Fort Triumph - Fantasy XCOM meets OotS

[JeenLeen]

I hope to get the last code this evening, though if someone else gets it first I reckon I'll wait to see if you'll be posting more. Looks fun, and I don't even really know what XCOM is.

[adamzeira]

Would love feedback guys. It's how I convince people in the company to keep posting keys here :)

The feedback doesn't even need to be about gameplay - would love to hear which parts of the dialogue you liked more, which parts less, and how you'd change them. And if you liked the prologue or the campaign more

Is there a way to revive falen members, or to use the save function? Or should I reload the last autosave as soon as someone falls? Or is the idea that new members that join are replacements? I'm not too familiar with the genre conventions.

Yeah heroes who die are dead permanently. The idea is you want to feel a real loss when something like that happens, or you can't create real attacment. Something XCOM did very well. It's a core part of the experience, though we're thinking of ways to augment it because it's a little different in FT (in FT, maybe because you get dialogues, you end up getting a lot more attached to the characters. In XCOM a bunch of your rookies can die, you only get attached to them later on when they have significant levels, at which point they're also sturdier and don't die as easily)

I hope to get the last code this evening, though if someone else gets it first I reckon I'll wait to see if you'll be posting more. Looks fun, and I don't even really know what XCOM is.

They were gone super fast :/ but I'll post more next week with the new build. Usually on Monday, Tuesday if there's a delay

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Yeah heroes who die are dead permanently. The idea is you want to feel a real loss when something like that happens, or you can't create real attacment. Something XCOM did very well. It's a core part of the experience, though we're thinking of ways to augment it because it's a little different in FT (in FT, maybe because you get dialogues, you end up getting a lot more attached to the characters. In XCOM a bunch of your rookies can die, you only get attached to them later on when they have significant levels, at which point they're also sturdier and don't die as easily)

Here's a bit of feedback about this system.

On the one hand, I absolutely love that your characters CAN die, and WILL if you make a tactical blunder, or just if the RNG dislikes you that day. HOWEVER, the thing XCOM had going for it is that you had a whole *roster* of people available to you. One soldier dying was bad, especially if it was a Colonel, but ultimately you had others who could slot in. You could rotate around your stock of soldiers, so that no matter what mission turned up, you had someone who could at least perform the functions you needed. The wound system encouraged this, because even a light hit meant someone was in the medic bay for a few days, so if something else turned up in that time, you had to sub in someone else anyway. Who then got experience. And thus your 'second string' was born.

This does not seem to be the case in Fort Triumph, where you have the typical D&D trope of 'we have four intrepid heroes going boldly forth', but when you lose someone, not only is it pretty expensive to replace, but they get replaced with a newbie, whose skill options may be totally awful and you won't know until those options come up, and you have no real ways of cycling or holding onto potentially useful adventurers on a roster somewhere. You have what is available for hire from the Tavern... and that's it.

Maybe there's a mechanic I'm not seeing, but that seems like death is far more punitively harsh than in an XCOM game where a rookie with a grenade could still absolutely turn the tide of even a high-end battle if that grenade was used in the right location. His weapons were still the same weapons as everyone else's. Maybe he wasn't as accurate with it, maybe he was more prone to panicking, and maybe he didn't have any extra skills... but it was a warm body with a weapon that did relevant damage and a grenade.

One of the classic tropes in D&D is resurrection. Rob has played with it several times now. How about, instead of a recruiting hall where you get newbies, you have a temple with a cleric who can res your fallen allies... at a significant cost. And by significant, we're talking (Recruiting Cost * level squared) sort of ramping up cost. And in addition to that, require some kind of rare (or STUPIDLY expensive) drop. Or rather, how about 'in addition to', rather than 'instead of', and an option to dismiss a party member who isn't living up to his standards.

I'd also like to revisit a request for a more visible skill tree that has at least some player interaction, instead of RNG deciding if I have a useful character or a mostly worthless one.

They were gone super fast :/ but I'll post more next week with the new build. Usually on Monday, Tuesday if there's a delay

You know, you are perhaps the most generous indie studio I have seen yet. Most will release maybe one wave of keys, if that, and that's it. I also wonder how many of these keys are actually going to people who want to play the game seriously vs how many are taking them simply because they are available and hey... free stuff. It seems like a larger percentage of the keys seem to be taken by people who don't even bother to post that they've taken it, which is a pretty good sign that those people are simply taking them to take free stuff you are offering. I mean, the publicity thing is probably worth it in its own right, but I'm wondering if you are hitting the point of diminishing returns with the free keys.

[Thomas Cardew]

I also wonder how many of these keys are actually going to people who want to play the game seriously vs how many are taking them simply because they are available and hey... free stuff. It seems like a larger percentage of the keys seem to be taken by people who don't even bother to post that they've taken it, which is a pretty good sign that those people are simply taking them to take free stuff you are offering. I mean, the publicity thing is probably worth it in its own right, but I'm wondering if you are hitting the point of diminishing returns with the free keys.

He has decent point. You might want to post you have X keys available and then have people send you a DM to cut down on random people taking them.

It could also just be timing. I didn't get a chance to install and play till the weekend. Even then I barely got through the tutorial and cleared the spider dungeon. I'd suggest maybe realize the keys on Friday instead of Monday, then checking for feedback on Monday morning.

Few thoughts. I got mildly irritated during the tutorial when I was scrolling the screen around using the mouse to edge instead of wasd and the quest wouldn't advance. I couldn't figure out why. Something similar happened with the select hero after you free the barbarian. I clicked on the portrait on the portrait instead of hitting tab, and was frustrated when I could see all her available moves but not doing anything because I hadn't clicked 'Tab'. I feel if you're going to offer multiple control options, they should all fulfill the quest conditions. Tie advancement to the result not how someone got there. Mildly annoyed is not how I should feel with the game in the first 15 minutes.

