AMA is now live!
over 6 years ago – Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 04:35:38 PM

Our AMA just went live!

Feel free to join us and ask us anything about anything:

https://gamingama.com/2-years-ago-i-left-my-corporate-job-at-ea-to-create-my-own-story-driven-458901/

Equipment & AMA Today at 5pm EST
over 6 years ago – Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 04:34:14 PM

Things are going well and we've moved past 60% funded. Again, a big thanks to everyone! We couldn't be doing it without your great support.

A quick reminder that we'll be having an AMA today at 5m PM EST. It will last 2 days. Bring any question! :)

AMA: HERE!

Equipment

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark has an equipment system that's both fairly standard, yet different than what most people should be used to. The main equipment categories are weapons, body armor, head armor, shields and accessories.

Weapons:

We have many different types of weapons, each family of weapons having their own general style.

Swords are well balanced weapons. They have decent attack power and the widest range of special effects and attributes out of all weapons.

Daggers are available to a lot of classes. They have lower attack and less range (vertical range) than swords. They tend to boost speed, evasion and critical chances and many have added status effects to their attacks.

Axes boast the highest damage for single-handed weapons in general, but tend to be otherwise unremarkable. They are the ultimate "brute force" go-to weapon.

Rapiers are only available to a few hybrid classes. They tend to have medium attack power (lower than swords, higher than daggers) and boost magical power a little bit. They usually come with some form of status effect protection as well.

Spears have medium attack power and confer a little bit of defense as well. They are one-handed weapons and their distinguishing feature is they can attack 2 tiles away rather than only 1 like most other melee weapons.

Maces are mostly only available to some hybrid classes. They have slightly weaker attack than Rapiers, but are very well balanced, conferring a small bonus to all defenses as well as to MND and even to max MP.

Rods are a caster's best friend. They do not offer much in the way of attack power, but they offer the highest increase to ones MND and are only available to select classes focusing on magical devastation. They tend to offer various resistances to elements and give an element to regular attacks.

Staves are the favored weapon of many healers. They offer a bit more attack than rods, but less MND increase. They make up for it with adding to one's magical defenses and evasion. A well rounded weapon.

Scythes are 2-handed weapons restricted to only a few specialized classes. They boast incredibly high attack damage and have a natural bonus to critical damage done.

Mauls are 2-handed weapons and offer the highest damage of all weapons. They are restricted to a few classes, but are generally easier to procure than scythes. They also increase one's maximum HP.

Guns are mysterious modern contraptions. Their damage is on the low side, but they have incredible range and can be used 1-handed. Only a very few understand their mysteries enough to use them.

Bows are 2-handed weapons boasting a solid attack power and quite the range. They are favored by those dedicated to archery and not the choice of laymen.

Crossbows are 2-handed weapons with less attack and less range than bows, but they are also simpler to use and thus more classes have access to them. They often confer an element to one's attacks.

Body Armor and Head Armor:

Both body armor and head armor is divided into 3 categories: cloth, light and heavy.

Cloth is favored by the magically oriented classes and tends to offer a small defense against physical attacks, but a very big defense against magical attacks. Cloth armor often provides elemental resistances, whereas cloth headgear will often increase one's MND.

Light is usable by just about everyone and confers a fairly balanced protection overall. Both light armor and headgear are varied in their design and offer a hodgepodge of benefits.

Heavy is usable by the strongest of warriors only and offers the highest physical protection there is, at the cost of somewhat lower magical defenses. Both armor and headgear are varied in their effects, but boast some legendary pieces of very powerful equipment.

Shields:

Shields can be equipped by many classes, although casters usually don't favor them. They offer added defense and a boost to evasion. Many powerful shields focus on blocking specific elements as well, adding versatility to any warrior's load.

Accessories:

Accessories are quite varied in their effects, but generally split into 3 categories: boots, rings and gloves.

Boots tend to confer a bit of defense and improve one's mobility, either through added Move or Jump, or a mix.

Rings are the go-to for units wanting to increase their resistances to various status effects as well as getting some small stats increase.

Gloves are the #1 choice for those wanting a simple increase to specific stats, along with a defense boost. They might not be as fancy as other accessories, but will give you that extra little boost you're looking for to your stats!

Every piece of equipment in the game has its own menu icon and every weapon has its own combat sprite.

Equipping a unit:

When equipping a unit, you have 6 slots do fill as you wish, with some restrictions. You can only ever wear 1 body armor and 1 head piece. Without the ability to dual wield, you can only equip 1 weapon and 1 shield. With dual wielding, you can equip 2 weapons or 2 shields. There is also an ability that allows one to wield 2-handed weapons using only 1 hand or 1-handed weapons using 2 hands, which gives you a great amount of flexibility as to what you can equip.

