The Ingvanr Saga

Whoah!  What a tremendous honour!

The solar imagery on your tarot card is spot on for the character too, well done!  I like the depiction.

I've been meditating quite a bit upon lore & world building lately, I'm eager to take a look at your game from that perspective this demo day.

Wishing you well

Hey Horbror, thanks for the great feedback.

Glad you liked the camera & inventory system.

Spamclicking is probably just making your brain secrete more dopamine, which is fine.

Regarding the magic system:

• I went back and forth with having friendly fire on the spells, especially with the Ultima Lich Bomb spell, trying to decide if I wanted the player to be able to accidentally necroblast their party into a bunch of zombies.
• I ultimately decided that potentially having to kill an accidentally zombified favourite party member was just the sort of traumatic experience that would teach the player to exercise caution when using magic.
• I also wanted the magic system to feel powerful but dangerously unstable.  Much like the game itself, at present.

Regarding the equipment notifications:

• I think sound effects will help with this.
• I have a DJ State Machine planned that will track when units are in combat vs when they are "marching" or "camped".  I could tie some reminder audio lines in to that as well:
• "We had better replace our shields soon, M'Lord",
• "No point in carrying around a broken shield, shall we discard them?".
• "Our broken shields are needlessly slowing us down" - when giving a move order
• This inspires me to throw in a whole banter system as in Mass Effect.  I'll add that to the "Nice to have" features list.

Regarding the combat balance:

• Having your shield break is a pretty gnarly situation indeed, especially if it is early in the fight when the weapons still have their edges causing them to deal bonus damage.  When I'm play testing I'll often discard a shield even if it still has one or two durability points left for a fresh one, especially if I'm going into a tougher fight.  Sometimes I'll just run away if the shield breaks though.  It's a risk calculation.
• I designed the core gameplay loop with 3 stages:  Scouting, Fighting, & Recovery.  I see checking your equipment and swapping shields out as part of that "Recovery" phase, as you're scoping out the next encounter and planning how to approach it.
• It's also hard to balance the RTS style fights and the ARPG style fights at the same time.  I don't want the more RTS-style fights to get too drawn out.
• I'm glad you found the fire ring strategy.
  • I included that to open the player's mind up to the notion that they could benefit from micro-ing the units.
  • It also provides some more engaging gameplay when low on resources rather than just "watch units exchange blows".
  • Eventually I'll limit the number of charges on that item, but only once I've included some re-charging mechanics.
  • I plan on keeping it easy to re-charge this particular item once I do so.
• With the items & spells, I've been pretty much relying on the Gambits for the party members and then micro the prince.  Once I expose the gambits to the player for customization I think this will become a bit more obvious.
  • On some runs I use him as a tactical spot healer and let the gambits control the rest of the party.
  • Fristivar automatically attacks whichever unit the prince is attacking, for example,
  • while Cauligen prioritizes whichever unit has the most HP, and casts his lighting spell at the furthest away units (trying to pick off ranged enemies) until it's out of charges.  The player can conserve his lightning for tougher fights by un-equipping the spellbook.
  • Alternatively, you can watch Koreans play starcraft and decide to maximize your APS (Actions Per Second)
• I'm working on a spreadsheet to calculate "encounter difficulty" scores so I can better balance the difficulty.
  • I do want most encounters to be pretty tough though, to encourage and reward scouting & skirmishing before fully engaging.
  • I have been enjoying using the throwing weapons and critical hits from concealment to soften up some of the encounters before charging in.
  • I shall continue to add to & improve the disengagement mechanics to open up this play style some more.

Regarding the crashes:

• I'm quite frustrated about this, I spent about 3 hours this morning play testing and finally got it to a point where it wasn't crashing for about an hour.  Then, immediately after uploading v0.1.5 I found 3 bugs in about 15 minutes.  Deeply frustrating.
• I have a vague feeling that the Godot export utility is introducing bugs, because as I said, I play tested for hours this morning, and then when I downloaded it from Itch to verify everything, it immediately crashed on the first level.  This might just be me coping and seething though...
• Maybe there's still an issue with the save system.  I hope it's that, since that's something I have agency over.  Are you starting a new game with each version, or are you hitting continue?  That wouldn't explain the crashes when walking into the fire.  I just did this a few times and wasn't able to re-produce what you're talking about there.  Which enemies were you fighting when this happened?

That was quite a bit of a blogpost, but it is helpful to write my thoughts down.  I appreciate your attention.

I was watching that lad playing your game on his stream earlier, it looks pretty cool.  I'm looking forward to playing it soon as well.

And here we go!