You got that right. I did beat the boss, was teleported to the last save point and got the message that I could go back to sleep now. Made my way back and then at my coffin I got the original message how I've got to free the land. No credits.
EDIT: just seen there is a header bar where I can rate it. Most get got these bars that are sprawled on the top right corner. It's actually much better that way. Just didn't expect it there so didn't look for it.
Just one thing - at the very end after you defeated the boss and it tells you 'the land is in peace, you may return to your slumber' you actually can return, but your coffin still tells you how the land is in unrest.
Maybe if you like, we could have a little post-game challenge and have the map filled with loads of monsters, maybe of the more aggressive sort, but stop the re-spawn. So we could clear the map one last time but from outside in. The coffin then could tell us how successful we were mopping up the rest and give the real ending. Just an idea.
Btw, has anyone got an idea why I can't rate this game?
Brilliant atmosphere and story. Especially for a jam game. Two puzzles didn't work for me. The first, it took me ages to figure out where to enter the answer to the scarecrow puzzle turns out it was AT the scarecrow. Probably too easy to find :-) The other one, others have commented on the QR code puzzle. For me, using an external tool to progress always feels like cheating in the first place. So I thought to myself - just look it up then. Easier than getting the phone.
Ok, looks like this game is in it's early days. Looks very promising so far. So I just dump a list of things I noticed.
Closing a dialogue box with the space bar doesn't work. It just clears the text but doesn't close the box.
I am playing on a 1024x7??? (that very old standard screen resolution). The edges of the game are off the screen. Monsters will hide there and surprise you fatally sometimes. Also some access points to areas need to be found blind.
The apple heals 20hp and the potion 40hp. However the apple is bought in the shop for 50gp and the potion 150gp. There needs to be some kind of advantage to have the potion as the price is quite steep at 3.75gp/hp opposed to the 2.5gp/hp of the apple. Maybe you could quaff one per key shortcut during battle, but not eat the apple that easily?
Birds can't fly over water?
The fire ring is of type 'staff' and not 'magic' as it says in the shop? Maybe I don't understand how it's supposed to be used. But it doesn't gain xp for your magic stat either. There is no stat for weapon type 'staff'. As it's not ranged and I don't seem to be able to train any skills with it it's quite useless as it is.
Is Brud supposed to leave the cave with you? Is he supposed to fight with you or are you supposed to defend him? I've tried to make him train up (as there is that 'allies' skill but he doesn't seem to be able to fight. Also I tried to give them my old broken sword and the wooden shield but the only way I could think about doing so was dropping them. Then they just disappear. Should be be a trainable 'ally' at all?
It took me a while to learn how to use Brud as he needs to be next to you to open that gate and I just didn't bother taking him with me after I tried a couple of things in the cave with him. I didn't remember what he told me the first time. Maybe it should be possible to interact with him later and he would then remind you of what he expected you to do.
When you drop the broken sword it doesn't ask you for confirmation as it does with the wooden shield. It also keeps occupying an inventory slot and tells you 'broken sword x 0'
Path finding: it is ok to have some monsters go in direct line towards you only. But an NPC like Brud should be a but smarter in following you around.
What about the barrel next to Vince? It behaves different to all the other barrels as you can push it around rather than smash it. Maybe a hint on how to use barrels in the cave after you passed the gate with Brud?
Ok, right now I am working on the cave quest and the swamp quest. I am spending a lot of time grinding for apples and gold. Could we have it to heal more efficiently, maybe at the save point or have a healer in the village?
I couldn't work out how the block points system works.
Maximum damage is capped? I am level 13 on strength now and I still can't do more than 20 damage to the apple slime?
By the way, I really loved how you implemented the controls so far. No finger yoga and switching between primary and secondary weapon is really easy. And one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse and no switching. I could imagine it's a bit awkward for left handed players though.
Thanks for making this game. Looking forward to see where you go with it.
I'm sure you had a lot of work making this nice looking table top thing. It's just so laggy here that the whole game is virtually unplayable. Firefox on linux.
Right in the beginning there is an options button where you find the fullscreen option inside. Otherwise it's for me only possible when I am on a run to press ESC. This will also pause the run and display all the additional information. There is a menu option at base but nothing happens when I click on it.
Sorry for posting so late but others might want to know too.
Ok, so I think I got two endings. One the 'normal' way and the other after discovering all the secrets. Does this sound about right or is there more to come? SPOILERS below explaining the endings I found.
After clearing the 'boss' room in the well (marked on the map) and leaving the room to the right (where you shouldn't have an exit according to the map.
The one shown in the video - after finding all the secrets all the special items in the inventory upgrade and you get access to the one gate outside.
Ok. Got the key for the garden and the game ended. I never got a hoe or whatever was needed to step on the brambles. Also I never even had near enough mushrooms to buy that special plant for the bar. It feels I missed most of the game. Is this right for the stage of development or did I miss anything?