Any remaining slots once you are done with your weapons, armor and shield can be used by any combination of accessories. Or you could forgo any of the above and just equip accessories if you're so inclined.

Another exciting Kickstarter to check out

Anyone that's a fan of digital collective card games should check out Doomtrooper, set in the world of Mutant Chronicles. Lots of beautiful cards and intricate lore!

They got funded in the first 36 hours and have been working on unleashing Stretch Goals!

You can check it out HERE!

New Idle Animation now part of the game! And monster portraits.
over 6 years ago – Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 04:53:02 PM

First, we wanted to mention that we're almost up to 700 backers! Thanks a lot everyone!

Also, if you haven't yet, please consider supporting our Thunderclap signaling the last 48 hours of the campaign! There's still plenty of time before that happens, but we like to be ready! (Thunderclap is a free service that will post a message on your twitter/facebook/tumblr page when the final 48hrs begin, which should give us lots of visibility on social media!)

Idle Animation added to base goals

We've known for a while that a lot of fans have been wanting a new idle animation to replace the retro "walking in place" idle. We've been working on getting everyone's feedback on the best one and just finished creating a prototype for it, which has been well received.

It's become obvious to us during the Kickstarter that this is a big issue for a lot of fans, so we've been working at finding a way to include the new Idle Animation as part of the base goals rather than be a stretch goal, without losing any content.

Since the majority of the game is funded from our own savings, it gives us added wiggle room that other projects might not have. It took us some planning, but we've managed to rework our expenses to include the new idle animation to the base game, while retaining all the content we had already decided on. It's going to add extra strain to our savings and loans, but we should be able to shoulder the extra cost and deliver the new idle animation we've shown as part of the base game. We'll still include an option to allow players to use the "retro style idle animation" if they want to, as was planned in the stretch goals.

This led us to reworking the Stretch Goals and we've moved up a previously lower stretch goal into the 2nd position: Hard Mode. Hard Mode will have a slew of changes to every encounter to increase the difficulty, including more enemies, different abilities, higher stats, different AI, etc.

Monster Portraits

We also want to show a few of our monster portraits that have been finalized fairly recently (you might have seen some of those on our twitter feed recently). We're still missing a lot of monsters from our planned list (we have more than 15 unique monsters sprites planned), but this should give an idea of how they'll look and be animated!

Another awesome project in need of love

Today we'd like to bring to your attention a project on Fig called Crazy Justice. It's an awesome looking cel-shaded 3rd-person shooter game with some steampunk goodness! It has full multiplayer (something my wife and I always enjoy!) and you'll be able to customize your character and craft and customize your weapons.

 You can check out their already 98% funded project HERE.

New Idle, Modding & Special Thanks
over 6 years ago – Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 06:16:34 PM

Things are going at steady pace and we're nearing the 55% mark. Once again, thank you everyone for your help and support!

We're going to keep this update fairly short this time (the last one sure had a lot of mechanics to digest and we're still answering questions about it)!

New Idle

As was mentioned before, a lot of fans have been asking for a new idle animation and we ran our basic design by everyone in this update. After tallying all the input we got on it, 2 of the proposed stances were roughly neck-to-neck for fan approval. When we started implementing the actual idle animation, one of them quickly revealed problems when linking to other frames (attacks, getting hit, etc), so that broke the tie! Here's the first version of what the new idle would look like:

While this illustrates the way it'll look, we still have to create the frames for every outfit/hat/weapon/etc in the game. This only represents about 5% of the total work needed to bring the new idle animations to life, but it should help show what you can expect for it!

Basic Modding

We want to make sure the game has solid replay and lasting value, so we prepared a simple, but fairly effective, way for users to mod the game.

First, you can add portraits of your choosing to the game. The system is fairly standard: every portrait has a small and a large PNG and needs to be of the correct size. Then you drop them in a folder and they'll now appear in game, as simple as that. Full instructions are included in a .txt file with the demo already.

The next set of modding options we have is again fairly simple, this time in the form of a config file called GameOptions.txt that comes with the game. This file isn't finalized and many more options have yet to be added to it, but there's already several hundred lines of things that can be changed.

Some of those things include the base potency of criticals, status effects, exp gains, ap gains, specific bonus and values for map events, the max size of your army, AI behaviors, UI colors, default outfits for enemies...

Well, a LOT of stuff. With the amount of options in that file, it should be easily possible for the community to create very potent balancing mods of their own, including changing AI behavior and specific maps rewards and events.

We'll be open to suggestions and requests for things to add to that file from the fans on our Discord server (within reason, of course ^^).

