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[miljan]

Just wanted to say; Thanks for posting this. Your thread brought in a few backers on Kickstarter.

Glad I can help you. As I can not support you directly. Hope you hit the goal, good luck

[nenjin]

Will have to toss a couple bucks this thing's way.

[EagleV]

Going to back this tonight, and advertising to some folks - I want this to get to $10.000.

[Rayvolution]

Going to back this tonight, and advertising to some folks - I want this to get to $10.000.

Thank you! Spreading the word is is absolutely the best kind of support anyone can give me.

Also, you guys have brought 5 backers from this thread! Woot!

[nenjin]

So this is actually pretty nice. There's playable build you can tool around with here. You might have to futz with your Java install, I needed to so it would run. If you get an error message or the game simply doesn't start, install this version: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre8-downloads-2133155.html

The pixel art is nice and clean. The music is soothingly chip tune-y. The game plays a lot like Fort Mode for DF. You highlight stuff for your people to interact with, and assign them to buildings to generally dictate what they're supposed to do with their time. They have names, levels and stats. They take mates and breed. The lighting engine is nice and soft. The sound effects aren't annoying. I'm actually letting it run while I type this.

I'm actually getting a bit of a Castle Story vibe off the aesthetics, but I mean that only in a good way. This is already a way more playable game than Castle Story.

There's not too much to say about it right now other than that. I'm constantly using the debug tool to spawn more people because they keep dying off so fast. Maybe they're starving. I dunno. It's a tech demo so there's plenty that's not in yet. But it shows a lot of promise.

Some random thoughts as I play. Some of this might already be in game and I just can't figure out how to do it/what it means, or it might already be planned:

-The maps are pretty neat. I love the ruined remains of other buildings in them.

-Resource values at the top need to be color coded based on what's good or bad. Is high hunger or low hunger better? I assume low since it goes up when you spawn more guys.

-It'd be nice to have a mouse button to cancel your selection. Having to hit escape every time is a pain Maybe double right click.

-Could definitely use both fast forward buttons and a pause button.

-There's no way to destroy existing structures so far that I can see.

-How to rotate buildings?

-My guys randomly start bleeding like crazy. The first house I built had a small lake of blood around it for how many people suddenly started bleeding inside. I assume maybe that's old age, as I have had villagers dying off. If there is an age to guys (that isn't just their level) it'd be nice to see it.

-Part of me doesn't see how this can be a survival game. At least, without knowing how monsters will work out. It's got all the resource chains and considerations of a game like DF. Except there's no migrants; population replacement seems to be by breeding only and it's kinda slow. So just getting a level of sustainability so you can build population is a thing. Which leaves little time for wall building and preparing for the general defense, and makes me wonder how you're going to get anywhere once attacks are added in.

-The resources needed to complete a structure should probably read a little different than the resources a structure holds once it's completed. Was confused at first that everything I clicked on was storing wood.

-The blood is pretty sweet.

-A sound effect when someone dies, like an "Agggh!" or the toll of a church bell, would be nice.

-It'd be nice to be able to jump to or highlight the person you're clicking on from the "Population" Menu. Or basically any place you can hover over a person and see their name.

-I like the star field back drop. Would be cool if there were occasionally things moving through it, like asteroids or suns or planets or giant disembodied eyeballs.

-A message log would be good, even if it's going to be filled with spam.

-I assume it's planned, but sandbox options are a must. I'm finding I enjoy the building in this, so I'd like a mode where you can unlock anything new, where you can turn invasions on/off.

-When you click on a building, it'd be good if the other "work" buildings also got a highlight, the color of which indicates how fully/not-fully staffed it is. Or maybe just an icon of the works + current/max displayed over the structure. Alternatively, this seems like the kind of game that would benefit greatly from some visual overlays. Building occupancy, storage capacity, pathing, ect.... overlays.

-Sim City-like natural disasters would be a nice feature.

-A sfx when you click on a building would add some life and noise to the village. Masons chipping on stone, murmurs of a household, that sort of thing.

I'd put off trying this for a while but I'm glad I made the time; it's looking like it's going to be a very fun game. It's slick and easy to get into. The kind of thing that can scratch that DF itch a little without committing you to, you know, DF.

It's already funded but there's still a week left to get in on it. I went in for $20 but I'm thinking about bumping my pledge a little after playing it.

[nenjin]

And then I just accidentally closed the game window instead of a menu.

[n9103]

It's actually Fullness (or that's the way it acts), and higher is better. Those at 0 will bleed and die if they don't get food. So yea, that's not old age that's killing them, you tyrant :p
High Happiness is also better, and is increased with idle time (I think they *have* to be unassigned).

No destruction or rotation yet.

[burningpet]

Well, i finally managed to run it thanks to Nenjin's link.

