I used to play some RTS many years ago, it is funny feeling, all those muscle memory hotkeys working, lol. By the way, normal browser build didn't work on me, clicked stable version and it worked. Interesting concept, a bit slow (maybe it worked bad on my browser). On second reality my troops got divided between hordes of new enemies, I couldn't unite them and lost my hero when he was acting strange and going straight to the enemy castle, while his army were retreating correctly. Also I don't get if it was a bug, or intentional, but first summoning circles like kinda over time stopped spawning ranged ones, and on second land it soon were building only one type of units (terminator-likes).
first summoning circles like kinda over time stopped spawning ranged ones, and on second land it soon were building only one type of units
Normally, any given Circle just makes 1 unit, togglable between choice of 2. While the King is present on a (fully attuned) Coven, those Coven’s Circles will produce both choices at once. Needs more visuals…
a bit slow (maybe it worked bad on my browser)
Stable version’s slightly sluggish in browser, and game feels slow in general to RTS veterans! Fortunately we got configurable game speed in native version.
I'm not an RTS player, but it's pretty entertaining. Some units are very overpowered (like the green pixie in the easy map), but I assume that's part of the puzzle - trying to figure out how to overcome the enemy and not just make a murderball and throw it at the enemies.
The UI is readable, and surprisingly enough the music fits. Again, I can't rate it against other RTS since I'm not much of an RTS player, but it was an enjoyable experience. I like it, and the goofy mix of different kinds of sprites grows on you.
Can't exactly say that a witch king ordering a bunch of murderbots around is not entertaining!
I was watching the stream – t’was unlucky with the RNG, but for being quite clueless on RTS you managed the game well enough. It was good to see. Ty for playing & stream in general, it was cool
Firefox 123.0.1 on windows 10. May not be a surprise to you but just in case. Works in Chrome. Takes quite a long time to cache 200MB of assets, that seems like a lot! Is it from multiple music tracks?
Looks like the experience is better on the d/l version so I'll switch to that, just wanted to see the web version load.
It's a little confusing that there's a hvc.exe and a LaunchHyperCoven.exe. I opened hvc.exe which I guess just defaults to some scenario. It seems like you would want players to always go through the launcher rather than opening hvc without the launcher and getting a default. Perhaps the itch.io app could default to the launcher or hvc.exe could be hidden away.
In the tutorial text: "Smaller ********* hold artifacts..." the ******** is blocked by rubble. I assume it says "fortifications".
That's really weird that I can use backspace to toggle between a tutorial and a game.
Bro I got completely wrecked in my first game, I didn't even get to leave my first coven spiders and shit came and killed me here lol??
You should choose a more normal way to start new games rather than alt+r, that opens my nvidia performance panel and consumes that keypress.
If the idea is that I have no time limit, then why not give me everything immediately?
It should be more obvious where the edge of the map is.
What does the yellow bar in the spawn circle mean? Seems meaningless? Edit: it seems to mean something only when I'm converting the stuff to a coven? And after that it's just for show and doesn't line up with what's going on.
Some of my units have having trouble pathfinding around forests.
Is it expected that the golems refuse to move?
Just now I gave an attack command to many troops and only some obeyed it. Then I selected the ones that didn't obey it and gave it again, some more obeyed but a few didn't.
The select all won't select all the ones I want to now. Maybe because there's too many? No.. there's some other bug going on. I think it's got worse as I get further into my playthrough. Small numbers of troops won't all select at once.
Ok! I rule the universe on easy mode! That was pretty fun.
Thank you for the notes, I’ll be sure to fix all the small stuff!
It's a little confusing that there's a hvc.exe and a LaunchHyperCoven.exe. I opened hvc.exe
I will blame this on the fact that you’re a dev! Normal people would never opt for the cryptic three letter exe?! Really, I just renamed these files because everybody missed the launcher… and now this.)
What does the yellow bar in the spawn circle mean? Seems meaningless?
It should align with that specific Circle next spawning a unit. Or do you mean the yellow bar on the King? It just stays at 100% when on a fully captured Coven, yes. I think I will just hide it…
Is it expected that the golems refuse to move?
No. But they have a pretty large collision box. Maybe that was the issue?
The select all won't select all the ones I want to now. Maybe because there's too many? No.. there's some other bug going on. I think it's got worse as I get further into my playthrough. Small numbers of troops won't all select at once.