As I think someone else mentioned. The troll felt weird. Everything was on the rails until the very last turn. I'd suggest either making that explicit too or flashing dialogue about 'You've got it from here'. Maybe some joke about the DM/Narrator going for more coffee/pizza/beer and you finish this fight.

I've been enjoying the humor and dialogue so far. The spider society joke made me chuckle. I need to play more and see more, but I'm worried that it needs to played straight a bit more. If you're always subverting tropes etc, it'll start to feel stale and predictable. Like the fortuneteller crystal, I would have left off the barbarian not being able to tell the difference.

That said I really am enjoying it so far.

EDIT: Been playing some more tonight when I time, had a bug in the middle of a fight. The one just after crossing the guarded bridge. I moved my ranger to cover, shot at the troll across the river with the grappling arrow. The animations happened; then nothing. I could move the camera, the music still plays, and the stun stars still spin, but I can't select my heros or move anyone. Screenshot.

[lord_khaine]

I have not played the game myself, only seen a video of it. But some bits seemed a little weird.
Especially the inclusion of a closer melee focus in a x-com styled game.

Are shields providing the same degree of protection as cover? Can you make your tank hunker down in overwatch, providing cover to an archer/mage behind while also slashing at the first enemy to close in?
Because i suspect that would provide much needed depth to what currently looks like a game of overwatch.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I have not played the game myself, only seen a video of it. But some bits seemed a little weird.
Especially the inclusion of a closer melee focus in a x-com styled game.

Are shields providing the same degree of protection as cover? Can you make your tank hunker down in overwatch, providing cover to an archer/mage behind while also slashing at the first enemy to close in?
Because i suspect that would provide much needed depth to what currently looks like a game of overwatch.

There are no shields, but all melee characters *automatically* have overwatch within melee range, and all melee characters can Brace to take half damage until the next turn, although that takes an action. These two things make melee characters *far* more viable than one might initially see. If you want to look up my videos, you'll see that in action.

Indeed, a viable tactic is to double-move into being adjacent to a ranged character, because a ranged character *cannot* fire when in melee with an enemy. So either he moves, and gets overwatched, or he goes into overwatch himself, in which case he gets hammered. Of course, dashing forward might reveal another pack before you are ready, but that's just part of the XCOM charm.

[Thomas Cardew]

Bug happened again. Different fight, same tile set. Used the grappling arrow to pull the top left troll diagonally to bottom right. It does the animation but the controls never pop up again.

EDIT: So I've been able to reproduce with ogres several times. Just did a map with spiders but the nothing happened. I've submitted a couple bug reports. Also had some visual glitches like ogres falling through the map after being pushed.

[lord_khaine]

There are no shields, but all melee characters *automatically* have overwatch within melee range, and all melee characters can Brace to take half damage until the next turn, although that takes an action. These two things make melee characters *far* more viable than one might initially see. If you want to look up my videos, you'll see that in action.

Indeed, a viable tactic is to double-move into being adjacent to a ranged character, because a ranged character *cannot* fire when in melee with an enemy. So either he moves, and gets overwatched, or he goes into overwatch himself, in which case he gets hammered. Of course, dashing forward might reveal another pack before you are ready, but that's just part of the XCOM charm.

It is actually your video i watched. But i kinda lost interest because it seemed like mostly a lot of overwatch spamming.

[deuterio12]

Yeah heroes who die are dead permanently. The idea is you want to feel a real loss when something like that happens, or you can't create real attacment. Something XCOM did very well. It's a core part of the experience, though we're thinking of ways to augment it because it's a little different in FT (in FT, maybe because you get dialogues, you end up getting a lot more attached to the characters. In XCOM a bunch of your rookies can die, you only get attached to them later on when they have significant levels, at which point they're also sturdier and don't die as easily)

You know Fire Emblem? For a lot of time it was infamous for being a tactical RPG with perma-death. But even the first game had the chance to ressurect a dead ally, although it was only in one of the last maps and you had to meet a bunch of extra requirements.

Still for a lot of time it was a quite niche series, to the point it only came outside of Japan by the 7th title or so, and only had a limited if loyal audience.

Then there was Fire Emblem Awakening, where for the first time perma-death was optional. And suddenly the game's popularity EXPLODED, to the point it went from a niche franchise Nintendo took decades to take from Japan and was about to abandon forever to something they can keep pumping out new titles every year including a phone game.

Now Fire Emblem Awakening did a bunch of other stuff right, but being able to disable perma-death was huge. You satisfy both sides of players, and should be pretty easy to code.

Kinda like the X-Com reboot had optional Ironman mode. Players can choose to be forced to accept their decisions, or they can not play ironman and still be able to spam save-load.

[Alent]

I'd be interested in trying this and devoting some stream time on my Saturday stream to it. Longtime S/RPG fan, although I can't claim to have more than 2~4 viewers on my stream. I just finished up a run of Final Fantasy 1 Restored, and am thinking to run Royal Stone next (an obscure gamegear S/RPG from Sega), but I'd be down for exploring this instead.

You know Fire Emblem? For a lot of time it was infamous for being a tactical RPG with perma-death. But even the first game had the chance to ressurect a dead ally, although it was only in one of the last maps and you had to meet a bunch of extra requirements.

Still for a lot of time it was a quite niche series, to the point it only came outside of Japan by the 7th title or so, and only had a limited if loyal audience.

Then there was Fire Emblem Awakening, where for the first time perma-death was optional. And suddenly the game's popularity EXPLODED, to the point it went from a niche franchise Nintendo took decades to take from Japan and was about to abandon forever to something they can keep pumping out new titles every year including a phone game.

