Shilling our game - Ragtag Adventurers

What the fuck am I reading.

The game looks like an inferior ripoff version of Impossible Bosses, a super fun W3 mod. Can't really say anything else though without playing.

looks interesting. I love couch co-op and top-down action games. I might give it a shot when it gets out of E.A.

oh fuck, we're treading serious nostalgia territory now

I'm assuming he meant it would take an hour or two of trying to kill the boss and most likely repeatedly dying.

In all honesty, why has this blown up so goddamn much? I mean, multiplayer games aren't exactly the newest star on the night sky, but I've seen a surge in those since 2016 or so, or at least the Steam Forums have people begging for co-op support even in games where it ostensibly makes no fucking sense.

Not to speak of the fucking trainwreck that was the last Overlord game, where they slapped this entire top-down co-op element on an otherwise mildly successful franchise for no apparent reason. I'm still salty about that.

I know that feel. Mind you, I can understand why many potential customers have a highly allergic reaction to that model (when was The Forest going to go out of EA again? Well, at least Gnomoria was completely feature complete, riiiight?), but especially for small, relatively inexperienced teams without a big publisher financing (and raping) their games, this sadly is often the only way to keep the baby alive. Especially because new devs drastically tend to underestimate the amount of workload they get themselves into.

What said, sorry for the confusion. And yeah, all of us loved Impossible Bosses, and we talked about it a few times while developing this. We agreed though that most of the bosses in that mod had a lot of undodgeable bullshit mechanics. We tried to make our bosses fair and as distinct from each other as possible. As for the demo, as I said I can't do anything right now but I will be tossing a few keys here first thing in the morning so you guys can test it out. I'll do my best to get a demo out asap though.

Right now there are 4 characters (pics related) and they're your pretty standard archetypes since we don't want to put too many hurdles between people starting the game and jumping into a fight. However, I did try to make them all fun to play. The mage for example is not your standard fantasy mage, he's a bunny-out-of-a-hat magician, and all his abilities revolve around bunnies. You can shoot fire bunnies or frost bunnies and your damage increases with each consecutive cast. However, the mana cost increases dramatically so you have to balance between mana preservation and damage. You have a few ways to restore your mana and you can drop a rambo bunny turret that fires at the boss and serves as an amplifying redirector for your own abilities, so you can shoot at it for a damage boost.

There was no real "agenda" behind making it co-op, we started to develop a boss rush game of this style and realized there is no reason for it to not be co-op early on in development. I have to say though, the first time we go four people go into it blindly at our office and watching them discover the game and have fun was absolutely amazing and worth every second spent on it.

And yeah, I know that people hate EA, I hate most of the stuff in EA too but the truth is that many man-hours went into this, and time is money we soon can't afford. In an ideal world we'd have had five more months to polish this and add more content before doing a full release outright, but we've already decided to double-time it from now on to get rid of the EA status as soon as humanly possible.

For all I know, I'm running around spamming the mouse button with one attack. What makes this stand apart from all the other Gauntlet rip-offs that are out there?

Oh, forgot to mention - unlike Impossible Bosses, this isn't played via clicking, it's a gamepad game through and through. There are keyboard controls and an option to use the keyboard for player 1 in case you want to do co-op with just one controller available.

give us some keys you turbokike and if it's good i'll shill it to my friends. make sure to write the key in oekaki or a paint image or something though

WTF? The demon-wamen is naked
FUCK YOU PATRIARCHIAL SLAVE! STOP SEXUALIZING VIRTUAL WOMEN
WHERE ARE THE STRONG LGBTPZ & MINORITY REPRESENTING CHARACTERS ?
Fucking Cishet devs, just wait til feminist journos find out

I've watched 4 seconds of that mp4 and all those floating numbers remind me of your typical MMO grindfests so it doesn't seem like my type of game tbh

I think feminists will be fine with it.

I didn't put any links in the OP thinking that anyone interested could punch in the name in Steam. Here's the the gist though:

store.steampowered.com/app/763730/Ragtag_Adventurers/

Hold on, let me see if I have any that haven't been reserved by our PR guys.