Very odd… there is a general limit of how many units can be selected: 48. (Bottom bar will be full.) That wasn’t the issue, was it? With "select all" do you mean drawing a rectangle around units, or do you mean doubleclicking a unit?
Takes quite a long time to cache 200MB of assets, that seems like a lot! Is it from multiple music tracks?
The web version is actually limited to just 1 track, to save space… A bunch of units’ spritesheets are very heavyweight, e.g. Golem or Spider. A single one easily amounts to 200+MB alone when fully uncompressed. Web version uses very expensive compression to keep the whole bundle within itch’ limits.
What does the yellow bar in the spawn circle mean? Seems meaningless?
It should align with that specific Circle next spawning a unit.
So sometimes that coven would be at the max spawn but the yellow bar would keep scrolling.
Is it expected that the golems refuse to move?
No. But they have a pretty large collision box. Maybe that was the issue?
ok yeah they got stuck between their spawn circles and a ledge.
Very odd… there is a general limit of how many units can be selected: 48. (Bottom bar will be full.) That wasn’t the issue, was it? With "select all" do you mean drawing a rectangle around units, or do you mean doubleclicking a unit?
Sometimes it was with a small number of units and would still happen. I think I saw it repro with double click and drawing.
A bunch of units’ spritesheets are very heavyweight, e.g. Golem or Spider. A single one easily amounts to 200+MB alone when fully uncompressed.
dang that's wild, low-poly low-res 3d is so small in comparison
Sometimes it was with a small number of units and would still happen. I think I saw it repro with double click and drawing.
Finally figured this, funny issue, the unit partially inherits character of "being an artifact" from an exhausted (destroyed) artifact, because specifically the cache keeping artifacts-per-coven was not cleaned up. So, like Artifacts, the unit then can not be included in group-selections. Issue did not come up before last week, because Artifacts used to have 5000 HP and not be consumed. Anyhow this caching was always near-useless and waiting to introduce bugs, guess I will get rid of it altogether.
So sometimes that coven would be at the max spawn but the yellow bar would keep scrolling.
The spawn progress goes on. If you managed to lose a unit in time and no longer be at max spawn when bar is full, the spawn would happen.
Neat game, I like how it's simple enough (I chose an easy coven) that I can play it without reading any of the abilities. Volume select in the tutorial was neat but I think it lacks the precision you really want from volume controls. I also don't know when I've captured a coven, other than checking it directly. Maybe it should change colour?
I played this for about an hour and it was really fun. I was a little confused at first, but once I figured out I could click on the spawn circles, it all clicked. I felt myself falling into my old AOE2 hotkey habits, which was really nice.
Here some comments feedback:
- I liked the graphics. I know people will cry about the typical things but I think it's kind of charming, and sells the feeling of a summoning tons of weird shit.
- It's hard to tell what makes a unit special, so I feel like I'm doing what I did in AOE2 as a kid, which is make big balls of templar knights and march them all over the map. When I played AOE2 as an adult, this was a whole lot less fun, and I wanted to be doing more tactical things like false charges, getting the high ground, flanking etc. That's hard to do when I'm limited to 2 units.
I think expanding the coven size to 3 units types would help. Also giving units activated abilites would help a ton to make them feel unique
- Loved the music. IDK if you made it yourself, but it's all a solid 8/10. I would look up at least one of the tracks on youtube to listen to again.
- It wouldn't hurt to speed everything up by 2x. At least right now, I didn't feel like I needed to micromanage anything that badly, so there was time where I just stood around waiting.
- This goes into my next comment, which is I kind of miss managing resources. I do feel most RTS go overboard with it, but just something to keep the summoning circles wouldn't be horrible. Soul chunks or something like that.
- Pretty obvious but multiplayer would be pretty awesome. This would be super cool as a drop in .io game style thing, where people constantly are taking or losing covens.
Anyways, that's all I can think of right now. It was really good, I hope you keep working on it!
I see, you also missed the launcher. (Or played in browser?) It is mostly all there: Multiplayer, game speed adjustment ("sloth") and the option to pick a more complex (difficult) coven. I recommend Pumpkins or Dropship&Mech. Naturally I have more involved designs in mind, only they need yet to be implemented…
Loved the music. IDK if you made it yourself, but it's all a solid 8/10. I would look up at least one of the tracks on youtube to listen to again.
The King has the ability "Deplete 1" which sacrifices 1 Circle in exchange for a temporary boost in production. This is the current idea of an exhaustible resource in the game. Your comment reminded me – very early I had a similar idea for that which has now become Artifacts: It was supposed to be like a "stockpile of weapons" that would hence be consumed after some amount of troops made with it. Adding that to the game now, so boosted troops are in limited supply and feel more precious.