I like what i played.

Nenjin's suggestions are gold, so ill just second all of what he said and just add a few minor suggestions:

- Clicking on a citizens in a building will center the camera on him.
- I don't see why you would actually need 4 different designations types. just have designate and undesignate. designating trees naturally assumes you want them cut, etc etc for rocks and crystals. 

There is an issue with slowness when reaching big population that is going idle, probably because idle citizens call a pathfinding search and/or browse through job lists? i suspect it has more to do with the random wandering pathfinding calls that hog it, but ill give suggestions assuming its both:

1) The least desired, have delayed response for citizens pathfinding calls which basically means it will also have a delay on response time to designations.

2) Two lists for idle citizens. fresh Idle citizens. citizens that finish a job go to that list and have 80% chance to be called when the next job is assigned. this list does not get a delayed response or if it does, its a very short delayed response and it keeps it random wandering. after a certain period of time (need testing for balancing) they are moved to an old idle citizens list and have only 20% chance to be called for a job, this list gets high response time and does not randomly wander. this is a middle ground approach which might improve performance, still maintain quicker responses and keep the atmospheric touch of wandering citizens. the only thing needs thinking and balancing is the part where a smaller population will go through more jobs and thus have less idle time. (This is an approach that assumes that the hogging is due to both wandering citizens and cycling through the job list)

3) If the citizens search the whole map every time they move, maybe limiting the random wandering to only the "Buildable Area" could reduce the time on those pathfinding calls.

4) Since in my opinion, the atmospheric touch of wandering citizens is less important than performance, i'd say just remove wandering altogether. since people do like it as it give the illusion of a living town, reduce the random wandering calls dramatically and/or enhance the atmosphere by giving citizens various idle animations.

5) Make jobs like farming (Farmers are a meaningful portion of the population) more "demanding". tiilling, watering, whatever. so long as the citizens are in the farm and are making little animations rather than call for a path.

6) Again, two groups of Idle citizens. this time its only based on % of the population. the first group which consists of 30% of the citizens wanders regularly, the second group have Random wandering completely removed. every minute or so shuffle the lists so citizens will appear to be all alive.

7) Since its probably has to do with various computer specs, its more than possible that other people haven't even noticed it. although, my computer runs far more demanding games easily. regardless, have a system that add/reduce the delay time based on the computer specs.

[bQt31]

You can get it for 2.5$ in the weekly indie gala bundle along with Deadlings Rotten Edition, Crimsonland, Nom Nom Galaxy,Muffin Knight and Super Trench Attack!

[nenjin]

They added AI monsters to this now, along with some turrets. They also took away the debug tool to spawn more plebes, so, deaths matter now. Guys start trickling in on Day 2 or so, and from there they come in larger numbers with ever higher stats. At Day 7, they were as tough as some of my original villagers (who were quite beef from cutting stone and wood all the live long day). Villagers, in large enough numbers, could still down them, but being that you don't control your guys, that wasn't going to happen. After marching past my drained turrets, zombies started pulling my villagers apart.

Here's a picture of my settlement the night before it was pretty much overrun. (Sorry for the giant image, the forum resizing code didn't want to work.)

Spoiler: Huge image (click to show/hide)

The turrets work, for a while. They run off essence which your Essence Collectors gather when stuff dies (and I think produce a trickle of essence themselves normally.) Unfortunately, enemy numbers and/or toughness eventually outstrips the amount of Essence you get for killing them, and they stop shooting. By Day 7 I was being hit from all three sides, with the south side of the village just starting to heat up.

Pre-alpha yadda yadda, but I'm curious how else they plan help you mitigate threats beyond just a bigger, better tower. Villagers aren't bad for killing stuff, but they get unhappy for having to fight (not sure if that effects their productivity or anything right now), and again...you can't control them. Soldiers with swords that you could post places would help a great deal.....also AI that didn't up and wander outside the village where, by Day 5, there are groups of monsters hanging out literally on your doorstep, waiting to ambush anyone that walks by. Or enemy AI that doesn't actively bait villagers into chasing them away from the village and into a group of their friends.

The replacement rate through birth is way slow as well, especially when your mothers to be keep getting et by zombies.

It's shaping up a little, but the real meat of the game will come in with the technology unlocks that are supposed to make getting up and running faster. I ended up shifting a lot of structures around because I built my village center into a space I had to clear first. So I imagine I might have found a better spot, and lasted a day, maybe, longer. I chose that area because of the bottlenecks, and I doubt not having them initially would make life easier.

If 7 Days is a good amount of time for a single play through of this, expect games to last about an hour and a half.

[Parsely]

The terrain reminds me of Creeper World.

[nenjin]

This is 50% for a full week.