That's not a woman

Just kidding

There is no leveling at all in the game, the numbers are just indicators. Making the optional is on my to-do list.

magnet or mega link nigger

Here you go, I grabbed these from the bottom of the pile, I can't risk handing out more before checking with the PR guys in the morning (it's 4:30am here) whether or not they've already sent them to anyone. If you grab a copy, just have fun no strings attached. No review needed, no recommendation, nothing. Feedback would of course be very welcome, but it's in no way expected.

So it only has to sell 2 copies for you guys to make a profit. That's nice to know.

got the third one down. thanks you jew, i'll tell you what i think

Europoor? More specifically, Germany?

Balkans actually

Alright, sure, I'll nab it then. Consider your shilling a success.

that'll do then, thanks faggot

This tells me nothing. All I see are the same videos you posted with characters running around and spamming a single attack. All your blurb are meaningless jargon. Are there no descriptions of skills and attacks to share? How does the game actually play? Are there items and leveling? Are the levels to run through or just arenas with bosses? How does character selection look?

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I hate video games video games are for shills.

Tell us if it's any good compared to something like castle crashers. It looks like a realtime RPG with movement and generic everything magic related. Can't say anything else without more info though.

Wait for someone to download and review the game that isn't handing out codes and isn't the gamedevs.

bump for interest and because I am bored.

Good luck, but this genre doesn't appeal to me at all.

OP I'm playing your game and I see no option for controls, what gives?

looks fun, but i have a suspicion
translates into "no online co-op". if so get that shit sorted out pronto, it's the fucking current year, can't expect goyim to have friends physically come over to their domicile and play video entertainment together

Funnily enough, one of the things I'm looking forward to the most is seeing just how accurate Steam Spy is as I'll now be able to see what Steam Spy says vs. actual numbers.

Sorry, it's been a hectic crunch time to get it out the door, we haven't yet had time to prepare all the instructions. I'll type out a summary here and make a more comprehensive guide on the Steam Community forum. We do have an in-game tutorial but something on the web is definitely needed.

You control one of four characters from a top down perspective fighting against bosses only (no levels in-between). There are no upgrades, no leveling and no items. Each character has a basic auto-attack, three skills and an ultimate skill. All of them were designed to be easily playable, but you should really feel a difference between someone skilled and someone who just started.

Your standard meat shield. His main ability is a shield that lasts a short period of time and resets its cooldown if it's broken by damage. The idea is to not just mindlessly spam it but to time it when you know damage will be hitting you. Other than that, he has a taunt which makes all the boss attacks target him for a given amount of time as well as a head-stomp which consumes all your energy (meaning not enough for taunt or shield) but deals more damage the more energy you had, so it allows the tank to go on the offensive when no actual tanking is needed. His ultimate increases the armor of the entire team significantly for a short amount of time.

I already talked a bit about him here but yeah, his shtick is balancing between fire bunnies and frost bunnies to optimize damage dealt and having enough mana to last the fight. The bunny turret acts as an amplification mechanism and is best used in situations where you know you won't have to move for the next ~15 seconds. His ultimate creates a mana-restoring zone which means that during that time you can't really run out of mana, so drop the turret, use the ultimate and fire away.

She is the only character whose auto attack is designed for actual damage as it's a very fast one-two punch combo. She builds up damage stacks as she hits so she does more damage the longer she hits, but the stacks drop off if she doesn't hit anything within 5 seconds. Her movement speed is the biggest of all character and she has a damaging dash attack (aside from the defensive dodge dash all characters have) and a power hit that consumes her stacks and deals proportional damage. Her last ability is to turn on a mode that increases her overall damage dealt and damage taken, as well as increasing energy cost of her punches, meaning you can't use the offensive dash that often (giving you fewer escape options). It's basically a high-risk-high-reward switch. Her ultimate summons a shadow copy of herself for a short period to help you.

