itch.io

Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful feedback! I’m thrilled to hear you enjoyed the strategic elements and the Overlord vibe—it means a lot to know the game’s potential is shining through, even in its early state. As a solo indie developer, your insights are incredibly valuable for shaping the game’s future, and I’ve taken note of all your suggestions and bug reports.

Response to Suggestions

Infusion Pregnancy Duration and Incentives: You’ve hit on a key issue with the infusion pregnancy mechanic—its high energy cost and slow progress make it feel unrewarding, especially with no experience gain. I completely agree it needs rebalancing to be more engaging. My plan is to reduce the energy cost through upgrades to the infusion device, though these upgrades aren’t implemented yet. Your suggestion to accelerate natural progression (e.g., 2 weeks/day) and shorten infusion to 3 months or 1 month for normal summoning energy cost is fantastic—I’ll explore these timelines to make the mechanic more viable within the 120-day endgame. Adding experience gain during pregnancy is also a great idea, and I’ll look into tying it to the mother’s activities or traits to reward players for engaging with the system.

Infusion RNG and Offspring Stats: Your observation about the summoning RNG leading to diminishing returns is spot-on. The current system, where only passes base stats and offspring stats are often weaker than the better parent, isn’t ideal. I’m planning to expand the infusion system to include multiple partners for greater variety, as you suggested, and I’ll tweak the RNG to ensure higher-quality offspring are achievable. This might involve factoring in both parents’ stats more effectively or adding a trait inheritance system to make infusion more rewarding.

Bug Reports

I’ve logged all the potential bugs you mentioned and will investigate them for the next version:

Population Cap and Housing: The Hamlet capping at 1,000 despite upgrades is definitely a bug. I’ll ensure housing properly expands capacity.

Food Mechanics: The lack of impact from food (and the unintended profitability of letting people starve) is not intended—dark humor aside, I’ll fix this to make food management meaningful.

Slave Market Incest Flag: The random incest marker on a slave market character is odd and likely a bug in the character tagging system. I’ll track it down.

Battle Rewards and Skipping: Losing population rewards when skipping battles is unintended and makes population growth too hard. I’ll add partial rewards for skipping to balance this.

Cavalry Overpowered: The cavalry being too strong (no damage taken, no need for towers) needs tuning. I’ll adjust their stats or enemy strength to make battles more strategic.

Fullscreen Menu Issues: The fullscreen requirement for menus to work properly is a UI bug. I’ll test across resolutions to fix this.

Character Image Inconsistency: The inconsistent character image sizes in the chambers menu (only in fullscreen) is another UI issue I’ll address to ensure consistency.

General Thoughts

The game is still in active development, with many mechanics (like infusion) being experimental. Your feedback has been a huge help in refining these systems—particularly the infusion mechanic, which will see improvements based on your suggestions. I’m currently working on fleshing out species level systems, and the next version (due in about a week) will introduce a core evolution mechanic to make breeding more rewarding. Thank you again for taking the time to provide such detailed observations. It’s players like you who help me understand what’s working and what needs work. If you have more ideas or want to discuss further, feel free to share here or join our Discord community. Keep the feedback coming, and I’ll keep pushing to make this game something special!