I like the game. The art style is really good and the Taiping rebellion is a very interesting setting to explore sadly I don't it in depth as much as other conflicts. I imagine the combat took you guys a lot of work (I mean i didn't even finish my game) and knowing unity the amount of physics related problems would drive me nuts but it came together really well. I hope you guys add in the rest of the combat sequences.
Play game
The Story of Qiu Ersao's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #2 | 3.421 | 3.421 |
| Gameplay | #3 | 3.316 | 3.316 |
| Overall | #4 | 3.596 | 3.596 |
| Historical Accuracy | #6 | 3.789 | 3.789 |
| Graphics | #6 | 3.684 | 3.684 |
| Thematic Relevance | #6 | 4.053 | 4.053 |
| Overall | #6 | 3.316 | 3.316 |
Ranked from 19 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Historical Accuracy
The only English-speaking source on Qiu Ersao is Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: the Qing period 1644-1911.
The rest has been extrapolated from context and dramatized.
We've been inspired by Qiu Ersao, a rebel female commander during 19th century China. She was part of a secret society and participated in the Taiping Rebellion.
In addition to the story, a great care has been put into the details: the characters' outfits, attitudes and poses, weapons and animations, as well as the instrumentation.
Thematic Relevance
Telling the story of Qiu Ersao, one the numerous female commander that fought during China's Taiping revolution in the 19th.
Disclaimers
Mix of free assets and handmade, mostly modified to fit the game. Fullcredits on the game page.
Comments
Thank you for playing! Something that was made clear by comments is that we didn't put enough emphasis on the Taiping rebellion itself, but at the same time, we wanted to focus on the life of a particular person and give the idea to player about how a nobody could drag against all odd into something that could impact the whole. We wanted to emphasize the local contexts, stories and lifes at that time and hopefully give player more curiosity to learn more about the actual rebellion. But as hihglighted by other comment, we could have done better to give more context ^^
Regarding the combat, well in fact that was the least worked feature xD. I ended up working on it 2 days in the end where the first day was focus on trying to make animation for the game. I eventually gave up on the broken rig and moved on retarging free to use animations to our rig and modify the animation using Untiy Mecanim to fit with our game. The second day was mostly integration as the movement and battle mechanics themselve were pretty simple and straightforward to implement. Nevertheless, I did had some issue with physics, but as I implemented it on top of the Untiy CharacterController, so it was just my fault ^^'
To give some insight of the development (hoping that it will interest anybody), most of the time was spend working on a framework to quickly integrate stories, battle and point and click sequence all together. As I was the sole programmer (except for graphics feature), I could not integrate all the stories and assets by myself on top of coding the game, so I ended up being more of a tool programmer for this jam.
If you're interested in more combat, we're continuing to develop the game to meet our original goal and incorporate some of your feedback. So stay tuned in the coming weeks :)
Pretty cool I just wish there was more of the combat, it was the best part.
Submitted
Storming the BastilleFascinating you chose her and ultimately the Taiping Rebellion. That one was a wild ride, honestly, and maybe some more information on that could have been fun. 😂
It felt like you had two different ideas for the game that didn't quite mesh. Like you tried to marry two gameplay styles and took on too much in not enough time. 🙈 What is there is interesting, though.
The music that is there is very nice, not distracting and very calming. Sad that it cuts off. (I know that it is a known bug.) 🤗
I (Gerbera) am very interested whether the dialogues - especially the dialogue with Hong Xiuquan - were based on some source or if they were though of by you. :3
Submitted
The Tale of Mother LüThanks for playing and for your interest :)
Giving more context around the Taiping Rebellion is definitly something we should have done, we were a bit too focus on telling Qiu's story and forgot about this important part. I guess that at least a simple text panel in the main menu would have helped ^^'
As we were envisonning an adventure game where the player would followed Qiu through the beginning of her involvement to the end of her life, we wanted to give some variation in the gameplay to not bore the player with too much text. We also wanted to give historical context information while keeping the player immerse in the experience and that's how we ended up adding the exploration (point and click) sections. We were planning a very simple battle system for people that prefer some action in games too.
The main goal was always to give as much story as possible, so we did integrate it in priority and delay the battle integration after. We could have added more, but I had some technical issue with WebGL at the end (not my best idea to make a game jam with a tech stream :x). Looking at the end result, there is definitly an unbalanced, but well, that how game jams goes sometimes. I'm just glad to have been able to put at least a bit of everyone's work into the final product :D
Dialogues wise, steredice took inspiration from the source she could find, but there isn't much archives from this time unfortunately. I don't know how much familiar you are with the original revolt, but we hope the provided interpretation was appealing enough to keep you engage until the end :)
The dialogue interactions throughout the game are great! I got excited with the first combat encounter, it came out of left-field, and really benefited the game. The art style was also very good and fit the setting well, especially with the dialogue UI. Would have liked to learn more context to the story at the beginning, as someone who is not familiar with the Taiping revolution. Apart from this though, enjoyed playing!
Submitted
Monarch's LegacyBoth the storytelling and the combat aspect of the game were good, nice job!
Submitted
Sea of TeasThank you for playing! Glad to hear you did enjoy the point and click sections ^^ We were trying to find diverse and interesting way to convey a long story with a lot of important details without overwhelming the players with information. We hope we have delivered a door to the chinese history and culture and that you will remember her short story. If you are interesting for more, stay tuned for a future update with more combat and a new story chapter!
Thank you very much :)
It was my first attempt at making a battle system like this and I really hope to be able to push it further in the future! We are planning to deliver an update of this game after the rating with more combat and an additionnal story chapter, so stay tuned for more (and follow me for potential future game! ;) )
The story was well thought out and seemed to be accurate. More fighting scenes would have been nice.
Submitted
Peasant LifeThanks for playing and thanks for your feedback! This will make our writter happy as she did put a lot of effort and research to write compelling dialogues throught diverse characters. Regarding the battles, we had some technical issue with WebGL at the end of the project which lead us to have to choose between the completeness of the story or a better balance between story and combat. In the end, we prioritized the story as it was the most important aspect for this jam.
The fighting aspect of the game was nice but i would've liked to see more of that than the story line which was also nice.
Submitted
Colonials at warThe art is good, but it's not very interesting. I'm not into novels, sorry.
Submitted
Caesar: Revolt in GaulThanks for trying and sorry to hear that the VN gameplay wasn't to your taste. Our written did take care to write short and interesting dialogue so I'm curious to know what we could have done to improve your experience. Unfortunately in the current build, only two battle are integrated, but in the case we would have the 8 planned battle throught the 3 chapters, do you think that would have been a more compelling experience? Like maybe putting more short dialogue during battles? Would you have any recommendation or opinion about how we could have tell this story?
Don't feel the pressure to answer, I'm really just eager for feedback! Again, thanks for your time :)
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.