Game News Esoteric Ebb is a 5E ruleset Disco-like where you play as a cleric unraveling a political conspiracy

[Gaznak]

Almost all modern RPGs look like some ugly one-man-made indie stuff from Itch.

 

[Sexy Beast]

in a perfect world people would take lessons of disco and apply them to normal rpgs with combat. but now we will get billions of combat-less copycats trying to outquirk each other

Almost all modern RPGs look like some ugly one-man-made indie stuff from Itch.

art is teh hard

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

I just don't get the point of attaching 5e D&D stuff to a game that isn't combat focused. It just seems like a weird gimmick at that point.

So... in Disco Elysium, can you actually lose? From the sounds of the game, different stuff happens depending on what you do, but it doesn't really sound like you can lose. That makes it, in my eyes, not actually a game.

So to see this game claim to be like that "game" makes me think it's also not exactly a game, more like, as someone else said, a bunch of flavor text that you have some minor control over.

 

[Chanel Oberlin]

So... in Disco Elysium, can you actually lose? From the sounds of the game, different stuff happens depending on what you do, but it doesn't really sound like you can lose. That makes it, in my eyes, not actually a game

There are a couple of moments that can earn you a game over if you're not careful but they're sort of in-game jokes played for laughs.

 

[ozymandiusz]

Voice acting is almost as bad as graphic itself. I would not even bother to get skidrow edition of that garbage.

 

[Oberon]

I just don't get the point of attaching 5e D&D stuff to a game that isn't combat focused. It just seems like a weird gimmick at that point.

So... in Disco Elysium, can you actually lose? From the sounds of the game, different stuff happens depending on what you do, but it doesn't really sound like you can lose. That makes it, in my eyes, not actually a game.

So to see this game claim to be like that "game" makes me think it's also not exactly a game, more like, as someone else said, a bunch of flavor text that you have some minor control over.

You can die at one point

 

[kangaxx]

You can die trying to retrieve a pair of trousers from a fan in the first room. Great gameplay.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

gameplay

dialogue is not gameplay

 

[kangaxx]

Did you not notice the tone of my post?

 

[Christoffer Bodegård]

Oh hey, I missed this thread.

So much great feedback here, had a blast reading through everyone's opinions. Thank you so much! I really do need the feedback. I obviously get opinions from all over the place, but I love getting it here since I can at least make a baseline assumption that I'm getting some unfiltered thoughts.

When it comes to the ART - it's rough, man. I've been learning as I go, and -- I think ItsChon put it best -- it's too flat, important stuff doesn't really POP, and the line art is sloppy as hell. I've been rushing to get this demo together in a decent time, and I have such a massive urge to redo everything. Especially the portraits. My profile pic as an example (love this ugly bastard). I'll be sure to come back here once I get to work on the environments.

Now COMBAT is a fun discussion. My old design didn't have any at all. But when I experimented with an encounter-system to compliment the normal dialogs I think I've found something fun. It essentially plays out like a theater of the mind skirmish. You take turns with your companions and opponents and make strategic decisions depending on available information. Every choice is written to interact and change depending on turn order, hit points, and so on, which I originally thought would be unwieldy as fuck to work with. But D&D combat is usually pretty short. Like, 2-5 rounds in a small battle. So the variables are pretty manageable. We'll see if the current design works at all in the broader game. Having a bunch of pseudo-random encounters appear in the world is at the very least an efficient way to eat up the player's resources and keep the narrative going forward.

But the whole game lives and dies on the WRITING, so I'll have to keep that in mind during development. Now I'm not a great writer exactly. I've only been working in the industry for a three or so years. So my current plan is to use the demo as a guide on how to proceed with the full production. It has about 50k words in it (if I had the money to pay an editor it'd probably be half of that), and I'll open up to a private playtest at some point to try to get as much honest feedback on those 50k as possible.

And the POLITICS. I like writing political conflicts. Mainly because it's just so human. Everybody wants different things for perfectly explainable reasons. I don't like it when very human ideologies are treated as alien thoughts. It's one of the first things that hooked me on Disco, the fact that everyone is humanized, even the outlandish characters that the authors (I assume) didn't agree with. Anyway, I made a game with goblins, so I don't have to deal with that. Here's my new website: https://esotericebb.com/

 

[Tyranicon]

Brofisted you just for having the balls to wade into the codex. That's a decision you'll probably regret soon.

Serious question(s), can you be any kind of cleric subclass? Are there homebrew rules and features? Is combat a big part of the game?

 

[Christoffer Bodegård]

Thanks. Love regret, makes me wanna change.

The PC uses a homebrew version of the Arcana subclass. This is mainly to explain why you have access to wizard spells. But also, the cleric is essentially a member of an anti-magic task force. So he's an 'expert' in esoteric bullshit.

