Vapourware Lays of Evenheart - Vapourware

[Norfleet]

Yes, but Battle Brothers is a game with a clear design focus. It's hard, but it's got a clear focus: You are a band of mercenary dudes murderhoboing it across the world. This one is more...well, schizophrenic in its design, in that you have a tile-based murderhobo simulator where you can decide not to be a murderhobo...and somehow, both of these choices, despite essentially sharing no game elements in common, are being crammed into one game. Normally when a game has two different sides of it, these two sides still interrelate in some way, or at least don't mutually exclude each other.

 

[Tyranicon]

"wasn't built with the player's experience in mind."

Then why the fuck would I want to play it? I get what you're going at, but you may wanna rephrase it.

Yeah so many games nowadays come with a little snowflake blurb, that this actually harcore and stuff. Just copy a better written one.
Age of Decadence, Vagrus the Riven Realms are the ones I can remember having one from the top of my head, but others probably have them aswell.
Or just leave it to the wayside, Battle Brothers for example does not have such a blurb either, and is absolutely brutal and treats your group like just another mercenary group which may die fast if you play on medium/medium/medium/ironman.
The people playing indie grid based rpgs are a rather specific group anyway, and one often accustomed to difficulty. The blurb is a bit of a waste of time.

Blurbs aren't really needed IMO. If it's a difficult game, people will know it by reputation.

That being said, game looks like it's coming along nicely.

 

[Fenix]

Let me know what you guys think

Make text shorter to make it sound, to give words weight.
Just write something like that - if you won't learn from the clean sheet, you won't survive.
Maybe rephrase it without negatives.
Brevity is a sister of talent - classic of russian literature Chekhov.

 

[Tavernking]

Here’s something I haven’t seen in a game before. Your chance to hit is unknown if you haven’t encountered that monster before. Once a party member lands a successful hit, that monster is added to your bestiary.

Reading lore books is another way to add monsters to your bestiary. You can donate these books to libraries, thus ensuring your future characters can read them too, long after you’re dead.

 

[Parabalus]

Here’s something I haven’t seen in a game before. Your chance to hit is unknown if you haven’t encountered that monster before. Once a party member lands a successful hit, that monster is added to your bestiary.

Reading lore books is another way to add monsters to your bestiary. You can donate these books to libraries, thus ensuring your future characters can read them too, long after you’re dead.

Pillars of Eternity does this.

 

[FriendlyMerchant]

Yes, but Battle Brothers is a game with a clear design focus. It's hard, but it's got a clear focus: You are a band of mercenary dudes murderhoboing it across the world. This one is more...well, schizophrenic in its design, in that you have a tile-based murderhobo simulator where you can decide not to be a murderhobo...and somehow, both of these choices, despite essentially sharing no game elements in common, are being crammed into one game. Normally when a game has two different sides of it, these two sides still interrelate in some way, or at least don't mutually exclude each other.

So kind of like Neoscavenger?

 

[Tavernking]

Magic Missiles: 100% accurate, impossible to dodge, and the number of missiles scales with one’s Arcane skill level. The standard attack of any self-respecting mage.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Magic Missiles: 100% accurate, impossible to dodge, and the number of missiles scales with one’s Arcane skill level. The standard attack of any self-respecting mage.

Nice, it's fast and I like the sound effects.

 

[vazha]

Very nice, will be following.

p.s. What on earth does the title mean?

 

[Tavernking]

Very nice, will be following.

p.s. What on earth does the title mean?

Good question. You see 'Lay' used in Tolkien's writings sometimes. To me, it has a dual meaning of the poem/story of the land of Evenheart, and also the topology/geography of the land of Evenheart. Also, I pronounce Even in Evenheart as such that it rhymes with ‘Heaven’. But it doesn’t really matter

 

[vazha]

I thought "lay of the land" meant the layout of the grounds when looking from a vantage point. And then, logically "Lay of Evenheart" would be basically how Evenheart (a place?) looks like if you look down on it from above? Made 0 sense, hence my question. Somehow I doubt I ll be the last person confused with this.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

My mind thought Lay that Lady Evenheart.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Here’s something I haven’t seen in a game before. Your chance to hit is unknown if you haven’t encountered that monster before. Once a party member lands a successful hit, that monster is added to your bestiary.

Reading lore books is another way to add monsters to your bestiary. You can donate these books to libraries, thus ensuring your future characters can read them too, long after you’re dead.