Since the last time I posted the game hasn't really gotten any more feature-rich. But there's been a ton of optimization in the back end, and a couple needed core features like saving and loading games, and sfx for things like children being born, people leveling up and people dying. AIs and spawns have been tweaked, and I'm happy to say villagers now rush to support each other in combat, and run away when the odds are too great, instead of basically being at the mercy of the AI pathing to determine whether they live or die.

That said, the big feature everyone is waiting for, the unlocks, aren't here yet. But I suspect after all the recent work, and a week long sale, that it might not be too far out. Seems like a good way to nab a lot of new testers and get people to buy into a second wave of EA with the beginnings of the unlock content.

Anyways, I'm always surprised how soothing I find this game to play. I'll fire it up to check out some mechanics and end up settling down for a full game. After all the AI changes and what not, I thought the game was a hell of a lot easier than before....and then I hit Day 6 and a wave of monsters bigger than my whole village overwhelmed it and killed everyone to a man, woman and child. Compared to like Day 12 in previous versions.

So to buy or not to buy? So far it's a cute little game that's enjoyable to look at and listen to, and requires very little overhead from you the player once you've got the basics going. I don't play a lot of it right now but I manage to enjoy what I do play. For $8, I think it's a good time to get in on the game for cheap and the dev seems pretty hard working so I don't think its an investment that won't pay off.

[debvon]

This game is on sale for $5 right now, I remember playing the tech demo a while back and being impressed so I bought it. The game is fairly brutal in terms of difficulty after day 10, that or I'm just garbage. Either way I don't like how you seem to be forced into a maze + tower defense build in order to survive for extended periods of time. The word "castles" brings to mind thick stone walls, armed soldiers, sieges- not a shitty TD game where you have to carefully build a large maze for enemies to wander through while your unmanned towers peck away at them.

And before anyone says anything I have tried both ways. 'Maze TD' seems to be the only viable strategy in most regions right now. 'Walled in castle' just doesn't work because
1) you can't fit everything inside the walls while still having access to resources
2) the range of towers just doesn't cover a fully built building chain so you will always have an Achilles heel wall segment OR too many turrets to worry about building
3) there are currently NO GATES (that I've seen). If you wall off completely the only way out to get resources is to break apart a wall section then reconstruct it at night, or blow influence. Walling in your resources with you is almost impossible in most cases due to build range quirks. By the time you got a small amount of stuff walled in with you, you'd be overrun.
4) completely walling in a turret doesn't work. Your civs need access to it to reload it, and if civs have access then monsters will simply use the same route to avoid walls. Flame turrets don't need this but you simply can't rely on flame turrets for a large portion of the game.

I managed to survive until day 9 with a walled off castle. I had to place a shit ton of towers around the entire perimeter to give equal firepower to all sides. I didn't have time to test a double wall (to siphon them in to a specific.. inner wall spot?) because by then I was overrun. The massive amount of stone this consumed was incredible. Expanding was out of the question. Most resources were out of my reach or took too long to path to through broken down wall segments.

On the other hand a maze-TD build got me well past day 11, I quit out of boredom but it could have gone on. Building the maze was tedious and just awful due to the build range system. Your own walls block build range so you have to build the maze from the outside in (or fuck around with range-extending fire pits that seem to block pathing). And I said it before but.. ugh, tower defense shit just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why do that to a game like this? Such a beautiful game.

The developer has stated that he's a huge TD fan and avoiding TD elements in this game would be "difficult". That just sounds like bullshit to me, if the guy likes tower defense and wants it in his game then that's why its in the game. There's plenty else you could do with a castle defense scenario in a top down game like this. Letting it slip into a TD with base-building (i.e. some kid's custom starcraft map) just seems lazy and makes the game feel rather shallow.

For anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about I have a screenshot of a partly built maze from a doomed embark

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Parsely]

Agreed. That's not a fucking castle. Now Stronghold. THAT is motherfucking castles, and walls are dirt cheap in that. Admittedly there is still exploitation of AI to be done with knocking holes in walls to get the enemy to go where you want them to, but in Stronghold you can build anywhere as long as there aren't any enemies close by so you can build really interesting setups that don't force you to have a nexus. Enemy units have an anti-building aura and that's your only restriction aside from terrain.

[nenjin]

Agreed for the most part. One tip is to liberally use the "destroy terrain" activity rather than try to harvest your way there. Regrowing trees and stumps will repeatedly show up where your fuck off huge building footprints want to go, and you save a lot of time just scouring out the edges of whereever your base is so you can fit all the buildings in.

That said...

I still struggle to understand how this game is supposed to work sometimes.

I too am not a fan of TD and similarly said to the dev "You really shouldn't make this about tower defense."