Pretty cool game. I played for about an hour and a half and I had fun. I appreciate that the tutorial wasn't a text dump, and I'm sure I would be completely lost without it. But the tutorial text hidden behind fog of war was annoying, I would need a unit right on top of it to be able to read it since it would go dark without one, but then the units would cover bits of the tutorial (same goes for buildings) , or I would be able to partially read the tutorial text and would need to send units to make it readable. Maybe make the whole thing appear when you reveal a bit of it. I only got as far as the first section of the campaign, but seeing the borders grow when I beat the last section felt very demotivating (Might just be a me thing to be honest since I hate roguelikes/roguelites so disregard this bit if you feel strongly about it). I'm assuming the maps are procedurally generated for infinite gameplay? I built a few buildings but have no idea what the stat increases do, maybe a tooltip or something might be helpful. An auto exploring unit might help as well, exploring felt really tedious especially with all the tree's & lakes that can spawn and the relatively low health of the starting units (On further playthroughs I see that the units you start with also appear to be random so I guess its just the units I got weren't great for it?). There's a mention of game speed in the web version so I downloaded the standalone but I can't seem to find such a setting in game. I like variety of units but I feel a lack of cohesion in them, maybe if the tiles they spawn on and their spawning circles matched the theme of the units or something the game world would feel a lot more alive. I feel like a lot of my gripes come from a lack of understanding of the in-depth gameplay elements. Something like a hand built campaign mode that can teach the players about the intricate mechanics bit by bit would help a lot. Individually the sprites, textures, look great but some of them don't mix well together or feel really out of place if you lets say started with skeletons and then you got a car or something next. I know I mostly just complained but I did have fun, and that's the most important thing. The game itself is fun, if there was a way to introduce players to maybe some strategy and understanding of more mechanics I could have fun for a whole lot longer. Keep up the good work, hope to see you next DD as well.
Heyo, thank you for playing! Appreciate all the input.
(On further playthroughs I see that the units you start with also appear to be random so I guess its just the units I got weren't great for it?). There's a mention of game speed in the web version so I downloaded the standalone but I can't seem to find such a setting in game.
You need to run launcher.exe instead of hypercoven.exe, then you can select your starting units as well as game speed ("sloth") and more.
I like variety of units but I feel a lack of cohesion in them, maybe if the tiles they spawn on and their spawning circles matched the theme of the units or something the game world would feel a lot more alive.
Oh, you remind me… this was my initial idea, having matching houses for each pair of units. Until I came across the Summoning Circle sprite and thought, well, screw it, this will do for all and save so much work.
I built a few buildings but have no idea what the stat increases do, maybe a tooltip or something might be helpful. … I feel like a lot of my gripes come from a lack of understanding of the in-depth gameplay elements.
Yeah, I am still unsure how to best do it. I want the details to be a bit mysterious, but that should be intriguing, not frustrating.
Comments
I used to play some RTS many years ago, it is funny feeling, all those muscle memory hotkeys working, lol.
By the way, normal browser build didn't work on me, clicked stable version and it worked.
Interesting concept, a bit slow (maybe it worked bad on my browser). On second reality my troops got divided between hordes of new enemies, I couldn't unite them and lost my hero when he was acting strange and going straight to the enemy castle, while his army were retreating correctly. Also I don't get if it was a bug, or intentional, but first summoning circles like kinda over time stopped spawning ranged ones, and on second land it soon were building only one type of units (terminator-likes).
:D
Normally, any given Circle just makes 1 unit, togglable between choice of 2. While the King is present on a (fully attuned) Coven, those Coven’s Circles will produce both choices at once. Needs more visuals…
Stable version’s slightly sluggish in browser, and game feels slow in general to RTS veterans! Fortunately we got configurable game speed in native version.
Ty for playing and feedback!
I'm not an RTS player, but it's pretty entertaining. Some units are very overpowered (like the green pixie in the easy map), but I assume that's part of the puzzle - trying to figure out how to overcome the enemy and not just make a murderball and throw it at the enemies.
The UI is readable, and surprisingly enough the music fits. Again, I can't rate it against other RTS since I'm not much of an RTS player, but it was an enjoyable experience. I like it, and the goofy mix of different kinds of sprites grows on you.
Can't exactly say that a witch king ordering a bunch of murderbots around is not entertaining!