Now Fire Emblem Awakening did a bunch of other stuff right, but being able to disable perma-death was huge. You satisfy both sides of players, and should be pretty easy to code.

Kinda like the X-Com reboot had optional Ironman mode. Players can choose to be forced to accept their decisions, or they can not play ironman and still be able to spam save-load.

I don't think that's quite accurate. The SNES Fire Emblems failed to come west because Kaga era FE wasn't shy about mature plot trappings like gods, rape, incest, the mass ritual sacrifice of children, etc. Translation would've had to censor huge swaths of the story just to get them past 90's era NoA censorship guidelines. (Although Mystery of the Emblem was tame compared to both Grandbell titles.) The exportability was made worse by most of the post-Kaga FE games being mediocre at best. S/RPGs work at their best when they're either "Nintendo hard", or social tier fun like Shining Force or FFT. After Kaga left, FE turned into something very different that tried to straddle the line between casual fun and Nintendo Hard at the same time, and succeeded at being neither.

(Edit: Addressing permadeath relative to Fort Triumph and in general below this point)

With that said, some S/RPGs have experimented with some really cool mechanics that make death mean something without having permadeath. Shining Force 3's friendship system and optional objectives make a great combo for making you feel connected to your characters. The things you do to grind friendship in that game not only build personal investment, they actually build a story in your mind where those characters have a reason to trust each other.

I've been mulling over permadeath and it's value in gaming for a while now, since I want to go indie and make S/RPGs, too. My overall conclusion is that permadeath has it's place, but it doesn't actually help create attachments to a character- it can only test the player's attachments to a character or goal. I don't do no death runs in Fire Emblem because I like the characters, I do no death runs because the game awards you for it at the end. I only care about a few of those characters- the rest are just padding to flesh out the game and usually end up warming the bench.

The trick to building attachment to a character is to develop a player's expectations for that character. Permadeath really doesn't factor into it in either direction. Consider the new Battletech game, where Dekker dying to headshots is a meme, but people are upset if their favorite recruit that they've been building up into a veteran merely gets wounded. This is due to the character suddenly being unable to match the player's expectations- now that character is unavailable for some time after the battle, and this affects the player's ability to farm C-bills to meet all those monthly expenses.

Many things can build that value- story and dialog, personal time invested via grinding, etc. It shouldn't be too hard to find places where the expectations of that value can be failed by defeat in a way other than permadeath.

[deuterio12]

I don't think that's quite accurate. The SNES Fire Emblems failed to come west because Kaga era FE wasn't shy about mature plot trappings like gods, rape, incest, the mass ritual sacrifice of children, etc. Translation would've had to censor huge swaths of the story just to get them past 90's era NoA censorship guidelines. (Although Mystery of the Emblem was tame compared to both Grandbell titles.) The exportability was made worse by most of the post-Kaga FE games being mediocre at best. S/RPGs work at their best when they're either "Nintendo hard", or social tier fun like Shining Force or FFT. After Kaga left, FE turned into something very different that tried to straddle the line between casual fun and Nintendo Hard at the same time, and succeeded at being neither.

Censorship is a weak excuse. The first Fire Emblem in particular didn't have that much "mature" stuff, the plot was quite barebones, and would've been child's play to censor it (and they still do censor here and there with the modern titles).

Nintendo simply thought the game would have no appeal outside of Japan (a common mistake, see also Xenoblade Chronicles for a more modern title that barely made it to the west). Luckily we had Super Smash brothers coming out with Marth/Roy, which turned out to be super popular, so Nintendo decided that it may be worth

And Blazing Blade was a freaking masterpiece, Koga or no Koga. Three lords (all 3 of which are still pretty popular to the point each got multiple versions in the mobile game), epic story, plenty of drama and dark themes, and it was quite high in the Nintendo Hard scale. If it had been a bad game, Nintendo would've given up on western Fire Emblem right there.

Although I'll agree that from there they started becoming a lot more casual, to the point people meme you can win the console titles with only Ike.

With that said, some S/RPGs have experimented with some really cool mechanics that make death mean something without having permadeath. Shining Force 3's friendship system and optional objectives make a great combo for making you feel connected to your characters. The things you do to grind friendship in that game not only build personal investment, they actually build a story in your mind where those characters have a reason to trust each other.

Cough Fire Emblem's Relationships cough.

I've been mulling over permadeath and it's value in gaming for a while now, since I want to go indie and make S/RPGs, too. My overall conclusion is that permadeath has it's place, but it doesn't actually help create attachments to a character- it can only test the player's attachments to a character or goal. I don't do no death runs in Fire Emblem because I like the characters, I do no death runs because the game awards you for it at the end. I only care about a few of those characters- the rest are just padding to flesh out the game and usually end up warming the bench.

What about the Shadow Dragon remake, where the game rewards you for getting your characters killed? Fans were seriously pissed off about that. Even if they were just bench-warmers, it was unfun and counter-intuitive to suicide most of your team to unlock all the secret levels.

So no, most players don't like seeing their unique characters die permanently, even when they're being rewarded, point.

[TheTeaMustFlow]

Yeah heroes who die are dead permanently. The idea is you want to feel a real loss when something like that happens, or you can't create real attacment. Something XCOM did very well. It's a core part of the experience, though we're thinking of ways to augment it because it's a little different in FT (in FT, maybe because you get dialogues, you end up getting a lot more attached to the characters. In XCOM a bunch of your rookies can die, you only get attached to them later on when they have significant levels, at which point they're also sturdier and don't die as easily)

The problem is the dialogue doesn't add much in that respect, since as far as I can tell all it checks for is if you have a character of a given class in your party - it doesn't matter if your wizard is the one you've had since the beginning, or a completely green replacement you added in 5 minutes ago, they'll still have the same lines. This makes them feel less like actual characters, and more like actors playing a role. It's like if you're playing D&D, Snorri Goblinkiller III the Dwarven Fighter dies, and you replace him with his identical twin brother, Snorri Goblinkiller IV the Dwarven Fighter.

