Oops sry to hear your profit isnt very high. I major in marketing so probably i wish to share you some of my thoughts in case it may be of any help to you. Most importantly about beta testing, i dont think u need to hire people to do this but just enlist some people to beta test the app. Most of these beta testers are usually gamers that want to play games, so it serves their interest too why not? Also about enemy turn, there should be a fast forward button because when the map is filled with enemy, an enemy turn can take more than 5 mins which is pretty outrageous to sit through, hopefully u can sped up enemy's turn. Well first of all from overall view, mobile IOS platform is usually for "simple" games like platformer etc where people can have short burst of fun in a short time eg a train ride etc. However it doesnt mean that there is no market for niche games like this. What you need to do is to build up your audience base. Game companies like Square Enix charges ourtageous pricing & doesnt feel sorry for it because they have a dedicated fan base to support them but i do not agree with those outrageous pricing, its a rip off to its fanbase. Therefore you have to get your games known to strategy lovers on IOS. Actually you might want to consider getting the game on steam because PC is a strategy haven. A lot of pc owners also own a tablet so if you made your name in PC World, it will help sales in your tablet department too. The pricing is okay, i personally love premium gaming but really the trend of free games are killing the honest developer. What you can do is make the app free by allowing users to play for example first 5 levels for free, if they like it then they can purchase. Well you definitely need more marketing for this game. Have you considered using game streamers to spread your game? Well some streamers have very big audience & if your ads hit the right audience at prime time slot, i am sure many people will check out your game. I am actually interested in game development, probably we can work together in the future? I have lots of ideas for gaming too
I completely understand, but I would do it right, if not for this game than another one. Reason is again, massive replay-ability and not perfecting AI/difficulty since humans, well, they are unpredictable and crafty . Maybe one rung down is not to use all the current maps but just one "arena" if that makes any difference- probably not too much difference but it would still be loads of fun to battle others. e.g., I'm still playing an ancient tank shooter called Pocket Tanks (almost 15 years)- really the only reason I still play is that there are human opponents otherwise it would be quite a bit of a bore. I think I'm fairly average in that general preference. Also mechanical beings/Golems. I kill plenty of them with poison type effects at the highest difficulty. All solid points certainly. On the counter there is only the world of models and aesthetics that a lot of us value- and that gives the game an uber level of polish. It wouldn't matter in very simplified games like many of the roguelike games on IOS now days. But when you have beautifully rendered models in a Unity engine, as you certainly have them, IMHO it would certainly add significantly to the sense of collecting artifacts if you actually see those artifacts (weapons, armor etc) represented much more accurately. This is gravy post bug fixes post AI and other elements of course but I think fairly important to your target audience as the game resonates with communities that have played tabletop WH, D&D and so on. Sure, I got another team up to Lev 30 average now. They are slaughtering everything in sight. Within the first round I'd say I can wipe out 95% to 100% of hostiles, regardless of highest difficulty setting, size of map, and number of NPCs. This is even without using the global / blessings based spells now available- but certainly with them. I hate to direct you to a competing product for reference since you're doing many things frankly better than it, but the balancing is better in Rodeo's WHQ. Have a look at it if you're unfamiliar. I'm about at the same level in WHQ but can be readily killed in most dungeons, if I'm not exceptionally careful and even then sometimes I buy the farm anyway. Some of the undead in their version are extremely hard to defeat. Which makes it fun, once you master the basics. The more I think about it the more I believe that the lowest hanging fruit here is variable initiative. If you do group initiative checks, or if possible, and much better, an individual/granular initiative check prior to engagement, then the game will overnight become a lot harder, since many more adversaries will be able to fire off solvos rather than being summarily executed by my 2 assassins .
Thanks for the feedback, gents. I'll write a proper reply to each point later today. Just a bit tied up. I found another critical bug where magic items are being lost for some reason. I think it's to do with loading a mid battle save where a character has been killed. I think doing so and then finishing the level might cause the character that died before loading the save to lose equipment. I'm looking into it ... I need to get this fixed before the next patch release as it's quite a nasty bug.
Quick update, gents .. I was not able to reproduce the bug I ran into where I lost a few magic items. Not sure what's going on there. However, I haven't run into it again despite many attempts so I think I'll release the next patch today and continue hunting that one down. I'm going to make a handful of minor bug fixes and refinements today and will then submit the update.
