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Team JethKo - Knee Deep is a detective adventure with role-playing elements & turn-based combat. What started as a small project turned into a huge thing that took almost a year of work. [: In this game I put ideas into action that have accompanied me since my teenage years & have now become reality. Graphics (apart from facesets & backgrounds), music & story are made by me again. In this concoction I celebrate the cartoons & the music of the 90s & Americana. I also wanted to promote the Artbreeder website with the backgrounds & facesets. [; The focus of this thing is on humor & very far-fetched puzzles. [: I hope you enjoy the game. Inspiration: Sam & Max, The Tick, Duckman, Hotline Miami 2. Grunge, Funk Metal, Nu Metal, Rave, Hip Hop, Jungle. Jethro is fed up. He doesn't want to interview more D-celebrities for this smear sheet, for which he is hired as a writer. He's after a big story again. Then he hears of mysterious murders of young women plaguing Chillcottin City. It's high time he reunited with his old pal Aoko to stir up the underworld of Chillcottins & the tech company that runs the place. Chillcottin City is located where New England & the majestic Sequoia forests meet the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains & the Bayous. The city is ruled almost dictatorially by a tech mogul, Robert E. Ternel, who even has ambitions to be crowned the new mayor. Robert E. Ternel's corporation dominates the entire urban economy with its cybernetic & genetic engineering products. The nebulous religious fanatic Mr. Person Man is also said to be in cahoots with him. Characters: Jethro Adimari, 33, is a passionate journalist & a failure. His wife Michelle loves him, although he is self-pitying and generally not the brightest. His wife doesn't like the fact that he spends so much time with Aoko when he's feeling adventurous again. He adores his red Isetta "Richthofen". Aoko Kitamoto, 27, is an unemployed justice fighter waiting to use violence against the good-for-nothing again. She loves video games, pop culture, being out of work & violence. And many more quirky Chillcottin originals! The villains: No Clip Norman, Grimace, Moon Logic, Weird Rado Karadzic, Ant Ass Andy, and others. * Approximately 4 hours of hard-hitting puzzle action with challenging battles!! * Deep turn-based combat!! * Limited save options!! * Humor!! * Things to find but also to miss!! * High score will be shown to you at the end of this thing!! * Hand drawn stuff!! * Backgrounds were cobbled together using state-of-the-art AI technology!! * Totally wacky characters!! * A Lovestory?? Sound track: Here is the link to the OST: DOWNLOAD: GET THE GAME FOR 0$ AT ITCH.IO!! <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< (just donate 0$ to download the full game!!!!!) The game contains language & themes that some may find inappropriate. Nothing in this thing is meant to be malicious or hurt anyone. Have fun puzzling. *: "When you look into the nostalgia long enough, the nostalgia will look back at you!"