On a related note, I noticed in Schneeky's playthrough that, if a character is missing, their lines are gone but all the others are the same, resulting in the surreal sight of the remaining characters having a one-sided conversation with a dead person, which is obviously extremely jarring - and a frankly bizarre choice in a game where you're supposedly expected to take casualties every now and then.

The narrative seems to be clearly written under the assumption that I've had the same four characters I started with all the way through, so I've unashamedly reloaded a previous save every time one of them died.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

It is actually your video i watched. But i kinda lost interest because it seemed like mostly a lot of overwatch spamming.

Considering perma-death and a lack of roster of second-string characters, do ya blame me?

[Knaight]

Considering perma-death and a lack of roster of second-string characters, do ya blame me?

It's worth giving some of the forced movement options a shot - overwatch gets you one attack, which is generally 4-8 damage on one target. Forced movement can routinely kill multiple weak targets (kicking small spiders into other small spiders, for instance) or kill individual strong targets despite them being at full HP.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

It's worth giving some of the forced movement options a shot - overwatch gets you one attack, which is generally 4-8 damage on one target. Forced movement can routinely kill multiple weak targets (kicking small spiders into other small spiders, for instance) or kill individual strong targets despite them being at full HP.

I did make use of that. Knocking things over on people, chain-hits, that sort of thing. Kicking trees over on people. But when I don't have enemies on screen, I do a lot of overwatch crawling because they definitely seem to have used XCOM's pack-spawning code, and you never know when Suddenly Sectopod might happen.

[lord_khaine]

Considering perma-death and a lack of roster of second-string characters, do ya blame me?

I can hardly blame you. I hate losing characters as well. Guess its more something to blame on the game.

I suspect the setup of the game should have been a little different than of what it is.
To make the permadeath make sense, then i would almost rather suggest to make the player take the role of guildmaster in an adventure guild.

That would bring the option of managing recruitment and training of backup heroes to the main squad. And perhaps also let killed heroes just get wounded and forced to sit out a couple missions.

[Alent]

Censorship is a weak excuse. The first Fire Emblem in particular didn't have that much "mature" stuff, the plot was quite barebones, and would've been child's play to censor it (and they still do censor here and there with the modern titles).

Nintendo simply thought the game would have no appeal outside of Japan (a common mistake, see also Xenoblade Chronicles for a more modern title that barely made it to the west). Luckily we had Super Smash brothers coming out with Marth/Roy, which turned out to be super popular, so Nintendo decided that it may be worth

And Blazing Blade was a freaking masterpiece, Koga or no Koga. Three lords (all 3 of which are still pretty popular to the point each got multiple versions in the mobile game), epic story, plenty of drama and dark themes, and it was quite high in the Nintendo Hard scale. If it had been a bad game, Nintendo would've given up on western Fire Emblem right there.

Although I'll agree that from there they started becoming a lot more casual, to the point people meme you can win the console titles with only Ike.

It's not an excuse. It's the simple truth. Kaga left, the series completely rebooted into a different series with a younger target demographic and immediate plans to go west. Someone wisely put the breaks on with Fuuin no Tsurugi because it was a bad game, but Blazing Blade went west and sold more than double the series average sales as a result.

Believe me, when I was younger, I swore up and down it was because the games were too hard. FE fosters an unusual elitism in its fans, I know, I went there in the 90's when I discovered the series. The reality, however, is simply one of cold business and target demographics- Nintendo doesn't have a reputation for selling dark games to kids, they have a family friendly image to maintain in the west and the NoA censorship policies in the 80's and 90's made for that purpose were so ridiculous that people would rather forget they ever happened. (They did, and it made the meteoric rise of the Playstation RPG market even possible.)

Cough Fire Emblem's Relationships cough.

You realize Shining Force 3 released in 1997, right? While it was likely inspired by Seisen no Keifu's marriage system, it easily predates every other relationship system in FE. That's irrelevant to the point I was trying to make for the OP to reinforce your own argument against permadeath- that there are ways to build a sense of loss without permadeath.

Perhaps I should have included the same quote of his you did after the paragraph about FE and NoA censorship.

What about the Shadow Dragon remake, where the game rewards you for getting your characters killed? Fans were seriously pissed off about that. Even if they were just bench-warmers, it was unfun and counter-intuitive to suicide most of your team to unlock all the secret levels.

So no, most players don't like seeing their unique characters die permanently, even when they're being rewarded, point.

Not only did you completely misunderstand what I was saying, you're refuting the wrong thing here.

We both seem to be in agreement that Permadeath is probably bad for this game, and when I saw the OP say the team felt it added attachment, I wanted to demonstrate that this was not the case by pointing out that death isn't the aspect of the game that builds attachment. The only direct refutation I was making to you was about FE's ability to go west earlier in the franchise. (I haven't even had a chance to play this game yet and it seems self-evident from other people's replies that permadeath is negatively impacting it.)

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I can hardly blame you. I hate losing characters as well. Guess its more something to blame on the game.

I suspect the setup of the game should have been a little different than of what it is.
To make the permadeath make sense, then i would almost rather suggest to make the player take the role of guildmaster in an adventure guild.

That would bring the option of managing recruitment and training of backup heroes to the main squad. And perhaps also let killed heroes just get wounded and forced to sit out a couple missions.

Or go with the D&D trope of extremely expensive resurrection. You know, diamond worth such and such plus caster's fees to bring the fallen back from the dead sort of thing. So it is still punishing death, but makes sense from a story perspective that the new guy isn't talking about things he/she never personally experienced.