What most annoys me is that this game is "ooh we have all these production chains so you can then do tower defense." It's about build order and optimizing labors, while juggling all these other sim elements like happiness, birth, food, terrain clearing and resource gathering and apparently monster hunting as well.

It's like, WTF? Tower Defense is just building the optimal defensive strategy. Simulators are about guys mining rocks to turn into stones to turn into walls and being surly when they're starving. The two do not play well together IMO. I do not like the pressure of having to find space for all this shit (starting your village with the land/resources forming natural barriers vastly increases your ability to defend, because you don't have to spread yourself so thin and enemies can be met in the same place every time) and figure out a build order while the doom clock is ticking down. I preferred several builds ago where you just started harvesting crystal and making fire bolt throwers ASAP. That at least was TD made accessible, and even though I don't like TD I felt like I was getting a hang on the game.

Now you have to harvest the shit (at the harvester building), then refine it (at the refinery building), then build the actual defense, tripling the amount of time it takes to get a viable defense started, as well as increasing the population tied up in just essence related buildings. It's still an option now to go that route immediately but it's grossly inefficient and you spend a lot of time building buildings instead of defenses. (All the Crystal Harvesting stuff and Defensive stuff requires the other buildings too.) So now instead, he wants you to harvest common resources like wood, to turn into ammunition for arrow towers and shit, working up to Fire Bolt throwers and Golems later.

These production chains had already been true for a lot of buildings for several builds (rocks --> stone --> brick I think? And wood --> log --> board.) I accepted it for building materials but now it's true for everything and it's kind of obnoxious. I spend more time clearing land than I do harvesting or building stuff. You even gotta prepare food into fucking meals now to get the most bang for your buck ><

On top of that is the whole Limbo system which, honestly, I have zero interest in. It's a cool meta mechanic but I don't see how to work it into gameplay. And I don't like all this work to build up a village/castle/whatever only so you can furiously try and export out materials and people when it's all going to shit. Or starting a game with a limited stock of resources so you can....slowly put your gains back in Limbo to give your next colony a running start? What about the colonists that you'll lose just getting a settlement going in the first place? It's acting like villages are supposed to be persistent and feed resources into Limbo, allowing you to grow a stockpile. Gameplay however sends a very different message. Logically I'm not getting how this game is supposed to get played in good order.

Which sucks because it's gorgeous and charming and endearing...until you get your face kicked in on Day 4 or 5. You can earn yourself a lot of extra days by constantly hunting down the monster spawning pits out in the wilderness and blowing them up with fireballs. I did it in earlier builds and it was fairly effective but it starts to become a full-time job doing that and you will never actually keep the monsters at bay. You'll just get a little more time as the ones at the edges of the map have to group up before marching on the village. And the spawn rate on monster pits will just continue to go up and up, as will their levels, and the hammer will eventually fall.

So yeah. I like the game but every time it gets an update and I get excited to play, I get about an hour into it before the pointlessness of trying stops me. And I can only see the game getting more obnoxious to play when it reaches the "unlock phase" and lots of technologies have to be earned through several playthroughs. (And by technologies I mean "pointless processing buildings.") It's possible what we have now is the actual base and other cool unlockable shit is coming later. (Like, I dunno, a single building to replace the MULTIPLE FUCKING BUILDINGS YOU HAVE TO CONSTRUCT TO PROCESS WOOD AND STONE AND CRYSTAL INTO DIFFERENT SHIT ><) But based on what I've seen I'm not exactly hopeful.

I've tried sort of to mention this stuff to Rayvolution (he reads his own forums and responds regularly) but it's just not the kind of game he's interested in making. I'm on board with everything he's doing except what seems like the idea we're supposed to throw down a fully featured base with walls and turrets and shit within 4 days. This game seems to expect you to utilize every second of gameplay if you really want to get anywhere. And that's just too hectic for me. The game's music and aesthetic and stuff lull you into a false sense of security. Doom is coming.

So I dunno. I probably just suck at it but in truth I find what the game is about (production chains under duress and tower defense) not all that enjoyable, despite how great a lot of this game is. All the other features are overshadowed by it. I could just play in pure sandbox mode (I guess it's Peaceful Mode now?), but it doesn't really address my core problems in that production chains and TD aren't really fun.

At the end of the day it is still a pretty sweet game and I feel like he's barely scratched the surface of what he's capable of. (Big monsters, crazy magic, alt tilesets, all manner and variety of actually interesting buildings. (The Medic Tent or whatever they just added is a good example of this.)) I want to see Heroes come back because they actually felt useful and special in your village. I don't want to talk the game down too far, because the dev is cool and really puts in the work. I just wish I didn't constantly feel cockblocked by this game.

edit

And then you see threads like: http://retropixelcastles.com/index.php?/topic/955-my-first-successful-game-is-rpc-too-easy/ and wonder wtf you're missing.