I would love to do multiplayer but I just don't know how the code works at all. So realistically, I doubt it would happen until I got the kind of funds to actually hire a developer who knows that area of coding well. Adding a hot seat mode with pre-built arena teams should be possible for the next game. It would be fun as it would allow for players to use random enemy units and weird team match ups and so forth. Agreed ... I'll look into it and see what can be done. You can also just think of poison as being a corrosive acid rather than a biological agent. I should be able to do something better in the next game. Since it has fewer characters, I'll be able to spend more time per character to add a bit of extra visual goodness. Still, I'm certain I won't be adding a different 3d object for all 400 base magic items but I can probably add a few variations ... base equipment / low level version, medium equipped / mid-level version and then heavily equipped / high level version. Kind of like how this was handled in the original Diablo game. I think you're onto a very good point. At very high levels, allowing one team to move and act fully before the other team can react is a very unbalanced design. Adding unit priorities / initiative could be done but might be a hard change to make in the code as I'd have to assign initiative values to all 100+ characters. Changing the turn order so that one player doesn't get to move all his characters before the other player can move anything is much easier. I think it would also be a very good change, as a whole. I made some quick changes and it seems to work reasonably well but it would require a lot of testing. I can already see that it breaks the in-game save process. I think in a later release, I should be able to add a different turn order where each player / AI moves one unit from their faction at a time. That will have a huge impact on game difficulty and give the AI a fighting chance. However, you're going to find that player abilities become much more powerful now that life damage / heal abilities scale by level. I love the change but it's probably going to be crazy broken at level 30+ characters.
Anything that has to do with level system will tend to make it very easy if you grinded. Well i didnt grind in this game unless its necessary so i find it pretty okay because i am a strategy kind of player, i know which mobs to take down first so its not a huge problem. I have not played WHQ but i have played their warhammer tyranid invasion game. Yes the game is indeed challenging but it runs on different system as in characters dont have level system but it still gets easy after you grinded the rare equipments. But i agree even with rare equips i still can get owned, a very impressive AI. It will be hard to implement that into this game because most SRPG runs on level system & if you overleveled you are pretty much killing the challenge.
Hey gents, Delayed patch slightly as I found a performance-related bug with the new bloom image effect. It's fixed now so still on track. I also added a "Fast Forward" button that appears during enemy turns. So now you can press it to hurry up the enemy turns and get back to the action a lot quicker. Also, breaking up the player turn to make it so each player moves one unit at a time seems easy enough to do, after all. I think I'll add it as a configurable option in a future patch. (not the next one)
Hey guys, I uploaded the next patch today. Originally intended it to be a quick fix patch to get the mid-battle saves working but it ended up being a huge update that includes bug fixes, new features, new levels and lots of gameplay balance changes. Will work on a full change list later today or tomorrow but it's pretty huge. Will still do further testing so if I find any really big issue that I didn't catch earlier, I may pull this submission and retry.
Thank you very much, it must be very daunting for a one man team. Well hope your next game rolls out well
Thanks ... appreciate the kind words and patience. Here's the full change log for the next patch: Bug Fix: Loading a mid-battle saved game now applies character stat bonuses from level / XP and character equipment properly. Bug Fix: Several bugs fixed that caused mid-game saves to not load properly. Bug Fix: Characters with 2-handed weapons (staves, great weapons, etc.) no longer receive double stat benefits from that item. Bug Fix: Improved animations of several characters to make the animations smoother and more consistent. Bug Fix: Corrected a bug where, on rare occasion, a character would be removed from the game without being killed. Bug Fix: Golem and Pyromancer abilities that prevent them from moving no longer prevent adjacent friendly units from moving as well. Bug Fix: Corrected several bugs that resulted in crashes during certain levels. Bug Fix: Completing battle 5 of quest 6 now increments progress correctly. Player progress no longer need to replay battle 5 to play battle 6. Bug Fix: Enemy wizards will no longer summon creatures (skeletons, demons, etc.) on inaccessible tiles. Bug Fix: Skeleton sorcerer's Dark Power ability no longer causes the game to become unresponsive and now executes properly. Bug Fix: Fixed a bug where the "Leave Area" button would never appear. Now pressing the "End Turn" button will bring up the "Leave Area" button if all enemies are slain. Bug Fix: Fixed numerous minor bugs. Enhancement: Added a "Fast Forward" button that appears during enemy turns to allow the player to speed up enemy turns. Enhancement: New bloom and color toning image effect applied to all levels. Can be turned off in options to conserve battery and improve frame rate. Enhancement: Corpses of slain enemies and allies will