World feels big full and alive. Colors are lively. Well done I want to sit and play it through all the way.
Reviews for "The Legend of Quintavius"
ImmanentDeath responds:
Good luck and have fun. Embrace the chaos.
Great game ! However, there still is a problem with the final boss's health bar.
Is there an explanation for why your fallen comrades are alive and well in the next scene?
ImmanentDeath responds:
Not other than saying that they're "defeated," but not "killed." There's just the assumption that when you win a battle, your defeated soldiers are only wounded and will be fully healed by the time the next battle happens, probably with the help of the healer Quintavius.
It's not something I thought was important enough to address in this game, since the story is the main focus and it assumes a main character won't die when they shouldn't. Your allies are just tough, and when they fall they'll get back up and walk it off.
I quite like the story, although I had some small issues with the gameplay.
The soldiers often wander off on their own to fight multiple enemies at once. My healing spell isn't enough to out-heal the damage, and my fireball spell barely makes a difference in combat. By the time they realize they should retreat, it is often too late for them.
Perhaps some sort of way to tell your troops to drop everything and come to you? Would probably help with the fights against Gruel as well, as they are often too busy fighting smaller enemies to focus on the big guy tailing me.
Obstacles aren't clear sometimes too, tiny rocks on the mountains and slightly bigger green stains during the final battle impedes your movement, but the former can get hidden during the heat of battle, and the latter blends in with the floor, which is covered in smaller green stains that DON'T impede you.
Storywise, I quite liked the message at the end.
ImmanentDeath responds:
These are valid points, they're just some of the things I've decided are features, even if they aren't the best game design. I'll try to explain them.
Soldiers will already try to return to you on their own if they need healing, but sometimes they just get surrounded. The ranged soldiers especially struggle with this since they try to keep their distance. You just have to go help them. And this gets harder over time when there's less sunlight and you recharge mana slower, but you also heal fewer soldiers faster than several soldiers.
Make sure you're lighting as many monsters on fire as you can for damage over time. With the magic ring on your left hand, you can hit several at a time.
And the obstacles are there just to get in your way, like the characters do sometimes. You just have to go around them, but when you're keeping track of several things at once it's easy to trip on something too big to step over. When I get stuck I just try to move in another direction.
It just gets a little tricky. Definitely things I would figure out better solutions for in future games. And I'm glad you liked the story, it's for sure this game's main strength.
Really great stuff!
Finally a game that allows to run around in a larger party xD
Some things I realized:
- Quintamus or Quintavius? I guess in the drawn title Quint"avi"us looks like an Quint"am"us, might consider setting a pixel line of space between the a and the v instead of connecting the letters
- All "cinematic" movement interactions seem to have the same "wait" time between animation changes, especially when walking around. This could be overworked to make the animations appear more fluid. Especially the "Quintavius-is-scared" cinematic part suffers from being a bit lengthy because of this.
- I personally do not like having to press an action key twice to go to the next text dialogue box (one for speeding up text appearing one for next text) ... but then again of course neither do I like to miss text.
- the "Try again" after a death could appear a bit faster - or, keep it's fading it at the current length but let us already activate it before it fades in - for the impatient among us ;)
- The dragon battle seems to suffer a bit from the dragonfires burn damage. -SPOILER- I ended up hiding behind the top pillar during an attack, going down and left, shooting 2 or 3 shots and going back behind the pillar, which felt a bit tidious, especially after dieing a few times. Of course, magical dragon fire can burn hotter than hellfire, but still a shorter burn time would be appreciated I guess ...
-> All these notes are just minor issues ;)
You did it, gj ;)
ImmanentDeath responds:
I'm right there with you with fancy cursive letters, sometimes they're hard to read. But that's why I have it spelled in plain text in plenty of other places, and the title can just be fancy-looking.
Sprite movements and animations during cutscenes is something I will definitely fine tune even more in future games. There's so many variables that go into it, and it's so dependent on timing, especially when scenes are synced with the soundtrack. And it's very subjective, too. I just went with what felt right to me.
My cheat for skipping text is to press space and click the screen at the same time. You can really fly through dialogue that way. But this also sounds like a good feature for a more rigorous dialogue system if I ever get around to making one.
I'll see about speeding up the game over screen, and doing something to alleviate the dragon's DoT. Right now it's the same as what Quintavius applies to monsters, 5 seconds of taking damage every second, which is reset on getting hit again. Thanks for suggesting that, because I did wonder if that battle would feel too repetitive.