Honestly, it's a pretty harsh dichotomy, XCOM holds the lives of their soldiers cheap, being in the horror genre of 'anyone at any time can die in a particularly gruesome and horrific manner', while D&D is on the completely other side of the power fantasy spectrum where either Death Is Cheap or Plot Armor exists. Crossing the two isn't an easy challenge, and probably the single greatest challenge the developers have to reconcile.

I'm waiting for the next version release to come out before recording more videos, to see how they have implemented certain things since my last recording. I'll also be doing the first campaign fresh.

[lord_khaine]

Yeah.. i would say its the opposite. Permanent death foisters detachment.
When your men can die at any moment. You either reload a lot like in old games such as Baldurs gate, until you have a perfect result.
Or else you begin to see your people as expendable fodder.
But when you can lose someone to a random event, then it encurage you to care less about him/her as a defensive mechanism.

[deuterio12]

It's not an excuse. It's the simple truth. Kaga left, the series completely rebooted into a different series with a younger target demographic and immediate plans to go west. Someone wisely put the breaks on with Fuuin no Tsurugi because it was a bad game, but Blazing Blade went west and sold more than double the series average sales as a result.

You seem to be implying that the series wasn't rebooting itself literally every title. Gaiden was completely different from Shadow Dragon, then the third title remade the first one changing lots of stuff, then Genealogy of the Holy War went for yet another completely different set of rules and characters, then Akaneia Saga was a bunch of stand-alone episodes streamed by satellite.

Koga leaving meant that Fire Emblem finally managed to stop rebooting itself every title and start polishing the mechanics.

Believe me, when I was younger, I swore up and down it was because the games were too hard. FE fosters an unusual elitism in its fans, I know, I went there in the 90's when I discovered the series. The reality, however, is simply one of cold business and target demographics- Nintendo doesn't have a reputation for selling dark games to kids, they have a family friendly image to maintain in the west and the NoA censorship policies in the 80's and 90's made for that purpose were so ridiculous that people would rather forget they ever happened. (They did, and it made the meteoric rise of the Playstation RPG market even possible.)

It was just cold business as I said. Translating a game takes work and money. And in particular back in the days Nintendo had one dude to translate all their games to english (and he used the chance to take plenty of liberties, like Chrono Trigger's Frog and FF VI Kefka speech patterns). If Nintendo considered a game wouldn't have enough public outside of Japan to make it worth the cost to translate, too bad. Fuuin no Tsurugi didn't get translated either because Nintendo simply thought westerners would have no interest, but luckily super smash brothers showed them the light, westerners fell in love with Marth and Roy right away.

And again, see the first Xenoblade Chronicles. Quite kid-friendly, but Nintendo was all "Na, westerners would not be interested in this" until the players made a big online petition going "Yeah, we want to play this!".

You realize Shining Force 3 released in 1997, right? While it was likely inspired by Seisen no Keifu's marriage system, it easily predates every other relationship system in FE.

C'mon, you can't just go "series X made it first if you completely ignore the other game that actually did it first". Fire Emblem characters getting married after fighting enough together is one of the staples of the series.

That's irrelevant to the point I was trying to make for the OP to reinforce your own argument against permadeath- that there are ways to build a sense of loss without permadeath.

Perhaps I should have included the same quote of his you did after the paragraph about FE and NoA censorship.

Ah, sorry for the confusion then.

Not only did you completely misunderstand what I was saying, you're refuting the wrong thing here.

We both seem to be in agreement that Permadeath is probably bad for this game, and when I saw the OP say the team felt it added attachment, I wanted to demonstrate that this was not the case by pointing out that death isn't the aspect of the game that builds attachment. The only direct refutation I was making to you was about FE's ability to go west earlier in the franchise. (I haven't even had a chance to play this game yet and it seems self-evident from other people's replies that permadeath is negatively impacting it.)

And I maintain my stance that it was no coincidence that western players seeing Marth and Roy in Super Smash Brothers then going "Who are those characters and why haven't we seen any of their games? Nintendo we want to play those character's games!", rather than your stance of "Fire Emblem was a super grimdark series, and Nintendo would never publish a super grimdark game to the west back in the day, please ignore all those early Final Fantasy titles like FFVI where one of your characters is keeping his dead girlfriend's corpse for years and another is chasing his family's ghosts that were poisoned along the rest of a city just to break a siege".

[TheTeaMustFlow]

Yeah.. i would say its the opposite. Permanent death foisters detachment.
When your men can die at any moment. You either reload a lot like in old games such as Baldurs gate, until you have a perfect result.
Or else you begin to see your people as expendable fodder.
But when you can lose someone to a random event, then it encurage you to care less about him/her as a defensive mechanism.

Indeed. When we say we care about our troops in XCOM, that means we care more about them in comparison to our troops in Age of Empires or Command and Conquer. We still care about them a hell of a lot less than our party in Dragon Age or KotOR.

[adamzeira]

Really interesting discussion. Been swamped with coding things for a new version so haven't posted in a bit, will be replying as soon as that's over

Gonna address just one point:

You know, you are perhaps the most generous indie studio I have seen yet. Most will release maybe one wave of keys, if that, and that's it. I also wonder how many of these keys are actually going to people who want to play the game seriously vs how many are taking them simply because they are available and hey... free stuff. It seems like a larger percentage of the keys seem to be taken by people who don't even bother to post that they've taken it, which is a pretty good sign that those people are simply taking them to take free stuff you are offering. I mean, the publicity thing is probably worth it in its own right, but I'm wondering if you are hitting the point of diminishing returns with the free keys.

