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Indie Heroes of a Broken Land

Mustawd

Guest
70% off on steam. ~$5. Not bad for a game that combines blobbing with a strategy layer. Playing right now. Will post impressions later as there are not a lot of threads about it.


That pixel art is so bad that I will not even give this game a try for the sake of my aesthetic sensibilities. UI looks atrocious in general.

UI is at least functional if not polished. My main gripe with the art is that's it is waaaaaay oversaturated with color.
hobl_multiparty.png

Otherwise it works for me. The in dungeon art is better IMO.

hobl_alpha072_fight3.png
 

Mustawd

Guest
Sadly, as much as I love it, I feel like it might still be monotone. After all, seeking treasure and killing all the monsters in a dungeon seems to get repetitive fast, and the blobber combat is quite basic. There are traps and other such stuff, but the question is does it add enough variety? I know I would like to see special events/characters and the like appearing in the dungeons to add some variety and give more incentive for exploration (for example, rescue NPC in dungeon X, bring him back to town Y, etc).

After 3 or 4 hours this is basically my impression. The game is good in bursts of about an hour or so. Anything more and it just gets repetitive. The enemies are the same..tactics are the same...etc. And when enemies do change, it seems to come a bit too slow for my taste.

Still, it IS addictive in a way. Although its simplicity can become one-tone very quickly, in another way it also allows one to get into the gameplay much faster. No long lore dumps from NPCs...no need to haul your party back to town. Just buy stuff remotely and keep on dungeon crawling. Just like many blobbers really but even more streamlined.

I think if the procedural aspect was refined a bit more this game could be a lot more interesting. However, I will say that $5 is probably a good price point. If you want to try out a basic blobber for the first time then this is a good place to start.

However, on normal difficulty everything so far has been a faceroll. If it doesn't get harder in a bit I might just start over and ramp up the difficulty to hard.

Oh, one of the neat things is that you can pick the size of your world that gets generated. I picked Tiny just to work my way up. I'd say I probably have 3 more hours or so before beating the game with such a small map. So probably 6 hours, give or take, on a tiny map. Not bad.
 

ushas

Savant
Joined
Jan 5, 2015
Messages
550
Well said bros. If I may add two cents:
Indeed, the repetitiveness is quiet obvious at some point (unfortunately rather earlier then later, depending how big the map is). But I also got the feeling that it can be improved upon (even by just pouring in more variety) rather than ideas and the procedural generator itself being broken design flaws here, if that makes sense. Simplifying and streamlining, although in most cases it means worse game, still those aren't evil by default. So here I kind of like that HoBL is trying to be effective in what it does, and not promising nor forcing something what is not the main purpose. Even when it means just a few hours of blobber fun, in the end. But I dunno, we are on crpg forum here. :obviously:

Mustawd, perhaps you would want adjust some custom difficulty sliders. There are obvious heroes and monster stats numbers and xp rate adjustments. But I think I've increased Dungeons slider, which determines how fast on the tile-based distance from your city overall dungeon level increases. And also for the purpose of less encountering the same mix of monsters, I've toned down the Monster number (I think it influences no. of groups per dungeon -> faster dungeoneering and less kill xp, but can be compensated by moving overall xp rate up). However, I found myself not purifying near dungeons so the next lower level party I hire will have some starting training ground. So it depends what one prefers. Other than that the difficulty depends a lot on items, I've found them potentially veeeery powerful - so Treasure Rate and Item Quality sliders...
 

Mustawd

Guest
Mustawd, perhaps you would want adjust some custom difficulty sliders.

I actually had not paid that much attention to the sliders beyond the overall difficulty and world size. I like the fact that there's some customization available, and if all those options are there then it kind of helps some of the issues I mentioned.

But that in and of itself is part of the problem. There's not a manual included in the steam purchase that I can see, there's no real tutorial, and the interface can be very counter-intuitive. Most of the questions I had had to be answered by googling it or searching through the steam message boards. For example, books, which you would think would be accessible through your inventory, are for some reason accessed through the potion screen. Makes zero sense, and it speaks a bit to the limitations of a one man team. Something like 2-3 play testers with a few hours each would have identified all these issues very quickly.

However, I'm still having fun with it, and I can see myself coming back to play it in short bursts again and again. It's just unfortunate that it needs tweaking on my part to bring it close to something more enjoyable.
 

ushas

Savant
Joined
Jan 5, 2015
Messages
550
I actually had not paid that much attention to the sliders beyond the overall difficulty and world size. I like the fact that there's some customization available, and if all those options are there then it kind of helps some of the issues I mentioned.

Yeah, don't expect complete solution but it helped me.

But that in and of itself is part of the problem. There's not a manual included in the steam purchase that I can see, there's no real tutorial, and the interface can be very counter-intuitive.

Right, I don't see any official game manual, or so. There is some ingame info, though incomplete as you pointed out.

You most probably already know about this, but just in case somebody else will find it useful - the game mechanics are also explained in the guide made by Guillaume777:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/726774-heroes-of-a-broken-land/faqs/68943?single=1

WingedPixel, are you still gathering feedback / wishlists for HOBL2?
 