I do homebrew a lot to fit the gameplay better. Just some examples: Detect Good and Evil is now only 10 minutes instead of an hour. The cantrips I use are either minor boosts to passive checks that eat up your concentration, specific effects that grant minor bonuses on rolls, or keys to unlock hidden dialog options. You can prepare spells multiple times per day to encourage experimentation. No proficiency bonus on rolls, but in exchange your equipment gives a lot of modular effects. Like, basic example, a dwarven helmet that gives -2 DC against all Entities with the DWARF trait. In general the item design is completely homebrew, making wild alterations to your statline. For class features, I'll probably have some mechanics for Channel Divinity. Maybe I'll treat it as a daily reroll? I don't know. Could probably come up with something more fun.

I'm treating combat similarly to when I'm running an urban exploration campaign with my players. Currently the plan is to have around 5 pseudo-random encounters that are unavoidable (and only stop if you finish a certain quest branch). These are incompetent assassins that continually fail to get you killed. So not too deadly, even towards the end-game. Then there's about 3 combat 'scenarios' where you have to be actively hostile in order to trigger them. These will most likely get you instantly killed unless you've prepared for them before-hand. So very little focus on combat. Which I think is the right move when I don't have a proper combat system in place.

The game will probably run from level 1->5. So I'm also treating it like I would as a DM: early levels are deadly. Its an 'open-world' in the sense that you can explore most of the game the second you leave the tutorial, but if you head down into the depths immediately you'll lose your tiny health pool real quick.

 

[ItsChon]

There will be a lot of edgey retards, especially since DE is so polarizing here, but if you can just ignore the stupid shit you'll find that there is some really good insight to be garnered here, so I personally hope you'll stick around. I look forward to seeing more about the game. What's your planned rough length of the game?

 

[Christoffer Bodegård]

I agree, lots of good insight. The rest is highly entertaining as well.

I'm using the demo as a rough estimate. Even then it's hard to say. If you're a fast reader like me the demo is about an hour. If it was fully voice acted (and you actually listened to every line) it would be twice that length, easily. But if we're assuming it's an hour, then the full game should be somewhere around 20-30 hours for a completionist run. It all depends on how much funding I get and how long we keep the development time.

Since the vast majority of content in EBB is optional it's even harder to guess the hours. I recently uploaded a quick playthrough of the demo and it was only 20 minutes. So, eh. I'll try to focus on quality over quantity anyhow. Should definitely get a good editor.

 

[agentorange]

At first I thought the artstyle was trying to ape Moebius and failing, but then I realized, yeah, that's actually the exact same artstyle flash animations and games used. In this case, the ones that actually went to the trouble of animating their characters rather than using the ugly ass flash animation style. Wonder why?

i thought of moebius and franco belgian comics when i saw the visual style too. the colors and the soft, curvy lines. what exactly about it is flash animation like though, flash animation doesnt indicate any kind of specific visual style in my mind

 

[tentanz]

Are you the drug addict that got fired, the one that went to prison, or the one that got involuntarily put in an insane asylum?

ok, Yankee White

 

[good fucking shit happen]

At first I thought the artstyle was trying to ape Moebius and failing, but then I realized, yeah, that's actually the exact same artstyle flash animations and games used. In this case, the ones that actually went to the trouble of animating their characters rather than using the ugly ass flash animation style. Wonder why?

i thought of moebius and franco belgian comics when i saw the visual style too. the colors and the soft, curvy lines. what exactly about it is flash animation like though, flash animation doesnt indicate any kind of specific visual style in my mind

I aint got no clue what kind of doodles Francisco Franco made but I read Heavy Metal and this aint it. So what the fuck you sayin?

 

[Tyranicon]

full game should be somewhere around 20-30 hours for a completionist run.

Now I'm interested, especially if the writing and combat are good. Have to warn you though, speaking from personal experience, solo/small dev'ing a 30-hr long game is no joke and will take you a very significant amount of time.

 

[Christoffer Bodegård]

full game should be somewhere around 20-30 hours for a completionist run.

Now I'm interested, especially if the writing and combat are good. Have to warn you though, speaking from personal experience, solo/small dev'ing a 30-hr long game is no joke and will take you a very significant amount of time.

Very fair concern! My estimate on developing this game by myself is around six years, realistically. So I'm talking with publishers right now to see if I can get some funding. With two employees and some outsourcing it should be done in two to three years. *In a dream scenario*. And even then, like you say, the writing and design has to be damn good too. So I'm gonna work on that for now.

 

[Tyranicon]

My estimate on developing this game by myself is around six years, realistically.

Please don't do that. For your own sanity.