Axioms Of Dominion is a project I got about 40% through and then had to let go for life stuff. Now I have roughly a year where I shouldn't have anything else to do so I'm hoping to release in late 2022 or very early 2023 if I run into serious issues. This is a fantasy geopolitics simulator that is broadly comparable to CK2+Vicky2+Dominions4+more. As a fantasy game it has tons of magic stuff but the focus is on DIP mechanics. Diplomacy(foreign affairs) Intrigue(shadowy affairs) Politics(domestic affairs) I have a Substack which can be located by searching the game name in Google. I have a goal of enabling 40000 provinces on very new PCs but the game is perfectly functional around 14000. I have a major goal of playing an almost purely combat free couple millenia taking down a major empire in the world from the inside. I'd expect an average top tier empire to have roughly 7000 provinces on larger maps if you run history for 4000-8000 years. Anywhere from 15% to 40% of a larger map. What constitutes an empire or even a kingdom is much more fluid and dynamic than in existing games. A 7000 province empire would have something like 10 ~100 province substates at the core, 40 ~50 province "major vassals", and then 200 ~20 province periphery/border vassals. Of course you can fiddle those numbers a bit but that is a good illustration of my goal. Several of the substack posts relate the very detailed political sim I am designing to make this goal plausible. I still have a few major and a few minor things to talk about on the blog. There is a Fandom wiki that has a few dozen pages on various major and minor systems. It hasn't been changed much since mid 2015 when I had to pause working on the game until now. Most of the backend stuff is done and I'm primarily figuring out the equations for mechanics, doing all the UI stuff, and getting the AI to function. I expect I'll do a UI theme, smooth out map generation, and maybe polish up the art assets at the end. The game is turn based with attention points. So you have like 1000 attention points per turn, still testing the proper amount and the costs for actions. I wanted to do a time based system but it is hard to code and people will just get mad anyways. It is a province map style like Sovereignty or Paradox games. There is a very detailed population simulation which interacts with the character mechanics. Ideology covers almost a dozen areas, Propaganda impacts ideology and religion and the military, there's a Quality Of Life system regarding food variety/quality and material goods plus shelter, Religion ties into both magic and diplomacy/politics, population is where your troops come from and there is a logistics system. https://imgur.com/a/AlPew Those are some early maps. The top one almost looks like Europe/Africa/Near East. Maps are generated procedurally as will the world be if you don't start on world creation but run history for a few centuries or millenia. The magic aspect is highly integrated and very expansive. It impacts every game system in various ways. I have a substack post about just magic. My substack is free for anyone to read. Magic can build roads, discover secrets, troop movements, and other knowledge from distant provinces, change the weather and climate, be used in various enchantments, etc. There is even a cool The Runelords(think that is the right series) inspired magical transference/pacts thing where you can empower your soldiers or other people with the powers of captured, or tamed, magical creatures. Or sentient captives. Strength, mana pool, speed, physical features like scales or claws, etc. And you can do evil mad science shit. Speaking of evil Axioms allows you to play a truly ruthless tyrant rather than just a good boy. Fear, blackmail, military threats, second class citizens, slaves, etc. The culture system allows a something like a society that reveres dragons, character secretly captures a dragon, transfers dragon traits to himself, become leader of confederation of tribes. Someone finds out, and can blackmail him, reveal him, kill him and become dragon king themselves, etc. You can destabilize a society by cutting off their access to a prestigious food resource that is a traditional staple of cultural diet, say cinnamon, assuming the leader has depleted his political capital and put himself in a risky position. Much more detailed example on the blog. The trade off is graphical sugar, no voice acting or 3d models, random world gen vs handcrafted map, although players/modders can make scenarios if they want, I just don't plan to release official ones but there is mod support. A stretch goal, well not really since there isn't a kickstarter, if I finish the main stuff early before release date is to integrate a "History" system that records important actions and can be loaded/interpreted by a wiki type program to allow you to read "history books" about the game world. The "simulated" history mentioned earlier is just starting a game with no player or observer and letting the AI play a few centuries or millenia and then picking a point jump in. Player could look at data files in theory but the idea is that you only know what your AI guy knew when you swapped in.

SETTLEMENTS! Mankind as we know it has been destroyed. We are little more than a few scattered people living in caves and under bushes, banging rocks together to keep warm and eat berries. Your challenge is to bring humanity together. Lift us up out of the stone age and forge ahead, all the while worrying about what destroyed mankind last time and if it will return to finish the job. Settlements is a game of managing resources and crafting output over a limited space. You control the pace of the game, relax for many days of playing as you customize each character and train their skills in the items of the era, or rush ahead researching technology as fast as you can. The choice is yours. Hi all, I am an indie developer who has just released my first game into Early Access on Steam. As a long time strategy gamer I wanted to create a deep strategy management game that would give hours of play. I am very open to suggestions and ideas from the community as you will see from the games forums. Please drop by and ask questions and see if you like what I am doing: http://store.steampowered.com/app/704640/Settlements/ I am also on Twitter:Settlements@TreonGames Thank you for your time to read this. I will come here to answer any questions you have! Tony

Hey Everyone! I wanted to post my current progress on a game I've been developing over the course of 9 months or so. I work for about an hour or two most mornings before work / my wife wakes up. It's a Sci-Fi top down dungeon crawler / shooter / loot game. The systems are a weird hybrid of Diablo and Destiny (the power progression and equipment work very similar to Destiny / The Division). I have a video of the latest build up on youtube which you can see here: and if you're so inclined you can download the latest build here from my google drive: http://bit.ly/2wIJud4 The current build doesn't have an ending and there are many known bugs. I just wanted to share what I've been up to with people. Thanks and I hope you enjoy it! Addendum: This is made using Unity3D and is intended for PC / Mac (hence why there are two executables in the build folder).