The only character to use all shoulder buttons on the gamepad. Each one heals a different ally so you don't have to select anyone or move to anyone to heal them, just press the dedicated button. He can drop a healing zone that heals all allies and damages are enemies inside. His "Holy shock" projectile is a slow moving orb that works like this:

His ultimate works in a way that pools all your health together and makes it shared for a given time, meaning if one person gets hit the damage is spread over all characters.

Aside from all of those you can play in "solo mode" where there are no AI bots and you can hold down R2 (or use the D-pad) to switch between all 4 heroes on the fly, e.g. switch to the Tank when you need to absorb a huge hit, to the Paladin to heal yourself etc.

tbqh (to be quite honest) OP, this Diablo clone doesn't look attractive or desirable at all. Uninsipred gameplay, dull art direction, generic rock soundtrack, onlineshit, and all that stuff.Good luck with your next game though.

I don't think normalfags are the target audience here considering OP is literally shilling his game on hatechan.

God, I LOVE this fucking meme.

delet

One of our junior devs worked on it and I had to disable it because it was way too buggy and I had way too little time amidst other tasks to fix it. It's on my to-do list, near the top actually.

Online is by far the biggest priority once I'm done with my week off. We have a working prototype but nothing even remotely ready for release yet.

(Thanks)

It's a niche game and we like it that way. Try to appeal to everyone, end up disappointing everyone with a watered down turd.

Fair enough but just to clarify, it really couldn't be more different from Diablo even if we tried I think.

Just dl'd it, ill give it a go.
Will give it full feedback once i give it a hour or so.

The gameplay looks kinda neat, but the art is ugly as fuck bud. I can hardly tell what these characters are supposed to be. The colors are excessively drab. The attacks are visually decent though.

OR maybe it's because advertising here is FREE???

Maybe you shouldn't have made a diablo like game to begin with. It's an overpopulated market. Make an open world sandbox action rpg or something instead, something that gives room for more creativity and idiosyncrasy.

tbh I don't think you can put a botnet on steam or GOG for that matter

alright then, I'll check back on it later then because WASD + JKL is terrible imo.

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it could've been a 3rd person, over the shoulder, fps roguelike, RPG, with dark souls elements built in the source engine

Almost had me there.

Face it bro. TES is one of the best selling series of all time, yet there's nothing remotely like it. Not even Gothic. There's so much potential in making a TES-like game.

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Co-op is great - at least, for console games. Co-op PC games I don't really understand, since unless you hook the damn thing up to a TV, it's a pain in the ass to deal with.

Of course, I say this in the sense of true "co-op", where one game lets you have two to four people playing it. Games with multiplayer only, and no couch co-op, are a cancer that should be annihilated. I refuse to play any of them.

This is actually an accurate point. If someone made a game that was basically Morrowind, except with better graphics and a hypothetical combat system that was like Dragon's Dogma except without the JRPG elements (the Attack v Defense which means you can't damage a Lvl20 bandit at Lvl5, but one-shot it at Lvl50), and then threw in voice-acting because normalfags eat that shit up, and you would have the single most successful game of the year.

The problem is, nobody has made this game. Bethesda doesn't want to make the necessary improvements to their formula, and everyone else is just copying them. Nobody is taking the base idea and improving upon it, because that would require too much of an initial investment.

Thanks. I'll be going to sleep now though as it's almost 6am so if the thread is alive in the morning I'll happily respond to feedback.

I suppose your eyes get used to it after a while since we haven't had these issues… but I'll see what I can do to differentiate the player characters some more on the screen. I should probably start with an outline effect for when you go behind stuff. Can't believe I haven't thought of that until now.

Thanks for the time, sorry about the lack of customization. We did however design it with the gamepad in mind first and foremost. That being said, I'll make sure the rebinding functionality is functional asap.

Couch co-op has always been far superior for me to online co-op. It's far more engaging and fun. With online, you're still playing alone most of the time, you just share the map with others. However, we want to support both options in any case so that's one of the features we're definitely working on.

