Welcome to Tavern Guardians: Banquet, a Puzzle RPG which blends the excitement of match three games with the strategic demands of Turn Based Tactics! No longer will you match tiles just to watch avatars attack enemies above the board. In this game, countless waves of enemies, each with their own skills and specialties, advance from the top of the board! You take on the role of a Guardian, charged with defending various taverns. Watch each enemies' movements and actions, and then use magical skills and items to claim victory against evil!

We have worked on this project for 1.5 years, and we hope to release the Early Access version some time later this year.  We will post more DevLog and illustration here. Follow this topic to learn more!

The DEMO of TGB is available now on our game page!
Feel free to download the demo, play to your heart's content, and share your valuable feedback with us.

INDEX
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Devlog 1: Basic Combat Design
Boss Illustration: Minotaur & Super Mushroom Bros.
Boss Illustration: Wine Walker & Goblin Cannon
Devlog 2: Design of Skill System and Stun Mechanics
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• 4 classes of guardians with their own unique skills and specialties.
• 60+ unique enemies with their own skills and behavior. You'll need to think of the right strategy to defeat different combinations of enemies!
• 10+ epic Boss fights
• 40+ items and pieces of gear to enhance your guardians' abilities and playstyles.
• Story Mode: Select a guardian to help the Tavern Master build his new taverns all across Dionia.
• Survival Mode (in development): Face completely randomized waves of enemies and pick from random items and gear in the shop. Full of surprises and difficult challenges!

We are WOMBO COMBO GAMES, a Japanese indie studio established in Fukuoka. The studio is comprised by 3 friends who love game and have experiences in the videogame industry.

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Banquet Devlog 1: Basic Combat Design

The core concept of the combat system of TGB is to mix PuzzleRPG and Turn Based Tactics.
Thus, you can see that enemies in the TGB will move, attack and cast skills according to their own behavior pattern as the enemies in the Tactics Game. Meanwhile, player may change enemies’ position by matching the tiles or using skills.

Attacking
You can deal a normal damage to an enemy by collecting the tiles adjacent to it. Extra damage will be dealt if four or more tiles are collected at the same time.
Prepare tiles ready to be matched at the position where enemy advancing toward by anticipating its action. Try to gather enemies together and attack multiple enemies with one single collecting. Evaluate the combat situation strategically while mastering the 3 matching skill and you will fight more efficiently.

Defending
This is a turn based game so after matching tiles the game will switch to the enemy turn. Like any other game, in the TGB, when your HP drops to zero, game over. Therefore, when you are sieged by the enemies, ceaselessly attacking is not a good option. Defending button will help you to neutralize the damage with your AM and wait for your opportunity to strike back. Of course, taking defend is not invulnerable. Using defend will end your current turn. You also must collect stone tiles to keep you AM above a certain level to cover the damage.

Collecting
You can deal damage by collecting tiles on the board and different tiles will bring you unique buffs. For example, collecting meat tiles recover your HP, stone tiles to recover AM, Mana portion to recover MP and so on.

P.S. If you have any question or suggestion about this game, feel free to let me know. 

Cheers,
Wombo Combo Games

Illustration of Minotaur and Super Mushroom Bros.

Hope you like it!
And you can experience Minotaur in our DEMO.

Illustration of Wine Walker & Goblin Cannon

Devlog 2: Design of Skill System and Stun Mechanics

============Skill System============

1. Skill design

We have added a lot of tactical combat skills to the Tavern Guardians Banquet, such as AoE attacks, displacement skills, and crowd control abilities. These skills are casted over enemies on the board. Therefore, we have modified their features to better serve the entire game mechanics.

Here we are going to give an example to show how the skills work. It is often the case that the enemies are constantly falling down when the tiles keep getting matched in our game, which may cause the players to lose the game quickly. We designed a skill for Paladin called Holy Cross to deal with this situation. When casting the skill, a player will summon a cross of holy fire to draw enemies into the centre and deal a large amount of damage. It can also trigger multiple matches and remove some tiles of negative status effects; thus, players need to make each move wisely. We hope that by introducing the skill system, the game can become more strategic.

2. Mana system

In the early version of the game, the skills enter the cooldown time after each use. Cooldown automatically resets in every turn. And collecting Mana Potions also reduces the cooldown time. However, we found that the recovery speed of the skills is not ideal in practice regardless of the cooldown time settings. It is extremely difficult for game balancing, and the tiles of Mana Potions become dispensable and less meaningful. The worst thing about this cooldown settings is that players are able to use all the skills in a turn to instant kill a boss.

Therefore, we designed the current mana system to replace the cooldown settings. Players have a mana cap like in traditional role-playing games. Each skill has its own mana cost and players can only restore the mana by collecting Mana Potions. Performing a skill may end the player turn as well. With the new mana system, the timing of performing skills is vital and collecting Mana Potions becomes meaningful and rewarded.

*Current mana system

*Restore a large number of mana by collecting Mana Potions efficiently

3. Targeting system

Most of the skills in the game require an enemy tile as the target. Players are encouraged to focus on the enemies' positions and strategically combine different skills to eliminate the enemies.

============Stun Mechanics============

1. Summary

There is always a way to interrupt spellcasting in many games. We innovatively added this feature to our Match-3 puzzle RPG. A stunned enemy is not able to action before regaining consciousness, thus we allow our players to take more actions after using stun skills in a turn.

2. How to stun bosses

In the previous versions of our game, players can stun a boss with a single use of a stun skill, which makes the boss fights less challenging. Hence, we redesign the new stun mechanics. It now requires THREE stun points to make a boss unconscious. Players can gain ONE point using normal skills or special items, and TWO points using stun skills. This design is in line with the new mana system. Players need to plan several turns ahead before using the actual skills to stun the boss. It also limits the number of times that players could stun the boss. As a result of this change, players are now expected to figure out other ways to defend against boss attacks.

The game also features skill and item combinations. We leave them to our players to discover in the game.

Till next time!
Wombo Combo Games