Mustawd

Guest
So just got done with three hours straight of playing this (woke up early and couldn't go back to sleep). Not sure if the gaming gods read this thread or what, but once it opened up a bit, this game got a lot harder and a lot more enjoyable. I've already had a party wipe, had to create a second party, had one of my buildings destroyed by invading enemies, and brought both parties back to my town in order to reshuffle them for optimization purposes. All in all a very good time!

Only thing that bugs me is the respawning of enemies in previously cleared dungeons. Or rather, I should say I "think" it bothers me because I appreciate the fact that there's a way to level up my newly created party. The respawned dungeons provide that. So i guess it's a necessary mechanic, but it still bugs me as I enjoy clearing dungeons and having them stay cleared.

Overall though, I'm really pleased. I hope it's not a matter of level scaling, but a lot of the monsters are now heavy hitters and resources have become scarce enough where I've had to leave the dungeon quite a few times to replenish my supplies.

Will report once I beat the map. so far I'm 5 hours in on the "tiny" generated map. But there's still plenty of content left. Maybe it'll take me 10 hours on my first play through.
 

ushas

Savant
Joined
Jan 5, 2015
Messages
550
Only thing that bugs me is the respawning of enemies in previously cleared dungeons. Or rather, I should say I "think" it bothers me because I appreciate the fact that there's a way to level up my newly created party. The respawned dungeons provide that. So i guess it's a necessary mechanic, but it still bugs me as I enjoy clearing dungeons and having them stay cleared.

Once you clear them you can clean them. Just click on the dungeon you finished and it will offer to purify the place for some price. I think it serves also some secondary purpose. Time to time monsters in disguise for a skeleton roam the land, and not cleared or purified dungeons may contribute to their numbers. But I'm totally unsure about this.

I also like how simple yet puzzleish the monsters' elemental strengths and weaknesses are. Damn those metal slimes.
 

worldsmith

Savant
Joined
Feb 1, 2015
Messages
107
I played this game a bit a while back.

I thought the dungeon controls and in-dungeon quick-travel made the actual dungeon crawling a pretty slick/streamlined experience. But once you stepped out of the dungeon and had to deal with loot management (especially once you start collecting 30K+ gold and you get the huge amounts of other loot that goes with that), the UI got so clunky I didn't want to deal with it. (IIRC that issue is why I stopped playing the game.)

The graphics didn't bother me at all. (Maybe the skeletons were a little too cute.)

The combat already beats the pants off the braindead combat of some other indie RPGs (e.g. Eschalon, Avadon), but that's not saying much - it would be good if combat were improved to make it more interesting (make the player actually have to stop and think more often). The resistances (and elemental attacks doing heals) and things like spirit rats are good things to have, but by themselves (at least as they were in HoBL) they are just something you learn once and then dealing with them becomes pretty much automatic after that.

I'm not sure what was up with the city diplomacy part. Doing a quest for one city would make them like me and a second city dislike me. Doing a quest for the second city would make them like me and the first dislike me. It seemed kind of pointless (and meant my access to different buildings was limited, at least at any given time).

The multi-party dungeons seemed a bit gamey to me - like they were placed there just for the sake of making multiple parties useful in one dungeon (which they were, but they shouldn't reek of that). Maybe if there were some lore explaining why they are like that it would help. (One thing that would really help is if the player had to discover that a dungeon requires a certain number of parties rather than being told - e.g., make all dungeons have multiple entrances, but in some dungeons all of those entrances connect, in some they don't. You could also have puzzles that require multiple parties even if all entrances are connected - e.g. one party has to stand on a pressure plate to let another party through somewhere else. And the game should let parties split while in a dungeon, even if doing so isn't a good idea.)

What I would really like is if the strategy level actually played like a strategy game - multiple kingdoms (one player, the rest AI), each using their own sets of adventurers to take over the land, probably with dungeon exploration not just yielding character XP+loot, but occasionally some kingdom-level benefit that will help in the greater conquest.
 
Last edited:

WingedPixel

Winged Pixel
Developer
Joined
Apr 27, 2013
Messages
84
Location
Toronto Ontario
Glad to hear you're enjoying the game!

I already have the basic features planned out or implemented, but I'm always in hearing what people think worked and didn't, so feel free to provide suggestions for a sequel.

The city diplomacy isn't well done. The fact that certain cities oppose other cities is only mentioned when you complete a quest for them. It also takes too many quests to win their favor. I originally wanted to have more at the strategy level but it was just too much and would have taken way too long, so it got cut. I probably won't have much or any strategic gameplay in the sequel, it just spreads my time too thin.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Glad to hear you're enjoying the game!

I already have the basic features planned out or implemented, but I'm always in hearing what people think worked and didn't, so feel free to provide suggestions for a sequel.

The city diplomacy isn't well done. The fact that certain cities oppose other cities is only mentioned when you complete a quest for them. It also takes too many quests to win their favor. I originally wanted to have more at the strategy level but it was just too much and would have taken way too long, so it got cut. I probably won't have much or any strategic gameplay in the sequel, it just spreads my time too thin.