Hi everybody. I thought I'd share with you my old-school story-centric tactical role-playing game Call of Saregnar. It is a project I've been working on in my spare time for the last couple of years, and I expect many more years of development ahead. As an introduction, here's my vision: A Mature Story, A Believable World A deep and engaging story with charming characters unfolds over ten chapters filled with murder, mystery, intrigue and suspense. The world is low in fantasy, and magic is rare. Despite that, you will encounter some creatures coming straight from mythology, but giant rats and slimes have been evicted from this universe. In the game you take control of a small group of unique charactes, each with their own backstory, personality and ambitions. As you progress through the world, they may join or leave you and they do interact with each other, giving you clues and directions on your quests and help you unfold the intricate story. 1990’s Old School Look Call of Saregnar features a 1990’s inspired 2D + low-poly 3D look, so you can get immersed into what’s most important: the story and gameplay. Let your immagination do the heavy lifting! Oh, it also features real actors! Freedom to Explore Despite being a story-driven game, the world is always open for exploration, so there is nothing stopping you from exploring the whole map in the very first chapter! Tactical Turn-based Combat Combat is turn-based and each opposing party starts roughly at the opposite side of a grid-separated battlefield. The party that has the initiative, starts first, moving all of its characters. After one side has moved all of its characters, the opposing party gets to move. There are a number of highly-strategic spells to be used in combat, not just damage-dealing ones, so you have to plan accordingly if you want to succeed. Detailed Party Management The characters you play are alive, so it means that they get thirsty and hungry, they feel cold and heat, they can also fall ill and must be taken care of. Fortunately for you, micromanagement is not completely manual as characters will feed automatically, as long as they have the food in their inventories. When you're traveling through snow, it is best to have heavy clothes in your inventory or your characters will fall ill or worse. You'll also need to heal their illnesses manually, for example. Talking about clothing, boots do wear out, so be sure to watch the condition else your characters might end up walking barefoot. You should also regularly take care of your weapons - oiling the bowstrings and swords, repairing armor, etc… – as they get damaged. Character Development While your characters’ attributes rarely change, their skills advance on a per-use basis. Skills can also be learned from a trainer or by reading a book. Encounters In a land as rich as Merrentar, you can expect to run into a variety of events that will affect your journey. These events may go from falling into enemy ambushes, discovering particular interesting spots and places, meeting traveling merchants or bandits, perhaps wild creatures, wounded travelers, a neat trove of herbs, a set of game tracks... all of these events are greatly affected by the various party skills. Unique Magic System To gain divine favor from the gods, pray and give offerings in the form of money, food or other valuables. Divine favor is you magical pool from which you can cast unique highly-strategic spells. Items Although the game has fewer weapons and armors than the average RPG, each item is that much more detailed and fleshed out. Finding new equipment brings significant benefits as the difference between the old and new is now actually noticeable. Grey Matters CoS challenges you to think and pay close attention to everything you read, because often that's the only way to complete sidequests or even main objectives. There are no quest markers or objectives, only a quest log with your past conversations for reference. If you want to know more about my project, visit the game's page at http://www.callofsaregnar.com. Thanks for looking!

Hello, Thumbs! What better way to make your first ever post than to start a dev log for Wizard Jam! "Our Weird Monstrosity" is going to be a pretty simple RPG where the Thumbs hosts emerge from the studio into a completely different reality... of their own crazy imaginings! The game will take place on RPG Maker style traversal maps and a battle system of my own design. It's a pretty loose concept which should allow me to make a bunch of references to the podcasts. Help Wanted (this'll be in the recruiting thread as well): I'm focusing on mechanics and implementation for the first week, by the second week I'll have a list of art assets to create. Now, I could create them myself but they'll look pretty terrible. So, if anyone is interested in helping with this I'll be looking for artists in the second week. (I'm going to very conservative with my asset requirements, and I'm looking for RPG Maker VX style graphics for the traversal and maybe bigger sprites for the battle system). Also, I'm making my own engine in the process, 'cause that's a rational thing to do. Here's a screenshot of my progress so far; Yeah, got a bit to go.