In any case, I have to get some sleep. Thanks for the comments guys, hope the guys who got the keys have fun and I'll answer any questions and feedback tomorrow if the thread is still alive.

that is the most autistic shit I've ever heard.

well I appreciate the effort of making the trailer into a webm but I couldn't even watch the whole thing. Maybe it was the music choice but there isn't really anything about it that appeals to me.

I'm pretty sure the file size limit is for every file combined.

Fuck you

The game looks ok though, nice job

I appreciate your honesty. It didn't look like my cup of tea personally but have a bump and good luck.

How do you feel about that, OP?

hey Bobby, don't shill your gme here pls

Starting off with a warning: I've only played the first boss solo, so things might be balanced around co-op more than the solo play which is fine.

Pros
-Opening cutscene was great and made me feel like i was just part of a Konosuba-esqe guild of adventurers and is a great idea for a game concept.
-Each class feels vastly different and does give different ways of playing the game, with decent strategy on what to focus on (if balanced correctly)
-Music is great, though i feel a bit loud.
-Controls feel fluid on gamepad, except for 1 issue which is ranged aiming.
-Hunter feels extremely balanced and fun to play and manuever.

Cons
-The balance of the paladin is really in question, the targeted heal is way too fucking strong when there is also an aoe that sits there for 2 minutes. Also the ball ability feels kind of underwhelming.
-For being a tank, he has no real way of blocking or destroying projectiles. I feel as though either his dash, or his autos should have some type of either projectile destruction or damage reduction on countering them properly.
-Wizard feels great besides his basic attacks, which just add a fourth damage source when his ice bunny attack is usable even when out of mana. Also, he seems to be the only one who can destroy projectiles at all, which makes him feel like he should have his abilities moved around so his 2nd special is some extra type of utility.
- The keyboard controls are absolutely abyssmal and not being able to control the direction you are aiming without moving your body is extremely irritating, especially on Magician.
-Graphics are kind of dull though i do seem the appeal in the design, though the 1st boss changing colors constantly just looks really awkward.
-Difficulty of the first boss is pretty low, though i feel its just meant to be a tutorial boss.

Other than these, I like it. Only other thing i've noticed is that Hunter in the tutorial is misspelled, and a few other grammatical errors, which everyone makes. Looking forward to a full release, and might recommend to friends.

Maybe the artstyle is better, but with that name alone I can tell it's fucking shit

Gave me a good chuckle

is this satire?

I don't think so, but the dev doesn't even remotely sound like a girl. No, he doesn't even try to make that faggy feminine voice, it's just a dude talking like a dude. Tranny my ass.

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Gimme a character that can dash super fast like the guy from Furi and you have a purchase

Who? There aren't even any clones of TES games.

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Fuck.
What do we do now?

I mean at least you are making a game so good for you op
Not interested in it since I dont play video games

the codes were all taken, make an exception and send me two keys at this email address and i can playtest with a friend
[email protected]
i'll send my report back to the sender email

That kinda thinking will not get you anywhere. it matters not what political opinions devs hold if they are still making good games.
If they are trying to shoehorn political messages into their games. Chances are that you would not enjoy that game in the first place. So no need to feel bad liking the game whos devs you don´t agree with.
For an example in one interview Cities skylines dev went all "muh women in gaming" but that will not make their game suddenly worse.

Release a demo, faggot. I'll give it a chance if I can at least try it out.

thepiratebayDOTorg

It looks ok but why does GUI look so pixelated? I'd rather go for low-poly renders to keep things consistent. Pixelart and low-poly don't work well like that.

user, I'm not gonna judge you if you're colorblind.

Also isn't it just a redraw and expansion on that stupid pony JRPG same person made?

For Early Access stuff you should be shilling on reddit.
I don't mean this in a derogatory way but you seriously won't get much exposure here.

maybe he's just an 8channer who's trying to give back to us?

then he should take my advice to his heart
Nobody is going to support early access games from here.

Not sure about the disjointed artstyle.
You seem to be going with a smooth and cartoon-like style with the gameplay, but the UI is just pixellated and really stands out, not in a good way.
Pick one and stick with it rather than try to double-dip on the Indie scene.

What a disgrace.

Yes, user, what a disgrace you are.

