barnabewild 2025-04-07 01:50
The iconography is kinda hard to read. it had me deep in strategysing tho!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD57 → Hireblades
By quasilyte
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 99 | 3.62 | 61 | |
| Fun | 81 | 3.58 | 60 | |
| Innovation | 107 | 3.50 | 60 | |
| Graphics | 177 | 3.31 | 60 | |
| Audio | 193 | 2.89 | 60 |
The iconography is kinda hard to read. it had me deep in strategysing tho!
I loved the pixel art you've made for this game, and also super fun turn based strategy. Crazy amount of content for such a short time. Well done!
It was a good turn-based strategy, and it was interesting to learn how best to approach the enemy in order to inflict more damage. But still, the game lacks training. For the first 5 moves, I just defended myself, not knowing what to do at all. I think if you add more animations, it will be more fun to play.
@barnabewild perhaps the low resolution is partially to blame here. Do you have any suggestions on how to improve it?
Cool game, similar to SOVL game. It was annoying that the horses moved one square, but that was a small thing. Very good work, a little tooltips/icons to view skills description, but here will be a lot of time after jam to fix this things. I was impressed of quantity of content.
@mr-mesmer the cavalry technically gets 3 actions per turn, but every unit can only move once during their share of the turn. Cavalry move 3 times, unless they lose their action points (-1 melee attack, drops to 0 if stun-attacked, penalties per tiles can increase the movement cost, etc.)
The turn ends when all units used their action points for this turn.
@quasilyte, oh, I think, that only difference in horse is diagonal movement, and i move them in one square each turn. Grab my words back. Although I've already come quite far, even with this debuff, using horses to flank attacks and archers to damage. TL DR: Gratz with new&popular in strategy on itch.io
@quasilyte I came back to replay it, and I did better at the game! my suggestion would be maybe the unit should be more like of a game piece than an icon?
Great game! It reminded me of Heroes of Might and Magic combat where turn order is determined by unit stats.
I got to mission 7 and my entire army got destroyed by a troll. I liked that the enemy is unpredictable, but it seems that they make a lot of suboptimal moves. Having a morale mechanic and enemies running away is a great idea too.
If the player loses a lot of units, it's very difficult to come back. You can't really pick your fights so each battle becomes more and more difficult. This can lead to a situation when you start a battle knowing you don't have a chance to win it.
Also, I couldn't find where to see current hp of a unit (could be useful with the troll, I didn't even know if I was close to killing it or not) and I couldn't figure out the turn order mechanic (couldn't guess who will take a turn next).
Overall, a great game with a lot of strategic depth. 😁
As the name suggests the gameplay is fantastic. Always loved these kind of games. There is a lot of depth to this. I like that you have to spend gold to replenish your units, which makes you have to think about the long game. Not just the fight ahead.
The AI also seemed capable. It avoided some of my "traps". Kudos for that. All in all a very nice gameplay experience. The graphics does the job well. I can easily distinguish the different types of units. I would have preferred using "units" instead of symbols/icons, but that may be a taste thing. The sounds could have been better, but I guess they do the job. Overall a nice submission!
For a strategy game – it's quite engaging, as you figure things out, you get drawn in :) Although not everything is obvious at times, maybe because I’m used to movement animations... but on the other hand, the way it looks now creates a unique atmosphere :) Thank you so much! Great job making such a strategy game!
A very cool and well-developed game. It's hard to believe that something like this could be done in just a couple of days. Good job!
Very unusual game.
good job😈😈😈
Good looking and pretty complex game, Thumbs up!
I'm impressed by the amount of different units and their capabilities. It's cool that you can backstab and that you build a moral system into the game.
How is this game connected to the theme? I could not make a connection, maybe "strategic depth"?
The level progression is good. After each level was a new unit to discover. I personally would have liked to gain access to the archers after I defeated them.
Everything is really great, but I think the audio was the weak point.
It's cool, that you could level up your units and I like the style of the UI.
Really complex game for such a short time! :)
> How is this game connected to the theme? I could not make a connection, maybe “strategic depth”?