Yeah, I agree, but I think there are 2 arguments in favor of giving keys (besides the more emotional "wanting to give back to the community")
1. We're a tiny indie studio with little/no marketing budget, any people here who received keys likely never would have even heard about the game and so couldn't have bought it (but as you said that has diminishing returns)
2. Clear feedback like the kind you've been giving is really valuable - it's worth it to give out a key to get a players detailed experience so you know what to change and the next dozen players have more fun.
On a related note I haven't been posting much because of working on implementing your ideas, but when there's time I should post the changes suggested here and implemented - a lot of your ideas are in and it's made the game *much* better for it. It's really beautiful to see.


But overall I agree, and the number of keys being handed out is definitely growing smaller

Actually had an interesting idea regarding giving keys (Partly from your post and Thomas'):

I'm confident having a nice light humor touch to the game, similar to OotS, will add a lot of fun in playing it (and wonder why more games don't do that, but that's a whole other discussion)
There are points in the game where that happens and it hits the spot (campaign mission 1, evil well, campaign mission 2). On the other hand at other points it's off. And as an indie studio this is pretty difficult to fix - we don't have resources for a full time writer and do a lot of the work ourselves in addition to our art/programming roles.
So I'm wondering what would happen if a mission dialogue was put here and people pitched ideas. Like if we posted the mages mission (which is one of the weaker ones, yet the one that has the most potential imo) and see what people come up with. I think there are a lot of witty people here and it could turn out great. If you guys would be up for it.

[JeenLeen]

If I get a key, I'd be happy to try to help with some dialogue. I also reckon I'd be able to provide some feedback as I play through the level. (My time to game is rather limited, between a full time job and 2 kids, but this looks interesting and I'd like to try it.) I was in the beta for Telepath Tactics and enjoyed giving feedback to it, so I reckon I'd enjoy this, too.

That said, I'm probably on the edge of who you want to get a key. I could afford it, but I'm not interested enough to pay for the game itself, so I'm a tad bit on the "hey, free stuff" group--but I would feel an obligation to give feedback and try to help improve the game. So no hard feelings if you don't release more keys and/or give them to others instead, but I figured I'd make this post in hopes of a key.

[lord_khaine]

Actually had an interesting idea regarding giving keys (Partly from your post and Thomas'):

I'm confident having a nice light humor touch to the game, similar to OotS, will add a lot of fun in playing it (and wonder why more games don't do that, but that's a whole other discussion)
There are points in the game where that happens and it hits the spot (campaign mission 1, evil well, campaign mission 2). On the other hand at other points it's off. And as an indie studio this is pretty difficult to fix - we don't have resources for a full time writer and do a lot of the work ourselves in addition to our art/programming roles.
So I'm wondering what would happen if a mission dialogue was put here and people pitched ideas. Like if we posted the mages mission (which is one of the weaker ones, yet the one that has the most potential imo) and see what people come up with. I think there are a lot of witty people here and it could turn out great. If you guys would be up for it.

I suspect if you come up with a promise on the line of "if we use at least x of your lines then you get a mentioning in the credits" then your going to get a lot of dedicated work.

Regarding the death bit. Since i have been playing a lot of Dominions 5 lately i begun thinking, what if losing all your HP just meant a roll on a affliction table?
For stuffs like "broken leg, -1 move" or "lost an eye, 10% down accuracy" or "neutered, minus all pride"

You could start a timer as soon as someone goes down, where if another hero manages to provide first aid then it either reduces the severity of the affliction, or how long it will last.
And make getting them removed by a priest a really expensive option.

oh.. this also opens the option for having a fixed team of heroes thats suposedly the same. If the barbarian then breaks her arm and need to sit out a few missions, then the party might need to hire a discount mercenary to fill the gap.
I think this would provide more attachment.

edit.
I also think it would provide more fun gameplay than crawling forward under overwatch

[Thomas Cardew]

Played some more, did the well which I enjoyed. And the mage breach level... which I did not.

The breach one was far too overwatch spammy by the enemy. I beat it without casualties through a lot of the cover manipulation effects etc, but it was not enjoyable. I rarely use overwatch myself, preferring to use the physics skills or other ways. But this fight made me feel like I had to, otherwise I'd just be waiting for my mages' push/vortex/teleport or the barbarians fear skill to come up.

Which leads me to a possible suggestion. The paladin feels weak. I use her a LOT less than the barbarian since she can't move as far or hit as hard. The kick ability is great but the barbarian has that too. I'd suggest making her shield more of her identity.

To that end some half baked skill ideas. Keep in mind, I've never played XCOM so I'm not sure how broken this will be... or how hard to implement. I'm not suggesting all of them by any means just throwing out ideas. The idea is to give the paladin a mobility and damage reduction option. Not as good mobility as the barbarian, but something to make her a little more useful. And better at popping enemy overwatches so you aren't sitting there waiting on the cooldown for your ranged physics skills to come up.

1. Covered Advance: The paladin lifts her shield and charges forward in a straight line. While moving the paladin has half cover in front her. After she reaches the end of the charge, she plants the shield in the ground and receives full cover and loses attack of opportunity for 1 turn.

2. Shield Charge: The paladin charges forward and bashes target with her shield dealing 1/3 damage and pushing it back 1-2 spaces.

3. Matyr's Resilience: The paladin steels herself and gains brace for the rest of the turn but losses X speed.

EDIT: Forgot to mention had a bug in the breach fight where I knocked an enemy mage INTO the wall where it was un-targetable but still able to attack. Still won the fight by killing the head mage but couldn't do anything to the mage in the wall including aoe's.

2nd EDIT: Forgot to mention, when I did the Well fight, I had 2 enemies argo to the side. I then got moved by the scripted dialogue to face the well with those 2 enemies now behind me. Scripted movement to start a fight isn't my favorite thing, but scripted movement that puts me in a worse position without letting me deal with enemies I'm already fighting is much worse.

