I'm relatively certain that the game will turn out well, but I just hope that this design philosophy doesn't result in a 1-2 hour experience; it's hard to claim the high ground when you're offering less actual content even after you disregard the grinding. This is particularly niggling with short RPGs, which give the same not-quite-epic feeling as the entirety of The Lord of the Rings taking place over the course of one afternoon. On a tangent, it's always a bit disheartening - and too common - to see developers working for six months or more, building a solid engine, developing fantastic art, perfecting the controls, and ultimately delivering a one-hour game; it is worse still when none of those assets are used again.
I'm really looking forward to Mage Gauntlet, it's whipped me into that rare, check-every-afternoon-for-updates frenzy that only a handful of games have done this year Have much respect for you guys over at Rocketcat: you do good things!
Oh, none of the hats do anything. Nothing at all, they're just cosmetic. Partly because there are over 100, and partly because we didn't want to restrict people to whatever hat had the best or most convenient stats. Pets have stats, though we tried not to go overboard. Yeah, as I get older, I very rarely play games that take 40 hours to get through anymore. It's just grating with me. Especially since I see all the tricks now that are used to extend playtime, just so you can put "40 hours of gameplay" on the back of the case. SQH is a good comparison as to how we handled the levels. I still want to do an open world RPG at some point, though. I just really like how the world-map/level-select seems to fit on the iPhone. Thanks, though we probably won't be updating much until the game's out, at this point. Still need to get a total playthrough of the game and record it for time. I know it's more than 2 hours total, but I'm not sure how much more. Removing the grind does make it shorter, but I'm pretty sure if you remove the grind from a KRPG, you're left with a game that's about 20 minutes long. We're going to be making a lot of games with this engine, some of which will continue the Mage Gauntlet story. We can also use the engine to make different styles of RPG. We could even do a turn-based Final Fantasy sorta game. Very soon, we want to finally tackle a long-held design goal of ours in a game: to move heavily towards randomized content and procedural generation. This would mean we could make a game that was both fairly quick to play, but also potentially infinitely replayable due to being different each time. A good example of this done right is the rogue-like, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. The problem is that the game is a rogue-like, which is an extremely niche genre... Also DCSS has tons of grinding for no reason, to inflate it to 8 hour play sessions, but I guess that's a different topic. Doing a quick playtest run of the entire game, will get back to the thread on how long it takes me.
Someone mentioned they liked the turn-based style that appears over the shoulder. Just to balance it out- I like to be able to see my characters in turn-based combat. I'm definitely psyched for this release. I'll be checking this forum frequently to figure out release status.
Glad to see the game will be wrapping up soon. Then I can finally get my hands on this game. I would ask if they were ever gona do the second trailer but I kinda don't want to ask for anything thing that might delay the game more.
Speaking of Super QuickHook (Best game you've done), do you plan on doing anymore updates for it? And will Super QuackHook be making any guest appearances in Mage Gauntlet?
I'll work on the second trailer when I run out of stuff to do, shortly before we submit and shortly after we get out the long, long delayed press preview copies. I'm not seeing any SQH updates in the future, at least in terms of content. Mostly because updates actually hurt us (you need a certain-sized active customer base to make updates worth it on iOS due to crappy discoverability). We're pretty likely to do a small feature/bugfix update of old games whenever we release a new game, though. Maybe Super QuackHook will appear, maybe it won't. Maybe almost every animal we've ever had in a game will be available as a pet?? Only Gnomey knows (though I actually can't remember if he appears in Mage Gauntlet or not). I've been playtesting the game, and it's still really difficult for me to get a handle on how long it really is. I can speed run Story Mode in about 2 hours if I ignore all side-rooms, secret areas, achievements, etc. Master Mode takes longer, on top of that. Need to see how long the entire game takes to play for someone that doesn't know every single enemy and map inside and out... I think it will be a satisfyingly amount, though. Feels longer than Super QuickHook.
You could add a level pack of like 5 levels and maybe a mix of Avalanche-Eruption mode? And charge 2.99 for it.
Not a big fan of charging for levels. Sometimes I think of making another hook game, though. We had plans for a more metroidvania-ey hook series of games after SQH, but stopped because we thought it would be a bad idea. Lately been thinking about making one for the PC. Maybe next year?
I fell asleep, didn't post it until today. There's little scenes like this scattered around the game, in out of the way areas. Also shows a tiny bit of the robe and weapon customization we put in. We're planning a trailer right before we submit the game. Hopefully that will be next week. Hopefully.
Each "aside" tends to have one thing, generally: Little dialog bits, or secret books/notes you can read Hidden extra health restores or spell urns Secret chests with loot in them you can equip Easter eggs/hidden art with associated achievements, like SQH had Pockets of hidden enemies that you have to find to get 100% in a level Oddly decorated room with nothing in it but a runspeed urn, so you can backtrack fast Some hats come from achievements, but almost all hats come straight from enemy drops. Enemies have a small chance of dropping their associated hat or hats. This chance is much greater in Master Mode. Some enemies drop up to three of four different hats. They also generally wear the one of the hats they can drop, at random. 105 hats overall.
Awesome screenshots. Great to hear about all of the hats, hah. Hopefully there will be some sort of hints as to what monsters to kill to at least hope for a hat. I wouldn't want to spend three hours killing every type of monster in hopes of getting on of the four hats it drops. Will this have Game Center support for achievements?