Thanks for dropping by. I'll give my final impressions when I'm done with beating the "tiny" world.


Also, can someone tell me what this is? I've run into it a few times, but I have no idea what it's supposed to be:

brain_zpsdkzzwd6q.png
 

Mustawd

Guest
Hmm...what's weird is that I couldn't select it or anything. It just stayed there. Even if I walked on the tile itself. Strange.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Ok, I think this is a bug, WingedPixel because sometimes I can't pick up the items (Like the stone thing, and the fire thing, and the crystal thing) and sometimes I can. Gonna keep playing, but just thought I'd report. Seems I've been missing a ton of stat upgrades...
 

WingedPixel

Winged Pixel
Developer
Joined
Apr 27, 2013
Messages
84
Location
Toronto Ontario
Ok, that's strange I don't think anyone has reported that issue. Maybe they're just too far away and it looks like you can click on it? You can also hit space/wait to collect anything on your current tile.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Ok, that's strange I don't think anyone has reported that issue. Maybe they're just too far away and it looks like you can click on it?

Nah, I mean I'll click on it when I'm right in front. I even go and stand on it...click on it..nothing happens. Anyway, let me know if there is a way for me to get a log file or something to you.

You can also hit space/wait to collect anything on your current tile.

Nice. Didn't know that.


Anyway, got to a point where I destroyed the 4 pillars. Thought game was over, but apparently there is one final stage. I go to click on it "3 parties required"

:x


Ugh...I don't recall this being told to me anywhere. Now I have to level a third party? Screw that. I'm gonna come back to it later, but that felt unfair IMO. And to be honest, the repetitiveness of these dungeons is killing me. Which is why I wanted it to be over lol. Oh well. I'll take a few days break and come back to it I suppose.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Lol. Touche.

I still need to beat this on a larger world, as I'm still playing on a "tiny" world. There's a lot more functionality and classes that I just haven't explored in the smaller scenario. I have a love/hate relationship with this game right now. I like a lot of it, but loathe the repetitiveness. So I can't play long stretches of it. At most I can squeak in an hour before wanting to slit my wrists.
 

Gunnar

Arbiter
Joined
Jul 10, 2016
Messages
819
Anyway, got to a point where I destroyed the 4 pillars. Thought game was over, but apparently there is one final stage. I go to click on it "3 parties required"

:x


Ugh...I don't recall this being told to me anywhere. Now I have to level a third party? Screw that. I'm gonna come back to it later, but that felt unfair IMO. And to be honest, the repetitiveness of these dungeons is killing me. Which is why I wanted it to be over lol. Oh well. I'll take a few days break and come back to it I suppose.

It isn't the final stage, you are going to need 4 parties to beat the game. (Imagine my surprise...) For me, that meant 8 fighters, 8 mages, 4 clerics and 4 thieves... A couple tips that help to make it more bearable:

You can customize the name and appearance of the characters. Color code the classes and name them for their class. This will make it easier to tell what you have at a glance when putting together your parties. When you are learning spells, try to learn them in the same order for everyone. Your spell list can't be re-ordered and it's annoying looking for the same spells in a bunch of different spell lists as you switch parties.

The tedium got to me as well when I played and I was glad when I finally beat it. Can't imagine playing this game on the larger worlds, it would take forever. That said, I really liked the idea of a strategic layer on top of the blobber gameplay, I feel like the game falls just short of greatness, which is too bad.

WingedPixel I'll definitely be checking out the sequel, glad to hear its in the works.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Where does the love part come in?

-Randomized dungeons are very well done. Biggest downfall is lack of enemy variety
-Tactical layer akin to HoMM is nice, and with a variety of objectives. Just lacks depth and urgency. However, it does have a main town building aspect to it which is interesting, if shallow.
-There seem to be a variety of classes. For example, I've just discovered the "Sorcerer" class, which I'm not sure how that differs from a Mage. But by looking at stats it kinda looks like a melee/magic user. (aka battle mage vs glass cannon). But i'm not 100% sure yet.
-Variety of spells and skills
-Variety of equipment


The biggest issue is that the procedural aspects seem to fall flat because there is not enough variety to choose from. So you tend to see the same thing over and over. So TL;DR, there are a lot of good ideas in here, but not necessarily the best execution or the polish needed to bring them home. However, there is still fun to be had. It just isn't sustainable, unfortunately.
 

Dorateen

Arcane
Joined
Aug 30, 2012
Messages
4,332
Location
The Crystal Mist Mountains
You can customize the name and appearance of the characters.

Can you confirm this is the case, or is this a suggestion for what would make the game better?

I wanted to fully support this project and the developer. There are a lot of design approaches I agree with on principle. But when I tried the demo some time back, I was disappointed to be confronted with of pool of random pre-generated party members who I have no connection to.

Now give me the option to customize these characters, and I’ll have a field day. I revere party roster management in computer role-playing games. Let me create the heroes, and I will nurture 4 different parties, no problem.
 

Agesilaus

Antiquity Studio
Patron
Developer
Joined
Aug 24, 2013
Messages
4,456
Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Death to the blobbers. Purge the inferior visual perspective.
 

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