KickStarter Prometheus Wept - turn-based RPG from Vigilantes developer - Demo Available

[just]

limes dont grow on ancient celtic lands

 

[Modron]

limes dont grow on ancient celtic lands

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_(material)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limewater

Just in case you're not joking.

 

[Timeslip]

Noooooooo you can't have a portrait for a character we don't know about that has the wrong kind of hair. This is just like when the Jewish globohomos try to make me get vaccinated.

It's not about the wrong kind of hair, it's just every other game dropping that kind of shit to please the woketards.
It didn't bother me back in the days in Shadowrun P&P because of the settings and the rarity.

Nowadays, there's 10000 times more lesbians with mohawk haircuts in series, movies and video games than I've crossed path with.
It's just fucking tiring.

Hey Darth Canoli. That's a portrait for a generic enemy, who has a few lines of dialogue. I don't know what her sexual preferences are. Haven't thought about it and won't have time to. It's unlikely character's romatic/sexual preferences will be developed much in the game. There are more interesting veins to mine and, so it makes more sense to let the player decide what happens between the scenes.

I think there's increased sensitivity in this area. X is too "woke", Y lacks diversity. I'm a fan of the middle ground: equally as wary of groups deciding to enforce diversity as "oh no, she looks like she might be a lesbian, go woke, go broke etc"

#hairgate

 

[Timeslip]

Timeslip are there any updates to combat mechanics (not counting hacking), specifically to make them deeper? I've never been a fan of sticky cover systems but I thought it was done suitably well enough in the first game to be ignored since the other aspects like item diversity and wound effects were captivating enough. However, the repetitiveness of combat really started to wear me down towards the last few levels. You know how it is with NuXCOM-likes. It becomes very much more of the same after some time.

Hey udm. Combat repetitiveness is one of the main things I'm going to work on. More gameplay variety heavy will help - you won't just be going from fight to fight. Like in the most recent mission, you'll have to search for clues to narrow down the search area for a missing person.

In terms of improving the combat depth, here's a couple of things that come to mind:

1. Unique ally perks: Each ally will have between 4-8 unique perks, which will substantially change how they play. For example, Ferdia Beckett can manipulate the nervous system of organic beings, distracting them so allies can escape an attack of opportunity, causing fear. I haven't implemented his later abilities yet, but they may include causing enemies to suffocate, temporarily controlling enemies. He's not going to be much good against non organics though.
2. Deeper status effects: There will be more status effects and some will be exploitable. Things like characters who are standing in smoke being more vulnerable to Suffocating, or characters who are bleeding being more vulnerable to Beckett's fear abilities. Another example, if you bandage more than once between combats, you become mummified, which increases the damage from fire.
3. Better item diversity: In vigilantes, weapons were largely rendered obsolete by higher tier weapons. For Prometheus Wept, the weapons will be different, rather than objectively better/worse than one another and with the exception of the early game, junk tier weapons, will all be upgradable and viable for the entire game.
4. More environment Interactions: Destructible cover, and interactions between fire, water, and electricity. Water slows movement, extinguishes fire, but amplifies energy damage.

 

[Timeslip]

Noooooooo you can't have a portrait for a character we don't know about that has the wrong kind of hair. This is just like when the Jewish globohomos try to make me get vaccinated.

It's not about the wrong kind of hair, it's just every other game dropping that kind of shit to please the woketards.
It didn't bother me back in the days in Shadowrun P&P because of the settings and the rarity.

Nowadays, there's 10000 times more lesbians with mohawk haircuts in series, movies and video games than I've crossed path with.
It's just fucking tiring.

I just realised a mohawk is probably hard to maintain in a post apoc environment, so how does it even stay there?

Grease isn't exactly high-tech product.

Yep, and animal fat was used in the days of the Roman Empire as proto hair gel.

#hairgate

 

[Timeslip]

Hi again!

So far, I've added most of the weapons, perks and items required for an updated demo. This means about 10 additional weapons and 15 perks. I've added quite a few crafting options and am in the process of finishing off the crafting system at present.

For melee weapons, I've added some unique properties, for example a night stick provides a defensive bonus, and the cleaver does additional damage to animals.

In Vigilantes, there were weapon tiers, and typically this meant there were 1-2 optimal choices at any given point for each weapon class. In Prometheus Wept, I'm aiming to make all weapons (except the very early ones) viable throughout the entire game through different quality levels of each weapon, and for each weapon to offer something different in terms of stats, or unique properties.

 

[Infinitron]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1208110/view/3392926548057365555

Prometheus Wept Dev Log Sep to Oct 22: New weapons, perks, shopkeeper, crafting

Hi again-

I've just completed the work for the current update. The focus has been on content, wrapping up the crafting system and adding shopkeepers. Feel free to check out the video / text info on the update, and do let me know if you have any feedback or comments.

