Greetings Hero Mages fans!
Indie Pub is a community of independent game developers and players dedicated to promoting and exploring indie games by providing developers with ways to connect, learn, and grow. This year they hosted their 3rd annual Independent Developer Competion, awarding the community favorite with a prize of $5,000, finalists with a prize of $1000, and the grand-prize winner, Dust Force, $100,000.
Hero Mages made Semi-Finalist in the category of Best Game Design- a proud milestone for our community! Below, I have included Hero Mages comments from Terence, indiePub's Patriarch (what an awesome title btw) to once again encourage player feedback and discussion.
First I’d like to say that I love the game. I played MTG extensively, and some table top games (Battletech), so the mechanics of Hero Mages are pretty familiar to me.
What I particularly enjoy is the depth of the game. The strategy gets surprisingly deep, and the cards are varied enough to make a lot of strategies viable. I’ve seen players attack their own units to unstun them; I’ve seen crazy hit-and-run tactics with the teleportation cards. It’s definitely something a MTG player can appreciate!
This kind of game has a pretty steep learning curve. I think a tutorial mode would be a great help to new players. I noticed your addition of computer opponents; this could make a tutorial pretty viable. Since it’s a turn based game, making a tutorial would be pretty straightforward: you could suggest an action for the player at every step. The mana and valor system is a little confusing at first; it would be nice to explain it clearly in this tutorial.
Another issue is that it’s hard to tell what exactly is happening when a player or computer decides to do a bunch of actions quickly after another. I know there is a log and a message at the top of the screen, but those are hard to see, and the top message changes as fast as the opponent does actions. Perhaps you could add an effect box, either on top of the character avatar on the right, or maybe just in the middle of the screen. So if someone casts a spell that raises the defense of all his teammates, it could have a message in the middle saying something like, “Guest_1’s Sorceress casts ASDF! Guest_2’s Rogue and Psionist gain +2 defense,” and then a little “+2” number pops up with the defense icon next to all the affected characters. That way I don’t have to look through the log and click on the spell just to see what happened.
A learning issue is that it’s not immediately clear that the Hero Mage is the most important character. It looks like it is just one of the other 3. It was not obvious to me that if I let it die, I would not be able to cast any spells. Maybe the Hero Mage should have a different colored or bordered avatar box?
The art in the game is awesome, but sometimes it’s hard to see things. I think you need more contrast. The characters, and even the walls, blend in too much with the ground; there isn’t a huge range in values. Perhaps if you had drop shadows underneath the characters, it would help them stand out more.
Being able to view the line of sight is so important that I think it should just automatically calculate it whenever you choose to move a character. I shouldn’t have to press E to check every possible tile; I should just pres the move key, and every time I mouseover an available movement location, I should see the line of sight.
I should be able to undo movements if I do so immediately.
The timer should flash or beep when it gets near the end of the turn. I’ve lost my turn accidentally a few times when I wasn’t paying attention to the timer.
I think there is room for some more environmental variation. Maybe ‘fences’ that would block movement, but could allow ranged attacks? Or rough terrain that would cost more movement points. Or an elevated station that would give line of sight over some walls.
The sound effects are great; they give feedback when appropriate. I like the music too.
Overall, the game is extremely fun because it is genuinely strategic and is well paced. I’d love to see where you take this. Maybe we can work with you to help drive some traffic to your game. We have some plans to increase traffic to indiePub, and hopefully that can benefit you.