Special Thank You

We'd like to give a special thank you to our friends from inXile and Obsidian for the shout-outs they've given us! It's definitely teams like these that enable the Indie Dev Community to flourish and thrive. We're very grateful for the encouragement and support. Once again, thank you guys!

Another Exciting Kickstarter

Today we'd like to bring to your attention Relic Hunters Legend, an online cooperative shooter with RPG elements.

Fun, fast paced action with your friends, gathering loot and growing your Hunters? Sign us up!

 

 Check it out right HERE!

50% Funded! BackerKit, Elemental resistances & status effects.
over 6 years ago – Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 10:23:13 PM

We're now 50% funded! An enormous thank you for all the support! We're incredibly grateful :)

We're happy to report that, after consulting with our current Arbiter Portrayer backers, we've increased the amount of available Arbiter Portrayer slots from 20 to 30 since they were so popular. If you wanted us to draw your portrait and add it to the game but didn't manage to snag an Arbiter Portrayer tier, now's your chance! :)

Also, we've just cleared 1 of our 2 Arbiter Hero tiers! We're looking forward to working with our incredible backer to design a unique custom battle as well as a powerful and exciting special class!

Finally, we're happy to report we'll be partnering with Backerkit to help us deliver add-ons and rewards as well as make the fulfillment process as smooth as possible for our backers!

Now, on to explaining a few more of our systems!

Elemental Resistances

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark features 2 types of damage: physical and magical damage. As we've covered in a previous update, each character has an ATK and a MND value, representing their physical and magical damage potential, as well as a DEF and RES value, representing their resistance to physical and magical damage.

All damage can be either un-typed (ie. raw physical or raw magical damage) or can be of a specific elemental type.

Every unit has different resistances to every different element, either positive or negative. For humans, most of these resistances come from their equipped gear, whereas for most monsters, their resistances are inherent.

Negative values imply a weakness and thus more damage received. Positive values mean less damage taken and for values greater than 100, you'll be healed by the element rather than hurt by it.

Taking advantage of your enemies' resistances is a good way to increase your damage output in combat, but not all enemies will be sporting the same strengths and weaknesses, so you'll have to tailor your attacks to your opposition to get the most out of it.

Conversely, adapting your own resistances to your enemies' favored elements might mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Status Effects

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark has a number of status effects, both positive and negative. Our goal is to make status effects more interesting and viable than they usually are in most games. Status effects, especially the negative ones, usually tend to suffer from awkward balancing issues, where they are often too powerful or simply not useful enough to warrant using.

We have many small design details that, when coming together, are geared towards changing that. Generally speaking, most abilities that apply status effects have either a fairly reliable success rate, or a fairly decent base damage, to ensure they are always useful. Also, while many status effects can be quite potent, none should be so powerful as to be game-changing by themselves.

Beneficial Status Effects

Attack/Critical%/Defense/Mind/Resistance Up: Increases the given attribute by a certain % (usually around 20%).

Barrier: Prevents the next status effect that would have affected the target.

Hasted: The unit gets their turn faster (~25%) than normal.

Mirage: The next offensive ability aimed at the target will miss.

Regenerating: The unit recovers a bit of HP at the start of every turn (~20%).

Rebirth: After falling in combat, the unit will immediately get back up (and won't suffer an injury).

Thorns: Any damage dealt to the unit will be reflected in part back onto the attacker.

Detrimental Status Effects

Attack/Defense/Mind/Resistance Down: The given attribute is lowered (~20%).

Berserk: The target flies into a blind rage and will automatically attack the closest target to them when their turn comes up.

Bleeding: Does damage based on the target's max HP (~20%) at the beginning of their turn.

Blinded: While blinded, the target's accuracy is severely diminished (~50%).

Charmed: The target will automatically fight for the side of the caster of the charm.

Crippled: The target cannot use physical based abilities.

Muted: The target cannot use magical based abilities.

Poisoned: Does damage based on the target's max HP (~20%) at the beginning of their turn.

Rooted: The target is unable to use the Move action.

Sleeping: The target is fast asleep and cannot take any action. Most physical actions taken against them will wake them up.

Slowed: The target's turn comes slower (~25%) than normal.

Weakened: The target has lowered resistances to status ailments.

Status effects will last for a few turns (1-3) or until they are dispelled or otherwise removed.

Always remember that a well placed status effect can have a powerful impact on the tide of combat! So, make sure to consider them when coming up with your strategies!

Other exciting Kickstarter projects

Here's another project we're very excited about: Freeman: Star Edge. The game is a mix of space and ground exploration and, of course, awesome combat.

Frankly, the style reminds us a lot of Mass Effect and that's a very good thing!

 Check out their Kickstarter HERE.