The more you encounter a monster and defeat/capture the more you learn its strengths/weaknesses or you just get a bestiary pic & name and a description? I can't recall the game I played that slowly you uncovered the lore of each creature/mob.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Here’s something I haven’t seen in a game before. Your chance to hit is unknown if you haven’t encountered that monster before. Once a party member lands a successful hit, that monster is added to your bestiary.

Reading lore books is another way to add monsters to your bestiary. You can donate these books to libraries, thus ensuring your future characters can read them too, long after you’re dead.

The more you encounter a monster and defeat/capture the more you learn its strengths/weaknesses or you just get a bestiary pic & name and a description? I can't recall the game I played that slowly you uncovered the lore of each creature/mob.

PoE has something like that.

 

[Tavernking]

The more you encounter a monster and defeat/capture the more you learn its strengths/weaknesses or you just get a bestiary pic & name and a description? I can't recall the game I played that slowly you uncovered the lore of each creature/mob.

PoE has something like that.

Yeah someone figured out that Pillars did it first. I'm planning that after landing a successful hit, you'll learn all it's stats and reveal your chance to hit it from then on. It'll make new monster encounters a lot more interesting I think.

 

[Darth Canoli]

PoE has something like that.

And some jrpg, console game or obscure RPG probably did it way before pillars.

 

[Abu Antar]

^Yeah, Final Fantasy XII does that, and probably a few more I don't remember off the top of my head.

 

[gurugeorge]

The Pathfinder games do it too - there's always a knowledge or lore roll when you beat mobs that reveals (or doesn't) a bit more about them so that the next time you inspect the mob you'll see more of its stats. PFK even revealed more of the written lore of the monster, though WOTR seems to have given up on that.

Troubleshooter does it too.

 

[Tavernking]

Public alpha character creation sneak peek. I'm only letting you play as a male and as a human or one of the human sub-races (half-elf, plus another I made up). Keeping it simple for now. Next up, working on the the screen that appears after you press 'Next' -> the trait selection screen.

I've also spent a lot of time working on random events - monster encounters, blizzards, getting lost in forests, avalanches, encountering arcane phenomena, etc. I plan to have around 100 of these. Depending on the monster you encounter, you can have the choice of fighting, negotiating, surrendering or fleeing. The chance of succeeding in whatever option you choose depend on the monster and your party's own stats. For negotiating, the party member with the highest Diplomacy skill that can communicate with the monsters will attempt to convince them to leave you alone. You will have to know how to speak their language if you want to communicate with them. Right now there are 9 languages in the game.

The biggest thing holding me back right now is the combat engine - once that's done I need to do some more work on the random world generation. After that, everything else should be a breeze and fall into place relatively quickly.

 

[Pink Eye]

Character Creator looks snazzy. Congratulations on getting this far.

 

[curds]

Game honestly looks fantastic, Tavernking

Looking forward to the release.

Good work man, respect.

 

[AdolfSatan]

[Back] button isn't aligned to anything. Shouldn't it be flush left with the other info?

You got plenty of unused space around the sprite. Maybe have it be a tileset that changes according to spawn settings?

Regardless of graphic whorery, this shows lots of potential, looking forward to the next, more fleshed out demo.

 

[Tavernking]

The only winning strategy is to rush a corner, and build a good old HoMM defense triangle.

Fixed as of today. I want flanking to be an important mechanic so I can't let the player camp in the corner of the map.

Solution: A border that players cannot move through, but AI-controlled units can.

Unintended feature: While testing I found that players can still move beyond the border as long as it's to come back into the main battlefield. I like this feature, so I'm keeping it as long as it doesn't cause any bugs.

 

[Ularis Badler]

Fixed as of today. I want flanking to be an important mechanic so I can't let the player camp in the corner of the map.

Solution: A border that players cannot move through, but AI-controlled units can.

Unintended feature: While testing I found that players can still move beyond the border as long as it's to come back into the main battlefield. I like this feature, so I'm keeping it as long as it doesn't cause any bugs.

I think the last feature works well, for as long you don't wish to create unpassable paths using natural barriers with trees and large rocks. Chances are, you already aware of this. Cheers.

 

[Haba]

The more you encounter a monster and defeat/capture the more you learn its strengths/weaknesses or you just get a bestiary pic & name and a description? I can't recall the game I played that slowly you uncovered the lore of each creature/mob.

?? Weird Lady ??