Content: Weapons, Crafting Recipes & Perks

Eight weapons, around 30 crafting recipes and 15 perks have been added to the game, which more or less completes the content required for the updated demo.

My last game, Vigilantes had weapon tiers, and each new tier largely rendered the previous tier obsolete, or at least sub-optimal. This resulted in there being a handful of optimal weapon choices at any time. For Prometheus Wept, I'm aiming to make nearly all weapons viable for the entire game, and for weapons to have unique traits to differentiate them from one another.

The cleaver provides greater bleeding damage, and additional damage against animals.

Baseball bats do high damage, and additional damage when targetting an enemy's head.

A scattering of perks have been added to the game, and the perk UI has been updated. Where possible, I've made perks more deterministic, so for example, rather than a 20% chance of a free attack, every 6th attack costs no action points.

Systems: Shopkeepers & Crafting
If you played Vigilantes, you may remember that there's a single, off-map shopkeeper in the game. Prometheus Wept requires multiple on-map shopkeepers, so I've added code to support this, to start the trade interaction, along with saving, loading and managing shopkeeper inventories. In Vigilantes, there were separate buy and sell screens for the shop and merged the old buy/sell interface into a single screen.

I've also worked on crafting system, improving the display of information and adding the ability to upgrade weapons and armour, after they have been crafted. Some layout and visual adjustments aside, this wraps up one of the more complex systems in the game.

The main parts of work to be completed for an updated demo are balancing and testing, which I'll start working on next. I'll keep you posted on progress, and if you have any questions or feedback, let me know!

All the best,

Daithi

 

[Nortar]

As weapons remain relevant throughout the game and crafting is modular, is it possible to replace/upgrade weapon parts with better components?
Can I take my starting "Gun of Theseus" from rusty scrapmetal peashooter to bfg made of shiny badassium parts?

 

[Timeslip]

Hey Nortar - Most of the code for deconstructing weapons is in place, but not everything in terms of how it will be handled is finalised.

The starting basic weapons in the game: Pipe pistol, shotgun, rifle, shiv and pipe do get stat bonuses from better quality components, but additional upgrades can't be applied. All other ranged, melee, armour benefit from metal quality and/or component quality, and can have their stats further boosted with upgrades.

Current thinking: I'd like to make it so characters who don't invest heavily in crafting skills can interact with the system. Assembling components into an item has a considerably lower skill requirement than actually creating the components. This means non crafters can kill someone with a nice weapon, break it down, and make something different, but crafters will be able to make components at will. It's likely you'll be able to deconstruct components into their metal, and remake them as something else.

Players who invest in crafting will need to get benefit for this, so there will probably be extra bonuses, like less loss of metal when deconstructing components into metal. I considered a chance to downgrade component quality on disassembly based on skill, but think this would be frustrating / or lead to save scumming.

Any thoughts on this?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Players who invest in crafting will need to get benefit for this, so there will probably be extra bonuses, like less loss of metal when deconstructing components into metal. I considered a chance to downgrade component quality on disassembly based on skill, but think this would be frustrating / or lead to save scumming.

Just do what AoD does, which isn't far from your own ideas- better craftsman get better conversion ratio of material and can add more boni to equipment.

 

[Nortar]

Current thinking: I'd like to make it so characters who don't invest heavily in crafting skills can interact with the system. Assembling components into an item has a considerably lower skill requirement than actually creating the components. This means non crafters can kill someone with a nice weapon, break it down, and make something different, but crafters will be able to make components at will. It's likely you'll be able to deconstruct components into their metal, and remake them as something else.

This is what I meant.
Say I looted a gun with better barrel, but worse handle then the gun my character wields.
Can I just take that barrel and install it onto my current gun, without need to craft all the parts and all that busywork?
Or do I have to break down both guns and reasemble their parts in any way I want?

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Current thinking: I'd like to make it so characters who don't invest heavily in crafting skills can interact with the system. Assembling components into an item has a considerably lower skill requirement than actually creating the components. This means non crafters can kill someone with a nice weapon, break it down, and make something different, but crafters will be able to make components at will. It's likely you'll be able to deconstruct components into their metal, and remake them as something else.

This is what I meant.
Say I looted a gun with better barrel, but worse handle then the gun my character wields.
Can I just take that barrel and install it onto my current gun, without need to craft all the parts and all that busywork?
Or do I have to break down both guns and reasemble their parts in any way I want?

