Been a fan of this project so glad they are still at it. I watched both videos, here are a few thoughts / constructive criticism:
Feature overview: I like the music. Narrator sounds like Google Maps i.e. boring. I like the art style and portraits. Character system looks robust but you can reallocate all your points over and over for free? Magic animations look kinda meh because characters don't react to being hit. Spellcrafting looks really fun. Morality system looks promising. Not many details on the strategy layer, would like to know more.
Beta gameplay: Skips through the setting and dialogue. If you just want to show combat that's fine but maybe just cut the world map and dialogue from the video? Nighttime makes it hard to see the action. Battle overlay is very busy. I don't like the weapon icons over each character's head. Also really hate the dot map that indicates movement range. Animations look good but are slooow, good thing there's a slider. Barks are annoying after a few times, save them for kills or something. Characters can't take a lot of hits which is cool. I like the music and sound effects. Combat has a gritty, hard-hitting feel which I like.
Overall the game looks good, but these trailers are a bit average. The gameplay video especially. I don't know if it's meant to inform or excite, but it doesn't really succeed at either. Maybe consider going for a shorter, fast-paced trailer to hype why the game is cool, and then a longer one where you really get to show off the game's systems and explain the mechanics to autists like us.
Will definitely be keeping an eye on this one though. You guys are showing a lot of heart and experimenting with some cool ideas so props for that.
That gameplay video is pretty bad. The camera is absolute garbage, I hope there is, or a at least a plan to have, camera panning and rotation implemented because playing this will be jarring otherwise.
Hey guys, thanks again for sharing this out.
Haha, the feedback regarding the differences between our feature trailer and our gameplay is fair and quite spot on.The gameplay trailer was something that was recorded in the engine for another purpose than marketing. I agree that it doesn't put our best foot forward. We have plans to replace it with a proper game play trailer soon.
As for the feature trailer itself, youtube and video retention being what it is, we needed to bring that run-time down while balancing the pacing, cutting to music and all jazs. So the focus had to be on our key features: tactics, magic, choices. Since the feedback for both videos is partially about that we aren't showing the full loop properly, I'll factor that into the next gameplay video and try to give you guys a proper view of the full game loop.
On the note regarding the camera controls, this is an ongoing debate for us internally as well. We made some of our maps with some interesting verticality and layouts, which inherently caused player sight-lines to be obscured. To that end, we do have a transparency system that will render large visual blockers invisible so that you can see through it - I just chose not to use it during that recording as I was already rather comfortable with the camera rotation. However, we are getting requests to free up the camera controls more (like using the mouse-wheel click to freely control the camera or increasing the zoom in/out range) so we're definitely going to be looking into that as our beta progresses.
Finally we come to the VO. I was the one who contracted, passed off, and edited the VO and trailer, so I absolutely understand the critiques, and I largely agree with a lot of it. It could have been better, but unfortunately for me, better would have been more expensive and potentially more time consuming to obtain. I'll be frank: money is super tight and it comes down to the proper allocation of funds, time, and effort into everything we do. I'm penny pinching every small thing we do, and when it came to the dollars and cents for our VO budget, the team and I all agreed that the money be better spent increasing our in-game battle VO which have been limited to a couple voices and a small pool of lines.
All that aside, the team and I are really grateful for the candor and support we get here on the codex - we also have a number of codexians in our beta and in our discord - and we're listening. We still have a lot of polish and fixes to do in the coming weeks and we are constantly working to make the game we've put everything into for the last three years as good as we can.
Oh and, we have a more "in-depth" video on our spellcrafting currently in the pipeline, and unfortunately for most of you the nice VO lady will not be returning. You now have to listen to a really unsettling recording of me talk about spells. Judging by the constant giggling from our animator who is currently working on that... you're in for a treat.
for the newspost.
