exodus If anybody wants to look what tiny iterations look like on a video game, the Demonschool demo has been updated as we are now in TactiCon as well.
I went to replay the demo today without even knowing about this! I was pleasantly surprised.
exodus added a tutorial tab to the title screen, and rewritten some of the text. We will have more robust tutorials in the final game, but this should make what we have a little more clear.
A lot of the information added in the tutorials was discussed in this thread, so, I was already keeping a lot of it in mind, but I think having it all in one place is really helpful. I certainly noticed it and read it and refreshed myself on things.
I think certain things could be clearer:
In Movement & Action Points, from personal experience I still feel that something that might trip up TRPG veterans isn’t all that clear, which is that Movement sans attacking is an AP spend, but if you launch an attack, it isn’t two distinct AP spends, you just get both for a single use of AP. Pretty much every other TRPG game I can think of off of the top of my head would treat Movement and the use of some kind of ability as two separate things normally, but in Demonschool moving without attacking to reposition for an attack is (often) inefficient play (maybe unless you’re setting up a sweet combo that makes it worth it or something). I’m not sure how you would change the wording to better reflect that, but, saying you’ll attack automatically doesn’t quite get there, even if pointing it out did help me understand how moving and attacking does work, eventually.
exodus also added blue AP indicators for when you’re mid-sidestep, as an indicator of what’s happening with AP during that time, as a sidestep+full move costs the same as one full move by itself.
I noticed this and it also helped me wrap my head around the economy of moving and attacking a lot better, and understanding just how powerful and economic Sidestepping is also helped me to better understand how it all works.
I think it might be worth communicating that if you initiate a Sidestep with one character, you can’t initiate an Action with another character without that previous character’s AP spend being completed. Or another way of putting that is that you can’t suspend the Sidestep as a Free Action if you interrupt that sequence. It would not be good to disallow doing so either, though–there are tactical reasons you might really just need someone to scootch over but still stay in place.
Then again maybe you are laying out too much of the tactical depth of the mechanics by point it out… I dunno.
- In the Rewind tutorial, I suppose most people would intuit this, but it might be helpful to know you can Rewind (or Undo) freely during the Planning Phase, and go Forward again (or Re-do), unless you change an action earlier in the sequence, which will start over from there. Basically it’s not 4D Chess.
shane The spaghetti lines. It’s hard to articulate just how much of a problem these are.
Okay, letting how everything works sink in a little more, I think I can agree at this point that the spaghetti lines are not necessary.
However, I still do wish that the description of each character’s attack changed to reflect the added properties of their Specials, as in Knute’s Heal extends 2 more spaces, Destin’s I think sends enemies flying back an unlimited distance, how much damage is actually added, etc.
I’m liking it more and more and can’t wait to get into the meat of the game, now! I want to see more of the overall structure and features hang out with the gang more and especially face a challenging boss! I wanna kick that weird brain skeleton guy’s ass!!!