I was watching the stream – t’was unlucky with the RNG, but for being quite clueless on RTS you managed the game well enough. It was good to see. Ty for playing & stream in general, it was cool
"WebGPU not yet supported in your browser"
Firefox 123.0.1 on windows 10. May not be a surprise to you but just in case. Works in Chrome. Takes quite a long time to cache 200MB of assets, that seems like a lot! Is it from multiple music tracks?
Looks like the experience is better on the d/l version so I'll switch to that, just wanted to see the web version load.
It's a little confusing that there's a hvc.exe and a LaunchHyperCoven.exe. I opened hvc.exe which I guess just defaults to some scenario. It seems like you would want players to always go through the launcher rather than opening hvc without the launcher and getting a default. Perhaps the itch.io app could default to the launcher or hvc.exe could be hidden away.
In the tutorial text: "Smaller ********* hold artifacts..." the ******** is blocked by rubble. I assume it says "fortifications".
That's really weird that I can use backspace to toggle between a tutorial and a game.
Bro I got completely wrecked in my first game, I didn't even get to leave my first coven spiders and shit came and killed me here lol??
You should choose a more normal way to start new games rather than alt+r, that opens my nvidia performance panel and consumes that keypress.
If the idea is that I have no time limit, then why not give me everything immediately?
It should be more obvious where the edge of the map is.
What does the yellow bar in the spawn circle mean? Seems meaningless? Edit: it seems to mean something only when I'm converting the stuff to a coven? And after that it's just for show and doesn't line up with what's going on.
Some of my units have having trouble pathfinding around forests.
Is it expected that the golems refuse to move?
Just now I gave an attack command to many troops and only some obeyed it. Then I selected the ones that didn't obey it and gave it again, some more obeyed but a few didn't.
The select all won't select all the ones I want to now. Maybe because there's too many? No.. there's some other bug going on. I think it's got worse as I get further into my playthrough. Small numbers of troops won't all select at once.
Ok! I rule the universe on easy mode! That was pretty fun.
Thank you for the notes, I’ll be sure to fix all the small stuff!
I will blame this on the fact that you’re a dev! Normal people would never opt for the cryptic three letter exe?! Really, I just renamed these files because everybody missed the launcher… and now this.)
It should align with that specific Circle next spawning a unit. Or do you mean the yellow bar on the King? It just stays at 100% when on a fully captured Coven, yes. I think I will just hide it…
No. But they have a pretty large collision box. Maybe that was the issue?
Very odd… there is a general limit of how many units can be selected: 48. (Bottom bar will be full.) That wasn’t the issue, was it? With "select all" do you mean drawing a rectangle around units, or do you mean doubleclicking a unit?
The web version is actually limited to just 1 track, to save space… A bunch of units’ spritesheets are very heavyweight, e.g. Golem or Spider. A single one easily amounts to 200+MB alone when fully uncompressed. Web version uses very expensive compression to keep the whole bundle within itch’ limits.
So sometimes that coven would be at the max spawn but the yellow bar would keep scrolling.
ok yeah they got stuck between their spawn circles and a ledge.
Sometimes it was with a small number of units and would still happen. I think I saw it repro with double click and drawing.
dang that's wild, low-poly low-res 3d is so small in comparison
Finally figured this, funny issue, the unit partially inherits character of "being an artifact" from an exhausted (destroyed) artifact, because specifically the cache keeping artifacts-per-coven was not cleaned up. So, like Artifacts, the unit then can not be included in group-selections. Issue did not come up before last week, because Artifacts used to have 5000 HP and not be consumed. Anyhow this caching was always near-useless and waiting to introduce bugs, guess I will get rid of it altogether.
The spawn progress goes on. If you managed to lose a unit in time and no longer be at max spawn when bar is full, the spawn would happen.
That makes sense as to why it only started happening later, good find.
Ah I see. I wonder if there's a way to communicate that to the player. Like "Readying spawn" "No room" "Spawn successful" text by the bar.
Neat game, I like how it's simple enough (I chose an easy coven) that I can play it without reading any of the abilities. Volume select in the tutorial was neat but I think it lacks the precision you really want from volume controls. I also don't know when I've captured a coven, other than checking it directly. Maybe it should change colour?
Music is pretty solid. Game is fun overall.
Thanks for the feedback
Good idea!
I played this for about an hour and it was really fun. I was a little confused at first, but once I figured out I could click on the spawn circles, it all clicked. I felt myself falling into my old AOE2 hotkey habits, which was really nice.
