Time for the Skeleton War!
MjjlaEG.gif


In general the Shadowlands seem like a real Noobkiller area. I havn't had a game over yet, but I have to play carefull and pull a lot of powerplays to stay ahead and not lose critical units.

A small warning before turning in Bellamy (I think that was the last thing I did before the Skeleton War began?) would be nice. Just a small text to indicate that after this you will have to go through a small Djihad that would make Paul Muad'dib proud before you see a friendly well stacked town again. Something along the lines of "If I turn in this criminal it might be a while until I see my home again".
 

Nathaniel3W

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Yeah, that town needs an equipment vendor. I'm putting one in right now.

And for the most part, necromancy altars are for the Shadowlands and druid altars are in the overworld. Have fun with your skeletons, and kill some Harkonnen, or uh, Candle and Sword for me.
 

AdamReith

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
Grabbed this and about twenty minutes in. Have to say I'm really liking everything I've seen so far, music and graphical style are very nice. I love how the sprites hop in some circumstances, details like that really add so much.

Would love a scalable UI because some of this text is really small but that's the only thing I'd say against it at this point.

EDIT: It was worth a try.

filth.png
 
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Repressed Homosexual
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I want to hug you through my screen for making such lovely gaming goodness. After having played through many Langrisser games recently, this is probably the next best thing in the modern era.
 

Norfleet

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Grabbed this and about twenty minutes in. Have to say I'm really liking everything I've seen so far, music and graphical style are very nice. I love how the sprites hop in some circumstances, details like that really add so much.

Would love a scalable UI because some of this text is really small but that's the only thing I'd say against it at this point.

EDIT: It was worth a try.

filth.png
What's small about that text? It's bigger than the text on the forum.
 

AdamReith

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
What's small about that text? It's bigger than the text on the forum.

Speech text is fine, I was thinking of this screen in particular for forcing me to squint a bit.

Also, forum text is scalable via browser settings.

amall-teext.png
 
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AdamReith

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
Sad, but multiple hard locks have meant I'll need to give up on this one. Hopefully after a period of bug fixing it'll be ready for general release but this one needs to go back in the oven.
 

Nathaniel3W

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Sad, but multiple hard locks have meant I'll need to give up on this one. Hopefully after a period of bug fixing it'll be ready for general release but this one needs to go back in the oven.
Sorry to hear that. Can you tell me what you were doing when the crashes occurred? I might already be working on it or have a workaround.
 

AdamReith

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
Sad, but multiple hard locks have meant I'll need to give up on this one. Hopefully after a period of bug fixing it'll be ready for general release but this one needs to go back in the oven.
Sorry to hear that. Can you tell me what you were doing when the crashes occurred? I might already be working on it or have a workaround.

First one I got a big stack trace in a new window when entering the starting town. No autosave on entering a town so I lost progress.

The second, was after the slime fight when you are escaping the dungeon. Hard lock at beginning cinematic after winning the battle, that's where I decided to shelve it as there was no opportunity to save even if I had been careful.

The game is very fun otherwise, the only thing I would ask to be changed is the the card system on level up. I'd make them much rarer as if I am raising a new batch of peeps I might need to do three to six card selections per peep and when most of them are auto-choosing the appropriate stat or whatever it just slows things down too much. It was actually putting me off hiring more troops.

One card selection at mastering the class where you pick between three ultimate abilities or something like that would be preferable.
 

Norfleet

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Speech text is fine, I was thinking of this screen in particular for forcing me to squint a bit.

Also, forum text is scalable via browser settings.
Maybe, but I've never felt the urge to do so, so I'm speaking of comparison to default.

Sir, that text is huge, and I'm 84. You need to go get your eyes checked, stat. If you can't read that, something is very wrong with your eyes.
 

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