@lllarso nah... there is no real connection. I gave up on trying because making it "every next battle is a descent into a dungeon" felt too weak of a connection that would not have any mechanical impact (making tiles/levels work differently would take more time than I could invest, or maybe I was too busy adding units and items). I opted out of theme for this reason - there is no connection and I fully admit it. :)
It's a very rare occasion for me to come up with a good and interesting theme-based game as it mostly ends up a worse game than a better game. :(
This time, I spent extra 2-3 hours testing and polishing the balance. It was probably a mistake to include 3 playable races instead of 1 or 2, but I felt lucky. I'm pretty confident with Humans (mercenaries) balance, undead were tested only 1/2 of that time, and horde being mostly untested. :) This is probably a lesson here for me - 3 races don't make the game better for LD, but it can make it worse.
Сделать такое за 48 часов, это очень жестко :sunglasses: Вообще люблю стратегии. В игре много параметров, разбираться первое время было тяжеловато, но интересно. Тут ещё в добавок три расы есть, а механику побега из-за низкой морали я вообще вижу впервые. Крутая игра!
That was fun, maybe add numbers on the icons to better see, which one is next in the row^^
I liked the turn base approach with focus on complex interaction mechanics with its simple visuals
It was hard to figure out how to play at first. Seems like a simplified version of the old strategies. It would be nice to be able to zoom camera in/out. Anyways for 48 hours, game is cool!
@wyzal it is inspired by several old strategies, that's on-point! I did, however, make a unique turn order where you can't use all action points at once, but rather 1 of them at a time, meaning a cavalry moves 3 tiles per turn, but not right away in a single move, but after 3 "rounds". Units with N action points get N rounds spread across the turn. In a sense, it makes interruptions possible - you can stop the cavalry from running past your units by attacking them (and causing -1 AP in the process).
The Lays with crab taste are on their way btw (I'll play your game, that is)
Wow really nice game!
It took me a couple of rounds to get a full grasp of most of the mechanics and I kept finding more as I went through.
Some things I would like to see in future versions: * A tutorial level or even just a wall of text with some more in depth explanations besides the screenshots would be nice. (I saw your description here after I played the game once, oopsie) * Soundtrack / more SFX would absolutely elevate the game * Some turn order indication (maybe a highlighted border on who's next) to help strategise more
The artwork and the gameplay has a super old-school vibe which I absolutely love and the gameplay has a lot of depth. I found myself playing for quite longer than I expected! Awesome entry :D
P.S. The menu buttons for credits and settings didn't work for me.
That was very very good! I have a similar project that I've barely starded and been unattended for a while... So your game was extra interesting to play since it offers lots of good examples on how to do things.
I got destroyed by the troll, it just walked from one unit to the other and completely wiped out my army, I wonder if there's a specific tactic to kill it, or was it just that my army was underleved, I wonder...
@ssiannas I can assure you, these menu buttons didn't work for anyone. :D I usually add these buttons at the start of the jam and it's a rare occasion when I have some free time and mood to implement them. :D
Thanks for the feedback btw.
@whateverdat the troll has Regeneration trait, which is probably too surprising in the game and there is no feedback that it heals. Basically, it recovers 100% hp at the beginning of each turn. The only way to deal with it is to focus attack on it. Usually, 3-4 volleys of arrows is enough, or 2-3 attacks from adequately experienced melee troops. It's like killing ~6 orcs in a single round. With that, it's quite an easy opponent, but it can be hard to align your units properly for an attack (especially since there are tons of goblins to distract and block you on this level).
And by the way, making it till the troll is a good result. This game is not intended to be fully completed. It's about how far can you get until the game overwhelms you, which can depend on luck (random items, units for hire, enemies).
This has got an astonishing amount of like mechanical depth for a compo game! All fits really well together the progression / recruitment system is really cool. Nice one!
Hey, really interesting gameplay, impressive for a game made in 48 hours! Background music would be nice, tutorial in the beginning,but these are small details, good work!
I really liked this one! Was interesting trying to outflank enemies. As I mentioned in my blog post comment the Warhammer soundtrack fits really well :)
@milestone-games I tried making a drum march-like part, but 1 hour near the deadline was not enough. All I managed to do is a ~30 sec drum loop that would drive the players mad
Very cool! The number of mechanics is impressive. I played and explored it with great pleasure.
Cool turn-based game in the spirit of magic and swords? (can't remember), the art is beautiful all the buttons are nice to poke. Feels the game is very complete!