 

[Rincewind]

Blatant DE ripoff, and while I like minimalistic art styles, this doesn't look half good. At least DE looked decent, and Planescape actually very good. All in all, definitely decline.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

At first I thought the artstyle was trying to ape Moebius and failing, but then I realized, yeah, that's actually the exact same artstyle flash animations and games used. In this case, the ones that actually went to the trouble of animating their characters rather than using the ugly ass flash animation style. Wonder why?

i thought of moebius and franco belgian comics when i saw the visual style too. the colors and the soft, curvy lines. what exactly about it is flash animation like though, flash animation doesnt indicate any kind of specific visual style in my mind

Looking at it again, since its been a while since I posted that, I guess you're right. Not sure what the special cases of flash titles were in my mind at the time, but regular flash animation has this thing where each piece of a character's body is its own thing. So each individual body part can freely move on its own at any time, kind of like cardboard cutouts if done poorly. As a result, a lot of Flash games had more animation than what should technically be possible on the developer's time and abilities. Now that I'm looking at it again, I don't really see anything beyond Moebius or the usual sort of simplified graphical artstyle you would expect out of someone who has to handdraw every frame by hand.

full game should be somewhere around 20-30 hours for a completionist run.

Now I'm interested, especially if the writing and combat are good. Have to warn you though, speaking from personal experience, solo/small dev'ing a 30-hr long game is no joke and will take you a very significant amount of time.

Very fair concern! My estimate on developing this game by myself is around six years, realistically. So I'm talking with publishers right now to see if I can get some funding. With two employees and some outsourcing it should be done in two to three years. *In a dream scenario*. And even then, like you say, the writing and design has to be damn good too. So I'm gonna work on that for now.

I don't mean to be negative too much, but you might want to consider scaling back what you can. That kind of gameplay time along with that much time to develop it sounds like a recipe for burnout on everyone's part, you and the players. Considering this is supposed to be a game for the first five levels of a character it seems a tad oversized.

 

[Christoffer Bodegård]

My estimate on developing this game by myself is around six years, realistically.

Please don't do that. For your own sanity.

I think it's fair to say I would go insane working on this alone for another six years. Plus I have a bunch of other projects I want to try my hands on before I get too old and tired. But I've already had some talks with a couple of publishers, so getting a revshare/funding deal doesn't seem that far-fetched anymore. I'm aiming for a 2025 release. But since I'm saying that out loud it'll probably be 2026. Don't quote me on either of those.

At first I thought the artstyle was trying to ape Moebius and failing, but then I realized, yeah, that's actually the exact same artstyle flash animations and games used. In this case, the ones that actually went to the trouble of animating their characters rather than using the ugly ass flash animation style. Wonder why?

i thought of moebius and franco belgian comics when i saw the visual style too. the colors and the soft, curvy lines. what exactly about it is flash animation like though, flash animation doesnt indicate any kind of specific visual style in my mind

Looking at it again, since its been a while since I posted that, I guess you're right. Not sure what the special cases of flash titles were in my mind at the time, but regular flash animation has this thing where each piece of a character's body is its own thing. So each individual body part can freely move on its own at any time, kind of like cardboard cutouts if done poorly. As a result, a lot of Flash games had more animation than what should technically be possible on the developer's time and abilities. Now that I'm looking at it again, I don't really see anything beyond Moebius or the usual sort of simplified graphical artstyle you would expect out of someone who has to handdraw every frame by hand.

full game should be somewhere around 20-30 hours for a completionist run.

Now I'm interested, especially if the writing and combat are good. Have to warn you though, speaking from personal experience, solo/small dev'ing a 30-hr long game is no joke and will take you a very significant amount of time.

Very fair concern! My estimate on developing this game by myself is around six years, realistically. So I'm talking with publishers right now to see if I can get some funding. With two employees and some outsourcing it should be done in two to three years. *In a dream scenario*. And even then, like you say, the writing and design has to be damn good too. So I'm gonna work on that for now.

I don't mean to be negative too much, but you might want to consider scaling back what you can. That kind of gameplay time along with that much time to develop it sounds like a recipe for burnout on everyone's part, you and the players. Considering this is supposed to be a game for the first five levels of a character it seems a tad oversized.

Definitely scaling back. I like the idea of making a smaller, cheaper (as in, the actual price of the product), shorter, and more focused experience. So just to be clear, when I say 20-30 hour completionist run, I'm comparing that directly to the data I have on Disco (the accuracy of which I cannot confirm). Doing everything in a DE run would be around 40-60 hours. I saw someone getting up to 100. Jesus. My first run was about 25. So then, according to my current GDD, I'm aiming for about half of Disco's playtime. Don't quote me on that either. But if my numbers are off, let me know.

 

[Baldanders]

When will this horrible adult swim art style go away?

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Godspeed on your development endeavors, Christoffer Bodegård.