Here some comments feedback:
- I liked the graphics. I know people will cry about the typical things but I think it's kind of charming, and sells the feeling of a summoning tons of weird shit.
- It's hard to tell what makes a unit special, so I feel like I'm doing what I did in AOE2 as a kid, which is make big balls of templar knights and march them all over the map. When I played AOE2 as an adult, this was a whole lot less fun, and I wanted to be doing more tactical things like false charges, getting the high ground, flanking etc. That's hard to do when I'm limited to 2 units.
I think expanding the coven size to 3 units types would help. Also giving units activated abilites would help a ton to make them feel unique
- Loved the music. IDK if you made it yourself, but it's all a solid 8/10. I would look up at least one of the tracks on youtube to listen to again.
- It wouldn't hurt to speed everything up by 2x. At least right now, I didn't feel like I needed to micromanage anything that badly, so there was time where I just stood around waiting.
- This goes into my next comment, which is I kind of miss managing resources. I do feel most RTS go overboard with it, but just something to keep the summoning circles wouldn't be horrible. Soul chunks or something like that.
- Pretty obvious but multiplayer would be pretty awesome. This would be super cool as a drop in .io game style thing, where people constantly are taking or losing covens.
Anyways, that's all I can think of right now. It was really good, I hope you keep working on it!
I see, you also missed the launcher. (Or played in browser?) It is mostly all there: Multiplayer, game speed adjustment ("sloth") and the option to pick a more complex (difficult) coven. I recommend Pumpkins or Dropship&Mech. Naturally I have more involved designs in mind, only they need yet to be implemented…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIAfb1umTvo
The King has the ability "Deplete 1" which sacrifices 1 Circle in exchange for a temporary boost in production. This is the current idea of an exhaustible resource in the game. Your comment reminded me – very early I had a similar idea for that which has now become Artifacts: It was supposed to be like a "stockpile of weapons" that would hence be consumed after some amount of troops made with it. Adding that to the game now, so boosted troops are in limited supply and feel more precious.
Thank you for playing and all the thoughts!
Pretty cool game. I played for about an hour and a half and I had fun. I appreciate that the tutorial wasn't a text dump, and I'm sure I would be completely lost without it. But the tutorial text hidden behind fog of war was annoying, I would need a unit right on top of it to be able to read it since it would go dark without one, but then the units would cover bits of the tutorial (same goes for buildings) , or I would be able to partially read the tutorial text and would need to send units to make it readable. Maybe make the whole thing appear when you reveal a bit of it. I only got as far as the first section of the campaign, but seeing the borders grow when I beat the last section felt very demotivating (Might just be a me thing to be honest since I hate roguelikes/roguelites so disregard this bit if you feel strongly about it). I'm assuming the maps are procedurally generated for infinite gameplay? I built a few buildings but have no idea what the stat increases do, maybe a tooltip or something might be helpful. An auto exploring unit might help as well, exploring felt really tedious especially with all the tree's & lakes that can spawn and the relatively low health of the starting units (On further playthroughs I see that the units you start with also appear to be random so I guess its just the units I got weren't great for it?). There's a mention of game speed in the web version so I downloaded the standalone but I can't seem to find such a setting in game. I like variety of units but I feel a lack of cohesion in them, maybe if the tiles they spawn on and their spawning circles matched the theme of the units or something the game world would feel a lot more alive. I feel like a lot of my gripes come from a lack of understanding of the in-depth gameplay elements. Something like a hand built campaign mode that can teach the players about the intricate mechanics bit by bit would help a lot. Individually the sprites, textures, look great but some of them don't mix well together or feel really out of place if you lets say started with skeletons and then you got a car or something next. I know I mostly just complained but I did have fun, and that's the most important thing. The game itself is fun, if there was a way to introduce players to maybe some strategy and understanding of more mechanics I could have fun for a whole lot longer. Keep up the good work, hope to see you next DD as well.
Heyo, thank you for playing! Appreciate all the input.
You need to run launcher.exe instead of hypercoven.exe, then you can select your starting units as well as game speed ("sloth") and more.
Oh, you remind me… this was my initial idea, having matching houses for each pair of units. Until I came across the Summoning Circle sprite and thought, well, screw it, this will do for all and save so much work.
Yeah, I am still unsure how to best do it. I want the details to be a bit mysterious, but that should be intriguing, not frustrating.
Game now has a tutorial, ingame!