A fun tactics game, clicking around near the beginning teaches the basics and it was neat seeing the different orb enemies with various stats.
https://www.youtube.com/live/UsbxyfIYWuc?si=xMCtwtiCc9dnAyFc&t=3028
Cool game! I'm not very good at it but I had a good time. Everything works well and I wasn't confused at any point, which is more than I can say for most strategy games lol. The sprites are charming and everything plays smoothly, overall really impressive compo!
Really interesting turn based tactics game! Getting into it is pretty difficult, but once you start getting the grasp on all the units you start to get better with every mission. Though that takes a while, since there's such a huge amount of units and traits to learn. :) I also liked the multiple-actions-per-turn idea, much more interesting than letting the unit move as far as it can at one time.
I've seen that others have already mentioned most of the issues I had with the game. One more thing that I did find a bit confusing is with one of the missions where all my units started spread around the edge of the map. Before I managed to regroup them together, during enemy turn I could hear enemy attacking me, but couldn't see which unit attacked where. Maybe moving the camera to the enemy unit before it attacks would have worked better here for some combat awareness.
@lcstark the spread deployment level is quite far into the game. Further than many players would go for the purposes of ludum dare game testing. :D
There are probably two difficulty spikes: mission 3 with orcs (requires the use of flanking and/or attacking from behind and/or luck with ranged troops), and mission with a troll (which needs to be killed in a single turn, otherwise it would regenerate to its full health). Many players found it confusing to figure out how to flank/backstab, so I failed at highlighting that mechanic in the game (the floating text doesn't help).
That level was a test of this concept for a less optimal scenario and it shows a flaw of this system - since you can't choose who is going next, the camera may be annoying. I found a solution to this, but it's not implemented in the game. As you mentioned, showing the attacks would be he part of that solution.
It was the goal to make a game that can be played like Fantasy General, which does provide missions with multiple area deployments (e.g. attacking from 2 sides, etc.) That would require fixing this issue, but the camera toggle between the units was the best thing I came up with during the jam.
I think this is my favorite game entry i played so far. Part of it is for sure my love for these types of games, but also that is was really well put together. For sure, might there might be balancing issues with the difficulty progression and economy, but for a 48 hour game it is beyond sufficient. Really nicely done!
Wow that's a lot of game in such a short amount of time! I had trouble identifying the icons at first but figured it out after some time. This game really has a lot of depth ;)
How does the turn on our work though? I sometimes got to move twice with the same unit but didn't understand why.
> How does the turn on our work though? I sometimes got to move twice with the same unit but didn’t understand why.
Imagine a single turn as 100% of time.
Now let's consider some examples: * 1 AP (e.g. zombie) would move once per turn * 2 AP (e.g. most units) would move twice per turn * 3 AP (e.g. cavalry) would move 3 times per turn
The "action" phase for a unit can happen at arbitrary time in turn, but there are rules: * 1 AP can take action from t=0 to t=1.0 * 2 AP will have first phase in t=`[0,0.5]` interval, and then at t=`(0.5,1.0]` * 3 AP means 3 phases following the same logic
Now we mix-in all units to get a full action queue. Units can lose their action point mid-turn, like when they do an action like attack (consumes all AP) or when they get attacked (-1) or even stunned (sets 0 AP). A double turn usually happens when other units that could move in-between lost their AP (or died).
Take this action order: ``` [phase1] [phase2] [phase3] -- cavalry [phase1 ][phase2 ] -- infantry ``` If infantry unit is killed or loses its phase2, the cavalry will have 2 actions in a row (given that there are no more units in the queue).
Generally speaking, it's enough to pay attention to the "dots" above the unit that represents the AP counter. If it's empty, the unit will not act during this **turn** (you can see the turn counter to the right).
Would like to more detailed description about rules. I didn't really get why in some cases you can't attack.
It was fun! I was defeated at the stage where my pieces were scattered along the map edge and the enemy army was all together. I liked the units getting stronger and leveling up, but it took so much gold to keep them healthy, I think the better strategy might be to let them die and hire new ones? The direction I recommend taking it is to having a more persistent base or something so losing a battle doesn't end the run, but you can rebuild your army after setbacks.