Of course for the time being we can change in about:config 'full-screen-api.allow-trusted-requests-only' to 'false'. Mozilla gives a warning not to change anything in there and I have no clue about the security implications. But it lets you play this game in firefox.
That full screen thing is still an issue on Firefox. I also don't see the need for the full screen call at that point - ironically putting the game screen with the error message into full screen manually is the only thing that works :-)
Needs a lot of work still. Par example the log entries for civil wars show 'country x against country x' where both x are the same. I once had a civil war where the opposing commanders were the same person. Died in battle but what side was he on? I would love to see this evolve a bit more. When someone is at the lower ranks like clerk or officer, they are certainly associated with a country? Also, when a faction becomes a kingdom it should show up on the faction list. Just to name a few items I noticed.
You'll probably want to review the 'invention of the soap' card. The date given seems merely to point to the first written description of the soap making process on some Sumerian clay tablet. This is just the time humanity learned some kind of literacy and soap making was known before that.
So the date given here is more an indicator for an important step in the development of literacy and has nothing to do with soap making.
I believe giving a date for the 'invention' of soap would be even harder than giving a date for the invention of the wheel (what is a very debated question today) as wheels keep better in the archaeological record than soap.
Ok, you were right. I found out that unrest spreads from three sources. AI causing unrest, the normal growth (seems to work as far as I can tell) and battles / sieges. Seems to be really well done; I just didn't get it at first.
The more I understand of the unrest mechanics the more genious I think it is! This even cancels out my last original point because if you don't pay properly attention on your cash flow and unrest there may be really game changing surprises in there when you think you've already won. It's all logical once you find out how.
Ok, point two still stands. The one about having an overview of the troops in a province. And selecting them.
Point three, I don't know yet really. I noticed that troops that are not 'at home' get the status 'waiting' and a time how long they are in that waiting state, so you got kind of control or at least early notice. I'm still trying to work out the point though.
Ok, it's already well balanced and even winnable on 'hard' the first run. Here are a couple of things I noticed:
The countdown I see - I presume these are days. Then it says in the beginning for the unrest counter 2/month it counts after the first month 10% instead of 2. Does this internally count up to 20? So these 10% are 2 of 20? This is not very clear or maybe a bug.
When you have lots of troops at one place, it's almost impossible to pick out one particular of the troops the way the flags are stacked on top of each other. Can be very frustrating.
When you have a lot of troops at one place, they tend to spread out suddenly. Of course you want to keep them all together so you don't leave your province vulnerable, however doing so becomes a chore like guarding a bag of fleas. The mechanics for that are so far completely unclear to me although there is logic behind that, like it should be hard to feed too many troops at one place. But since it is possible to just order them back it doesn't really make a lot of sense the way it is now.
Some of the games like this give the option to finish when you've conquered like 50% of the map as after that point it just becomes a mopping up exercise with loads of micromanagement but virtually no chance to loose. I would like to see this option here too.
I can't read any text because it's too small. In the settings there appears to be an option to change the screen resolution with only the one default resolution in there. If there would be some more options in there that might solve the problem.
You probably did the same I just did; built the first houses to the left of the town hall. This is where the ore bearing ground is. You can demolish these houses to make space. The ore bearing ground is the area that looks like flat ground with grey pixels in it.
I agree with you on the first one and I had to replay so many times to get this right and as it's given by the game I suppose it's not a spoiler to post it here:
Dry up
Soak
Spread
Grow
Draft
Collect
Maybe that makes it easier to figure out the other stuff. Just a hint: the resource cards you get aren't random but based on what happens in the game. Just if there isn't enough space to add any more to your dock there is a degree of randomness in selecting those that can be added.
Had a great time playing and learning this game. For me the extent of the updated training missions was just right to learn how to play. I had to replay some of them to deduct the game mechanics but imo this is part of the whole fun.
There is only one thing I would like to ask for: while the game is paused I would like to get rid of the pause menu to see the whole map. This to review what happened and also to plan ahead. I see several ways to do this:
Just add an option to the pause menu to display the whole map. Any or every key could unlock this mode to let you play again.
If this is perceived as cheating there are again several ways do deal with this. One would be to add a counter for the times the pause state was engaged. This counter could be displayed at the end of the game.
Or add an option to the main menu (challenge mode) to disable the pause function completely. So if someone hits Enter in this mode, the whole map would be blanked out and just the options to reset the game or to return to the main menu would be available. Of course there should be something on the win screen that hints on the challenge mode for bragging rights.
The challenge mode would then run in combination with option 1 or 2.
Really enjoyed that. Two things though (excuse this after over five years past the last comment...)
For those with blue-green anomaly it's really hard to get that there are even different colors for tempered and etched items. Not too hard to figure out I suppose as you can click on really every item everywhere. Kudos for that.
Then I won the last battle where I think I should have lost it. I had:
Plate
Shield (plus one backup)
Missile launcher
2 Missiles
1.5 Capacitors
The enemy should have shot down both my missiles with their rail gun and than ground me down with whatever they had left. I couldn't follow how this happened but their ship was disabled in no time.