[Knaight]

1. We're a tiny indie studio with little/no marketing budget, any people here who received keys likely never would have even heard about the game and so couldn't have bought it (but as you said that has diminishing returns)

It was certainly nowhere near my radar - and that free key not only put it on my radar (which could have happened without it), but let me play it enough to enjoy it, recommend it to a few people, and thus put it on more radars. There's potentially some serious marketing here through word of mouth.

[Alent]

I like the injury idea. You might also have units that defeat player characters kidnap them somehow, and have to do a side quest to save them, or similar.

Actually had an interesting idea regarding giving keys (Partly from your post and Thomas'):

I'm confident having a nice light humor touch to the game, similar to OotS, will add a lot of fun in playing it (and wonder why more games don't do that, but that's a whole other discussion)
There are points in the game where that happens and it hits the spot (campaign mission 1, evil well, campaign mission 2). On the other hand at other points it's off. And as an indie studio this is pretty difficult to fix - we don't have resources for a full time writer and do a lot of the work ourselves in addition to our art/programming roles.
So I'm wondering what would happen if a mission dialogue was put here and people pitched ideas. Like if we posted the mages mission (which is one of the weaker ones, yet the one that has the most potential imo) and see what people come up with. I think there are a lot of witty people here and it could turn out great. If you guys would be up for it.

This seems an interesting thought. I would certainly feel less bad mooching a key while I'm in forced savings mode if actively contributing in some way, also.

While I'm thinking about it, do you also have a TigSource Devlog thread for the game?

[adamzeira]

New build finally up! Prologue has been polished a bunch, and aside from minor adjustments in the future I think it's at a point now where we can move on to dealing with Strategic, which is where most of the things you guys are now bringing up are at


Regarding writing I don't want to give keys then make it specific peoples jobs, both because writing in the right tone is something some people will have and some won't and that's okay, and because it'll feel like a job. I think it's better to have people contribute something of significance then get a key

Looking at writing teams for really well made tv series, you see they have a *lot* of writers. The lead writer, Dan Harmon or Tina Fey and such tend to get the credit, but there are actually dozens of writers on those shows. I wonder if to create a masterpiece you really have to know how to work as a team, get all kinds of ideas from different people and their perspective on what works and what doesn't. It's theoretical, but is a pattern that emerges from looking at interviews. Anyway I think it's worth a shot

I'll post a bunch of details around the 91st post so it's right on the top of page 4 and easy to find. And on page 1

..the thing XCOM had going for it is that you had a whole *roster* of people available to you. One soldier dying was bad, especially if it was a Colonel, but ultimately you had others who could slot in...

This does not seem to be the case in Fort Triumph, where you have the typical D&D trope of 'we have four intrepid heroes going boldly forth', but when you lose someone, not only is it pretty expensive to replace, but they get replaced with a newbie

It's a really good point. Not sure what else to say :) I think now that prologue is done and the focus is on strategic, this becomes one of the most important things to deal with.

So far the suggested ways to deal with it by you guys are
- Expensive Resurrection/Quest/Item
- Rotate out heroes so the loss of one doesn't sting as much
- Ability to disable perma death (Fire emblem style)
- You're playing the role of a guildmaster and heroes dying is part of it
- Afflictions table on death

- (Can be in tandem with most of the above) Timer when a hero dies that lets you heal him and determines the severity of what you lose

(if I missed any let me know)

Need to think it over carefully. It's a big decision that'll require time and resources to implement

where a rookie with a grenade could still absolutely turn the tide of even a high-end battle if that grenade was used in the right location.

This part is important, I think it's what separates a good tactical game from a grinding tactical game where only high level units matter. I'd like to think FT has that though - a level 1 hero can have significant impact on the game using kick or whirlwind, as much as a level 1 in XCOM with a grenade.

It can always be improved of course.. Open to ideas. Maybe potions with various effects, similar to grenades in XCOM, but even stranger because you can have any kind of an effect with a potion

EDIT: Been playing some more tonight when I time, had a bug in the middle of a fight.

Fixed 2 out of the 3 bugs. The bug reports were super helpful, thanks. Fun fact: it's basically a miracle you encountered the troll bug twice, it was near impossible to recreate :)

Also was remaking the tutorial and implemented most of the suggestions

I've been mulling over permadeath and it's value in gaming for a while...

...The trick to building attachment to a character is to develop a player's expectations for that character. Permadeath really doesn't factor into it in either direction...

...Many things can build that value- story and dialog, personal time invested via grinding, etc. It shouldn't be too hard to find places where the expectations of that value can be failed by defeat in a way other than permadeath.

Sounds interesting... If you have ideas, happy to hear them :)
Sending you a key in a PM btw. A build came out today with a much changed prologue, would love to see someone playing it

On a related note, I noticed in Schneeky's playthrough that, if a character is missing, their lines are gone but all the others are the same

It varies, maybe it was a piece of dialogue where if a character is alive it adds something independently of anyone else. Most of the time not having a character changes the dialogue. There's definitely an issue there though - the original idea was that most of the speaking would be done by side characters for that specific mission - like a wizard you're escorting or some such

But then we made the prologue campaign as a prototype, where your characters have actual dialogues, and people connect a *lot* more to them than a side NPC. So.. Requires some thinking.. Open to any suggestions

...what if losing all your HP just meant a roll on a affliction table?
For stuffs like "broken leg, -1 move" or "lost an eye, 10% down accuracy" or "neutered, minus all pride"

...could start a timer as soon as someone goes down, where if another hero manages to provide first aid then it either reduces the severity of the affliction, or how long it will last

oh.. this also opens the option for having a fixed team of heroes thats suposedly the same. If the barbarian then breaks her arm and need to sit out a few missions, then the party might need to hire a discount mercenary to fill the gap.
I think this would provide more attachment.