 

[Nutria]

I'd like to make it so characters who don't invest heavily in crafting skills can interact with the system. Assembling components into an item has a considerably lower skill requirement than actually creating the components. This means non crafters can kill someone with a nice weapon, break it down, and make something different, but crafters will be able to make components at will. It's likely you'll be able to deconstruct components into their metal, and remake them as something else.

I tend to favor this. Because I'm not going to get really into crafting in your game, but I'll be mildly annoyed if I keep getting crafting-related loot and I can never use it.

 

[Timeslip]

This is what I meant.
Say I looted a gun with better barrel, but worse handle then the gun my character wields.
Can I just take that barrel and install it onto my current gun, without need to craft all the parts and all that busywork?
Or do I have to break down both guns and reasemble their parts in any way I want?

It's not possible to remove a single component from a weapon - you have to break down both guns, then build a new gun with the parts you want.

I'm trying to minimise busy work, and will be looking into ways to make the process easier. A "use best parts" button would remove a lot of the clicking.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

This is what I meant.
Say I looted a gun with better barrel, but worse handle then the gun my character wields.
Can I just take that barrel and install it onto my current gun, without need to craft all the parts and all that busywork?
Or do I have to break down both guns and reasemble their parts in any way I want?

It's not possible to remove a single component from a weapon - you have to break down both guns, then build a new gun with the parts you want.

I'm trying to minimise busy work, and will be looking into ways to make the process easier. A "use best parts" button would remove a lot of the clicking.

Inb4 you fix the bug where someone creates a Desert Eagle with a revolver magazine.

 

[Timeslip]

I'd like to make it so characters who don't invest heavily in crafting skills can interact with the system. Assembling components into an item has a considerably lower skill requirement than actually creating the components. This means non crafters can kill someone with a nice weapon, break it down, and make something different, but crafters will be able to make components at will. It's likely you'll be able to deconstruct components into their metal, and remake them as something else.

I tend to favor this. Because I'm not going to get really into crafting in your game, but I'll be mildly annoyed if I keep getting crafting-related loot and I can never use it.

I tend to go for crafting skills when available, but get that it's not everyone's preference - this route seems a decent compromise.

 

[Timeslip]

ERYFKRAD - that loophole has already been addressed. Ammo capacity of revolvers / double barrel shotguns can't be increased, but they get other bonuses. Sorry to disappoint

 

[ERYFKRAD]

ERYFKRAD - that loophole has already been addressed. Ammo capacity of revolvers / double barrel shotguns can't be increased, but they get other bonuses. Sorry to disappoint

Is ok, Marksmanship is my dump stat

 

[Infinitron]

A new demo of post digital turn based RPG, Prometheus Wept, is now available!

 

[Timeslip]

Here's a link to the demo: https://www.indiedb.com/games/prometheuswept/downloads

The plan is to take any feedback from this provisional demo, to improve the release for the Steam Festival next week. Had hoped to have more time for feedback, but it is what it is. Hoping to get some more music in there before release if possible. The main questline stuff is fairly polished, but there's not a whole lot to do outside it. Here's a couple of images:

Here's the updated map for act 1.​

The player team, equipped with crafted armour and weapons.​

The blue coated figure seems linked to the missing persons in Sunny Pines. Be they friend or foe.​

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

I liked the painted look of the world map.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

I see that "prone character moving"-bug is still in.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

I've played new demo for some time.
Some bugs I've noticed in spoilers.

spoilers

1. On combat encounter where player meets "preacher", shed scene activates mid combat when player approaches it, might cause softlock if option for automatic turn ending is turned off.

2.On firemen- and washing machine maps NPC who isn't in party comments something which is about earlier scene.

3.When you return to main town starting scene plays again when you go to entrance and game takes you to first mission with "preacher". No picture of that one.
4.Another picture of "prone main char moving".

 

[Timeslip]

Hey Taka-Haradin puolipeikko - this is great, really appreciate your help.

I've fixed 1, 2 & 3.

I was unable to recreate the laying down bug the last time I tried, but will try again. Can you tell me anything more about how to recreate, can you notice a pattern, or send me a log if it happens again?

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Hey Taka-Haradin puolipeikko - this is great, really appreciate your help.

I've fixed 1, 2 & 3.

I was unable to recreate the laying down bug the last time I tried, but will try again. Can you tell me anything more about how to recreate, can you notice a pattern, or send me a log if it happens again?

*shrugs*
All times that I've seen it has been when main character went down in wolf lady fight on 1st mission. Picture is after MC going down against sniper lady.
I could still move on map and use his skills on interractable objects and dialogues, but he doesn't spawn into fights and using medicinal items that regen hp don't get him upright.

edit.
One more bug: I was incapable to craft weapons, because crafting screen doesn't seem to register various handles and blades/barrels etc. on inventory.