now remain on the battle field with new blood splatter effects. Enhancement: Added approximately 50 new base magic items for players to find that results in approximately 2000 new items. Enhancement: Player abilities that modify life or action points now scale by the character's level. These abilities now become more effective as the character levels up. Enhancement: Improved audio clips for several special abilities / effects. Enhancement: Added 3 new quest levels in quest 1 to ease the difficulty curve and allow players a chance to level up once before the more difficulty battles at the end of quest 1. Enhancement: Added new poison abilities to most giant spiders. Enhancement: Reduced motion of dynamic camera to prevent motion sickness experienced by a small number of users. Enhancement: Increased resolution of light maps to allow for better looking shadows and lighting. Enhancement: Several minor changes to improve performance. Game Balance: Improved base hit chance of starting player characters. Game Balance: Modified goblin stats to reduce their dodge chance but increased their attack damage. Game Balance: Increased hit points of Ratmen Lord and several other higher-level creatures. Game Balance: Added a short range fear attack to the Illusionist's Mirror Image creature. Game Balance: Improved mind control abilities to make the effects permanent. Game Balance: Lowered the action point cost of several summon spells and / or made the summoned creatures more powerful. Game Balance: Lowered duration of Chronomancer Ritual of Chronos ability. Game Balance: Shadow witch's blind spell now prevents the target from performing abilities. Game Balance: Reduced starting hit points of Steel Golems. Game Balance: Numerous minor changes to unit stat lines and abilities. The patch is in the review queue so could be released anywhere from a couple a days from now to a couple weeks. All depends on how busy the App Store review guys are. Doing further testing now. The next patch after this will include any further bug fixes (as needed) but will hopefully focus on some new content. I'm thinking of adding a couple of new characters to the roster to finally bring it up to 30 characters in total. Also, I want to add a few more functionality enhancements like being able to manage inventory in the tavern and also add some fun bonus levels that you can get from talking to the blacksmith and temple priestess.
Does that mean that not all abilites improve with levels?Or does it mean that only HP/AP buffs improve with levels, not damaging abilities?
Not all abilities ... just the ones that either increase or decrease HP / AP. So a spell that gave +15% dodge chance would be the same. However, a damage spell will now do 2 - 6 life damage per level of the caster rather than a fixed 5 - 15 damage. Healing spells and those that affect action points also scale by level now in the same way. It makes even low level spells very useful in later levels. The reason I didn't modify the ones that modify a stat line % is that those could get really broken at higher levels. An ability that gives +100% dodge chance would make the character more or less untouchable, for example.
Hey gents, Took a little time this morning to work on the next game, Path of Damnation. Created the warriors of one of the human factions in that story, the North Cumbrians. Fairly typical feudal human kingdom with a little bit of Saxon flavor thrown in. Here's a picture of them holding a bridge in the 3rd battle of the next game: CambrianForce by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr
Pic of another human faction for the next game: PathOfDamanationBattle by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr This is from the same battle as the pic shown earlier.
The other day i also discover that if you hire mercenary, when u exit the game & relog she might not be with u anymore. Is that fixed?
Can you explain a little more? How exactly do you exit? I don't think i've ever run into this but if you can give the details of how to reproduce it, I'll getbit fixed. By the way, you do know that mercenaries only fight for a set numeber of battles before their contract expires, right? Is it possible that the contract has just expired?
Yes i can finally start playing this game. I've been waiting forever to play this game, because you are so dilligently patching this game. Kudos to you dev. You have my support for the next title u come out with!
Thanks ... it does seem pretty stable now and the mid-battle save has been working with almost every weird situation I can throw at it. Still, let me know if you find any bugs ... will definitely patch them. I'm sure I'll find a few more as I continue my own play through of the later levels. The next update will add 2 new characters that I've created already for the next game: 1 - The Shadow Ghoul - a weird creature that can feed on the dead and infect its enemies with poison. Can also perform some destructive magic spells and phase in / out of reality to move around the battlefield. 2 - The Hatchling Dragon - an off-beat character class that is a small dragon. Fast moving and with some nasty bite / claw attacks but physically still pretty fragile. As it grows in power, it will have increasingly powerful breath attacks of multiple elements (fire, lightning, ice, poison gas, etc.). A bit like a fast moving and more melee-oriented walking cannon. The above 2 will be the final characters for the game. 30 is a nice round number, after all. I'll also add a few more bonus levels and may add another set of quest levels to extend the campaign. Not entirely sure about the last bit. I might use some of these cool knights that I've made for the next game in a new quest level.