Looks p fun OP. Now sell that shit to Microsoft for a couple billion and never talk to us again.

(The AI guys should be perfectly fine for the first boss, they mostly struggle with #2 and #4 for now, working on a few fixes to smarten them up)

This is something we thought about but ultimately left as it is because his mana drains really fast. Obviously we'll evaluate it some more especially in solo mode where you're not healing constantly so mana conservation is less of an issue.

There's a bug right now that prevents melee attacks from destroying projectiles but it was always intended to be possible. Mind you, the tank takes 40% less damage and an on-demand shield and higher health pool, so he can just soak up projectiles and be fine most of the time. That's how we've played, especially on the first boss where we just have the tank use his ultimate on the two phase transitions with the projectile rain.

His auto attack restores mana, that's its primary function. Although it might not be a bad idea to move the ice bunny to the auto attack and redesign that stacks in such a way that if you are using the opposite of what your current stacks are for, it restores mana instead of consuming it. So if you start using ice bunny at 10 fire stacks it would restore a lot mana, but take off one fire stack, then restore less mana and remove another etc. until it drops to 0 fire and starts building up ice at which time it would start consuming mana more and more. I'll write this down and see how it feels.

The graphics of the game are a whole separate story (more on that below) but the boss changing colors specifically is an old mechanic that was in the first design of that boss, where he'd gravitate more toward range attacks (blue) the less people are in his melee range, and toward the stomp attack (red) the more people are there. That mechanic has taken the back seat after a while but was never really removed, its effect is just almost negligible. Try keeping your distance from him and you'll notice that he rains down meteors slightly faster.

He's meant to be at least somewhat difficult, and I feel that out of fear of overtuning the bosses ("yeah, WE can do it easily because we've been playing it a ton, most people will fail this many times") we might've under-tuned them now. Gonna see how it goes once more people have their hands on it.

Doing an English pass as we speak to fix those in a patch. Thanks a ton for the feedback!

The Fighter fits that bill pretty much.

We originally intended to go full low-poly / pixel UI (mostly since we had a very short development time in mind and cutting out textures and speeding up modeling seemed like the easiest way to get something out quickly that looks presentable) but as development went on we started doing a bit more "complex" particle effects and shaders, it deviated from the original plan and ended up looking the way it does. The HUD was already finished at that point though so it stayed in, but we plan on redoing the in-game HUD in the same style as the main menu etc.

I'm well aware of that, and our PR team is probably promoting it on reddit etc. but I don't visit there so I wouldn't know. I know full-well that most people here will dismiss it on the EA principle alone, but I don't really have any "shilling agenda" here, I don't want to sell it to you guys, I've been on this board for a long time and I'm proud that I've finished a game, so I wanted to share it, that's all.

So win-win? :^)

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I'll keep an eye on the game, my brother enjoys similar games, so it's good to know I don't have to look hard for next year's birthday present

That's great to hear. If all goes as planned there will be huge improvements weekly for many months to come.

Prove that you aren't a faggot and give me a demo version, OP. Gameplay at the very least looks possibly interesting but I'm not putting money down until I've tried it.
Do like full roster of characters and 1-2 sample battles with full-enough features I can get a feel for the game.

Shill elsewhere faggot

will you be making a linux version?
seems like a fun game to toss on my htpc

He's riding the minority movement for minority money

It's on the to-do list. UE4 should support it out of the box so I just need to check out how the linux packaging process works as I haven't done it before. No promises other than "I'll give it a shot".

Already discussed demo possibilities here:

Out of curiosity, how does someone talk about any new game (not necessarily one's own) without appearing like a shill for said game?

OP a bit faggoty about it and obviously hasn't lurked here long but it's fine to shill if you are outright stating you are the creator of the game or related to it somehow. See Speedbot Dev as well Otherwise, post a link to a pirated copy since a shill would never do so, taking a shit on the game you want to talk about would also help.

the real issue is the lack of creativity
they should have brain-stormed a little more while drinking some vodka

Does this have netplay co-op?

No, but it will in a month or so.