So I figure I should start chronicling something about this project as slow or as fast as it ends up moving. Hit a bit of a milestone recently, graphics engine up and running with basic physics, so riding the positive wave while it lasts! Shards of Celetin (not entirely happy with the name, but unlike Phantasmagoria it doesn't clash with another game) is a 2D role-playing game based on an alternate timeline for Earth (another one of Those, yup), one where humanity evolved from cavemen with access to the powers of the elements. Fire, Air, Metal and Ice. Not the usual quartet, but there are reasons for that. There will be some combat (or even more than some if you're really motivated to do so) but the primary context will be puzzles, wayfinding and dialogue-driven plot movement. There are a lot of cool things you can do with elemental powers in combat, but I also figure that affords a lot of creativity in solving puzzles, too. I'll be updating this devlog with, well, whatever. It could be sprite art, it could be ingame capture, it could even be worldbuilding if people are interested. It's a world I've spent a lot of time across the years crafting (born as an idea for a novel a lot earlier on in my life) that I'm always revisiting and carving out new details for. The current setting is "modern day", the real challenge will be drawing out the world I've made into the game itself (in an easily-accessible manner). I hate the Skyrim-style of "find random sodding manuscripts everywhere". Current Version: Scrollable viewport, predictive collision detection and fixed-step renderer / physics (for now). Lot of the data-level stuff done behind the scenes. I've even made a start on devtools, to make making all the JSON data so much easier than writing it out by hand. Immediate Goals: Tie renderer to refresh rate (crude v-sync, with double-buffering shouldn't cause any artefacts). Currently fixed at ~60FPS. Update and integrate physics model into game view, and with the controls. Currently inheriting a fixed speed for the player character and nothing else, with no acceleration / deceleration. Not-So Immediate Goals: Sprite art! I've been trying to work on a style, so we'll see where that goes. I want to replace the temporary background and player sprite, as the most-pressing thing. Layered renderer. Will involve designing atlases for my sprites. I want to do some particular magic here because layered puzzles with multiple layers of interaction == goal, and visualising that will be important. Everything else in the game.

So, this game's out now, and despite the not great name, it seems pretty cool. I hadn't followed the kickstarter, but after reading some impressions of it and hearing it favorably compared to old cRPGs, I decided to check it out. So far it seems reasonably well written, nicely open-ended, and full of insane side content (I helped a talking clam find his way back into the ocean, investigated a set of evil talking statues, and helped a group of unemployed pirates find work). I'm a bit worried that the game's difficulty will destroy me later on, and that I'll build my characters in a way that is stupid and totally wreck their viability in the later game, but for now, it seems pretty fun. Is anyone else playing it? Thoughts?

Heeyyyy, so me and some friends made a podcast. We nabbed the worlds best URL: www.sweetbuttguys.com And are going to start filling it with junk and some Tales of the Black Crusade! (eg that's what we're playing, Warhammer 40K Black Crusade) Honestly, I can't say that it's good, but some people (eg us and close friends whose opinions we can't trust) find it funny. Be warned that we are total idiots, aren't all Pen and Paper veterans, and the microphone quality is terrible (actually genuinely sorry about that). But you gotta start somewhere right? My only connection with games talk these days is Idle Thumbs (<3) and Rock Paper Shotgun (<3) so hope you guys don't mind me dropping this plug into your precious forums We drop some Idle Thumbs references from time to time, and probably picked up some mannerisms, which is kinda weird! Our inspirations (me and another player who decided to record, the others don't listen to podcasts, except for John who devours every Warhammer audio book/drama that comes out, and they are so prolific with those it may as well be one...) are definitely Idle Thumbs, plus some SModcast and maybe some Marc Maron, so can't thank Idle Thumbs enough for being so great and inspirational. Cheers! Edit: Oh yeah!! Obviously registered with www.hover.com/wizard! They were super helpful, I transferred all my domains, but almost gave up on one because [other shitty very large domain registrant] was giving me the wrong codes for transfer. I decided to try the valet service, but they had issues too, so assumed it wasn't going to happen, as usually those services will take simple steps for you, but not go the whole way. They ended up calling [other shitty very large domain registrant] via phone multiple times and sorting it all out!!! I honestly didn't think internet service like that existed, so that was a great experience!

So, I have an idea for an "alchemic" skill tree system that I'm sure isn't exactly original, but I'm perplexed as to why it hasn't been used more often in games. Well, I can imagine it could be rife with imbalances and unforeseeable problems, but it still seems worth a try. Basically, I'm disattisfied with how RPGs typically put you into a "class" than give you a bunch of linear paths to travel, all based on simply dumping points into confined categories. I would propose a system where players choose from different descriptors to further color a base class. Instead, or perhaps in addition to, simply leveling up certain skills they'd instead choose ideas like "fire," "rage" or "bardsong" to modify the entire class. Hence, "alchemic," since you could choose different descriptors to end up with entirely different sorts of characters, not just distinguished by different skill-point allocations. Anyway, since this is all rather free-form, I figured I could explain myself best by copying a late-night steam discussion I had with a friend of mine, where we elaborate the basic ideas. Its rough, and long, and fraught with mispellings, but I hope you can see the idea we're trying to hash out: and, also, a couple parting thoughts: