Heroine's Quest EP5 - Break, Enter and Die

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This is a pretty short episode due to a combination of frustration and technical difficulties. It seems I am definitely trying to access the Thieves' Lodge too early, but this isn't signposted that well. That room is especially annoying since the game hints at the puzzle solution (pretty ineffectually in my case) even before you really have the information you need to work with.

The puzzle also relies heavily on the look function which frankly doesn't work very well in this game. For this kind of feature to work you need either better art direction, so interactable objects are more distinct from the set dressing or some kind of highlight system.

You also need to be pretty generous with the hit box for these objects, I missed the left antler and received the room look description instead. I then assumed that both antlers were the same object and missed a letter required to solve the puzzle.

Maybe some of these are system limitations, I believe the game is made in Adventure Game Studio and perhaps it is just difficult to have multiple look descriptions or to implement the kind of highlight system I mentioned before. It is probably important to keep in mind that this is a free game which also implies that they didn't have much of a time or financial budget to work with.

I guess part of the problem I had in this episode is that I was not really fully engaging with this game, I recorded the episode after having played Massive Chalice. In effect I was kind of pining after the new hotness rather than wanting to explore Heroine's Quest more fully.

Lets Play: Massive Chalice PBB

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I backed this game a little over a year ago on Kickstarter because a turn based tactical fantasy game that takes place over an epic timeline complete with breeding your own heroes sounded awesome to me.

Then I got further into it late last year because a coworker of mine recommended I check out the Team Streams, They have been really transparent with the planning and development process for this game, not quite as a documentary like Broken Age, but every 2 weeks they have had a 2ish hour twitch stream about the game development. They have shown google docs, prototypes and art as well as amusing bugs and incidental weirdness. I have really enjoyed watching them and they have made me pretty keen to get my hands on the game to try it for myself.

Really enjoyed this hour with it, it feels a lot better to play it on my desktop than it did when I played it on my Surface during a flight where I was relying purely on the touch screen. I am keen to keep playing and yet also hesitant since I also don't want to get tired of it before it is finished. I guess I will leave it up to you, are you interested in seeing more of this?

It will be back to Heroine's Quest on Friday, but after that who knows?

Heroine's Quest - EP4 - The Only Hero In The Village

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I was really worried that I would end up stuck making no progress in that forest for a couple of hours, would have made for a lot of fairly boring episodes with me getting increasingly frustrated. Turns out that the solution to the Sigurd problem was to find the village that was about 3 screens away. Wish I had done that the first time I found Sigurd, but then again I would probably still be struggling with the combat system.

Honestly I can respect the amount of geography this game has, the forest has a fairly good ratio of interesting to pathways for random encounters. I think they balanced that fairly well and the temperature/energy system stops you from just rushing through it. I also really like how we can go back to Hermie and ask about some of the places though I suspect that he is not the only one we could ask.

I am kind of curious as to how long this game will be, is it all going to take place in the forest or will we finish up here at some point and go to a new area with its own magical map. I am not really sure what to expect from this game.

Heroine's Quest - EP3 - Freezing in the Forest

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This episode is mostly a mix of exploration and getting to grips with Heroine's Quests fighting and survival mechanics it contains a lot of dying. Right from the start in fact with a badly placed autosave.

This kind of situation is an edge case of two different mechanics not meshing with each other. Autosaves are nice in a game like this because they reduce the amount of content we have to repeatedly push through, but the system used here is a bit too simple. One autosave slot triggered on entering or leaving town.

In most cases that is fine, just resets us to where we left off, but here it left us seconds before death with no real recourse. This is the autosave not only being useless but sabotaging itself. If you have no manual saves you have to completely restart. From this point on I can no longer trust that there will be a useful autosave to fall back on.

There are a few ways to try to solve this:
1) Try to detect edge cases like these, don't trigger autosave below a health threshold for example
2) Don't autosave when entering towns only autosave when you leave towns.
3) Have several autosaves, automatically rotate through 3 or so. Letting players go back further to fix mistakes.

1 and 2 do have drawbacks though. For 1 if you don't make the edge cases clear then the autosave system feels a bit unpredictable and thus unsafe to rely upon. In the case of 2, narrowly but survivably entering town is kind of the best time to have saved your game.

But number 3 seems like the best way to avoid situations like these, I don't understand why some games are so keen to place low limits on saving. Replaying content is not fun, encountering Ratatosk is funny once, encountering him 3 times... not so much.

Heroine's Quest - EP2 - Boasting to the Gods

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We get what I assume is the main plot, the way they reveal it feels pretty heavy handed though. First there is the meeting with the Jarl and his wizard where they outline what they understand is happening on a more grounded level and then once we leave the keep we are immediately forced into the meeting with the Norns, which tell us what is really going on.

I don't really understand why these reveals need to be so close together, why not let the player explore for a while then a chapter or two later raise the stakes and reveal that their opponent is a frost giant. I like the whole scene where you boast to the gods but feel it would be better if I had the opportunity to actually get something done first.

The woods are interesting to deal with but I think I will leave off talking about them until next time.

Heroine's Quest - EP1 - Trolling In The Mountains

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This is the start of a new LP series and a trial of the system I would like to use in the future. The basic plan is:
- If I have a game I want to play, then I record that
- If I don't, I will pick a game and record at least one episode, if I like it continue as a series, if I don't then it should stand alone as a first impression kind of thing.

I certainly am happy to take suggestions as to games to play, it turns out I can be pretty bad at deciding exactly what to play next I kind of have a discoverability problem even within my own steam library, let alone anything else.

I found Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok whilst playing around with Steam's new Discovery Queue feature, given it looked kind of interested and was free I figured it would be a good idea to add it to my library so I guess that system does seem to work. It seems to be a bit of a mix between a point and click adventure and an RPG. I am not entirely sure that this is the kind of thing I really want mixing, but we will see as for now I am intrigued so this won't be the only episode.

The Doctor Who Cloned Me - Episode 6 - Deposing the Empress

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With the destruction of the Empress the Doctor Who Cloned Me comes to a close. Kind of disappointed that the moon itself was such a non-event it would have been interesting to have maybe reached the moon earlier and had more take place up there, but maybe they were worried about how to handle the low gravity in indoor environments.

I was a little embarrassed at how long it took me to work out what I needed to do to beat this boss and well it was a bit stupid that the fight involves attacking giant ovaries, seriously, given that the end goal isn't to spay the empress and it is immediately followed up by a killing blow seems like a really dumb way to fight something.

In the end it was more Duke Nukem Forever and while it is slightly better than the main campaign, it still isn't a particularly great game and there are just much better shooters out there to spend your time on.