edit.
I also think it would provide more fun gameplay than crawling forward under overwatch

I like these

Probably hard to balance though - Pillars of Eternity did the injury thing, and it was meaningless because you could always just heal it up
Darkest Dungeon also did the negative traits thing - and it was also almost meaningless because it was too expensive to treat (and too much effort to pick your heroes based on injuries), or keep track of. Though that was with a very large roster of characters
Maybe it can be tweaked to be balanced, though I suspect it'll be hard to keep it in a good place inbetween "too harsh" and "meaningless"

[GloatingSwine]

You know Fire Emblem? For a lot of time it was infamous for being a tactical RPG with perma-death. But even the first game had the chance to ressurect a dead ally, although it was only in one of the last maps and you had to meet a bunch of extra requirements.

Fire Emblem also traditionally gives you about three times the number of characters you can possibly use in a map, with multiple largely identical copies of the same class quite often, so losing one is less of an inconvenience.

[adamzeira]

Actually, silly to wait. Will write the overall mission direction and edit the first post to reflect it

So mission 3 in the campaign is between 2 mage factions - the Worldshapers and Stormhands. I feel like there's a lot of potential in it, mage themes being very fertile ground for writing, but it doesn't really nail the humor right now and needs to be rewritten

Mages - Have two recurring themes:
1. Bachelors/Masters/PhD students. References to student and university life and everything that it entails (ramen-eating first years to citation-chasing professors/PhD students)
2. Mad scientists obsessed with discoveries at any cost, disregarding other peoples safety, but not their own. The girl genius comic nails it in a few places
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20091019
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20091021
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20091026

Worldshapers & Stormhands (aka Ghouliards) schools - Worldshapers is a poor college. Stormhands is a fancy university. References and parodies to real world or fantasy schools are welcome. Prep schools, SAT, lack of funds, citations, internships etc etc
Currently -
Worldshapers have a Sorting Fedora, though maybe it should be given to the Stormhands
Stormhands have an upcoming questline where Chad the mage joins you in stealing a rival college's mascot. He's a terrible mage and is only in the university because his father donated a wing to the school

Abstevan Girdleweaver - a professor in the Worldshapers college
Professor Barnaby Pettysworth - a professor in the Stormhands university
They're both at each others throats during the mission for, essentially, being professors in the same field, it's kind of an allusion to the competitive nature academia sometimes brings out in people. It doesn't come across as very amusing atm, and can be removed if that doesn't change. But it's an idea.

The breach - a magical occurrence, somewhat like a meteor crash spot, that both sides want to study. The Stormhands want to take it apart and examine it, the Worldshapers want to examine it as it is first, then take it apart and examine it

You can also use hero characters, but then there should be fallbacks that assume only 1 of them is alive. So for example there can be lines between the paladin and mage, but they need a fallback in case only the mage is alive, for example

(Currently there's only the Worldshapers side but there'll be the option of picking Stormhands soon)
pre-mission dialogue - a confrontation between the mages
mission dialogue 1 - defend the breach for 3 turns while enemies approach
mission dialogue 2 - breach is safe, chase after Barnaby
mission dialogue 3 - Barnaby is dead, victory


The first 2 dialogues go as such:

World map dialogue:

Spoiler: Mission 3 World Map Dialogue

Show

Abstevan: Pettysworth, you old hack, you won't get anywhere near this breach!
Pettysworth: Do you understand the forces we are contending with here Girdleweaver? Of course not.
Where did you learn your "magic", In a coloring book?
Abstevan: It was the best coloring book the school board could afford that year, you pompous slime!
Pettysworth: Think of the <b>science</b>, Girdleweaver! The discoveries we could make, the advancements!
We must consume this breach's mana and study it!

<size=-7>It will, theoretically, only collapse the wave fabric of time a little bit.</size>
Abstevan: You maniac! The breach must be protected.
We will mend the tears and restore this piece of land to its full pride.

<size=-7>Then afterwards, we will rip it apart in a careful and precise manner, of course.</size>
Pettysworth: You insipid coward. You know full well my funding requires immediate results.
I've had it with this...
Pettysworth: Stormhands! Show these cretins the destructive power of REAL mages!
Abstevan: To arms, Worldshapers! To arms!
That is, uh, if you were given any weapons. Budget was rather tight this year...

First dialogue:

Spoiler: Mission 3 First Dialogue

Show

Abstevan Girdleweaver: The Stormhands are going to rip this breach open if we don't stop them. Fight on!
Professor Barnaby Pettysworth: Are those actual broomsticks wielded by your pupils, Girdleweaver?
Abstevan Girdleweaver: What our students lack in armaments, they make up for in ability, unlike your spoiled brats!
<Worldshapers mage student moves up, Stormhands mage student casts fireball, killing him>
Professor Barnaby Pettysworth: Haha! What was that you were saying?
Abstevan Girdleweaver: Confirmation bias is beneath even you Pettysworth.

Although perhaps sorting students by bravery over smarts is less than effective. Somebody should really speak with that Sorting Fedora.


<Heroes teleport in to assist Abstevan>
Any (1-1):
Mage: We're here to help!
Ranger: We're here ta help.
Paladin: We have arrived to save the day!
Savage: We come help!
Abstevan Girdleweaver: Reinforcements! Thank the Gods. We need to hold out long enough to heal the breach.

{Dustin}! You’re my star pupil, go and heal that breach! You lot, protect {Dustin:her-him} while {Dustin:she-he} works!

Let's start with the first 2 and see what we can do. Editing suggestions, dialogue ideas, general theme ideas are all welcome. Discuss