Lemma Soft Forums

Hey everyone,

I started up an RPG combat game with a programmer I met on these boards, we moved from Ren'Py over to flash, but I wanted to share our trailer and demo.

Immortal Souls merges elements of Final Fantasy, Puzzle Quest, and Bejeweled into an exciting and fresh comic book style RPG. Dialogue scenes have a distinct Visual Novel feel

Please take a look at the trailer here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGlh5S1M6jU

And the demo, here:
(PC) http://ftp2.bmtmicro.com/immortal_john_demo.exe
(MAC) http://ftp2.bmtmicro.com/immortal_macdemo_john1.zip

Let us know what you think!

The game's website is http://www.comicbookrpgs.com

Nice looking game! (although I'm not sure the text content is really high enough to fit in here)

I love the animations, a couple of polish nitpicks:

When you're doing letter-by-letter text, words sometimes start to form on one line and then drop to the next when they get long enough for automatic wrapping to kick in. This is a common fault in poorly-designed textboxes and is kinda distracting. Can you adjust the code to know where the linebreaks should go beforehand?

The multiple-level, multiple-color enemy health bars confuse me, I can't tell from looking at enemies how comparatively strong they are.

Thanks for your feedback Papillon!

Yeah the way text moves is one of my big gripes, our programmer (Jordan Kent) will have to find a way to change it, at some point.

Pretty much the only way to tell an enemies level is by their HP. Maybe when the fight starts we'll have their levels fade out above their head. And fade back in when you mouse-over them.

I could use some feedback if anyone has finished the demo.

Did we have too much story? Did you like the story? Please vote in the forums so I know where to take it from here!

The poll is at: http://www.comicbookrpgs.com/forums/sho ... r-feedback!

Pretty much the only way to tell an enemies level is by their HP.

Huh - I didn't even *notice* they had an actual HP number on screen, my eye was too busily drawn to the confusing HP bars. So, the different colors are completely meaningless then? I mean, I have multiple enemies onscreen and if I click them, they all show the same HP number, but their overhead bars look different...

.... but then I'm not sure that HP number is working, since now that I can see it, I'm not seeing it change when my attacks do damage? Everything just says HP 10 all the time. I'm still confused.

Also, your installer is dropping shortcuts that don't correctly adjust for where the game was actually installed. (I don't install to C:\Program FIles.)

Yeah I was just made aware of the shortcut thing, we'll have to update the demo to fix that, and a few other things later this week.

The colors actually do mean something. The purple/orange/blue/red are enemy armor. The green is the enemy hit points.

If a color doesn't match, the enemy resists the damage.

Using the correct color will completely destroy an armor. So using 3 orange attacks will destroy an enemy with 3 orange armors regardless of how much your base damage for that attack is.

We say "Combox_" now when you destroy armor, it used to say "Break!" but maybe I should do something more obvious like "Color Match!"

Anyway, I gave up after being completely slaughtered about five times in a row on the same battle (3-3 I think). I tried to use a special item but I've had trouble attempting to pick up and assign items... I instinctively try to drag and drop, which doesn't work, and when I did get a bonus item clicked on, it jumped to a long distance away from my mouse pointer and stayed at that relative distance. Clicking in slots to assign it didn't work, and when I finally gave up and exited the inventory screen it was apparently lost forever.

Yeah sorry about that item bug fixes are #1 on my list of things to fix right now.

I just sent an e-mail to the programmer asking him to basically address all the issues you had with combat, these are things that have become appaerantly a big issue. I wanted to simplify it, but it looks like we've oversimplified to the point of confusion, thanks for the feedback!

we're going to display armor hitpoints, enemy levels, and add "Wrong Color" and "Color Match" text so players can get a better feel for what's happening.

I tried the demo. For most part, it looks really polished. Didn't think it was made with flash. As someone who also make flash games, this is really impressive.

I have also encountered the same problems with Papillon. I bought equipment, only to be unable to equip them. And the HP is just confusing.

Also, the random texts that appeared on the side bar... It didn't serve anything but to confuse me. Like when it says dice, I don't even know how to use it, or where it was actually located.

Last but not least, why does it have to be vampires and zombies? I couldn't get into the story because of it. ^^; This is my personal bias because there are just way too many of such flash games floating around.

Hey Mirage, i guess I'll try to be more specific about the power dice, a lot of information cycles through that window so we hope over time it helps people get a handle on it

I'm hoping the changes with "Color Match!" "Wrong Color!" and adding HP/armor points will help clarify things.

For some reason the game developers testing the game totally understood combat, but we changed the text report system and it looks like it's confusing people, time to make it more clear

As for the setting, the game started as more of a VN with dark vampire gameplay, you'd be a vampire roaming the city and playing a bunch of minigames. But then as we got started I decided to invest a lot of money (2 years worth of heavy saving) to produce something I could actually sell. There's a very detailed background story, which I hope to tell in future versions. I had a lot of ideas bouncing around in my head and this was the one I was inspired to do.

This is sort of a prototype, we actually have 50% of the artwork for an entire isometric exploration of the city that I can't afford to put into the game right now.

I really liked the battle system, though it took me a while to figure out "oh hey... match-3 for combos!". It's very challenging when you're just one up against 4 enemies... I wish there would be tag-team later on.

Also, yes, inventory is a little bit broken.

For some reason it reminded me of some Penny Arcade games (without the 3D exploration). If you already invested in the isometric exploration art, I don't see why it would be difficult to add it in. Because as it stands it's just battle after battle, some cutscenes, then next battle, which could get repetitive. In fact I wish there were more cutscenes.

It didn't feel like a flash game until I hit right-click and the Adobe settings dialogue popped up. The installer is just nothing more than extracting where to put the flash exe. I think if you compile with Adobe Air instead it will feel like more of a solid package -- plus you would have a better chance of getting on Steam.

Dafool,

Our programming fell behind the progress timeline, mostly my fault for experimenting so much with the battle system, so our artwork got ahead while the programming fell behind.

I realized integrating the exploration areas would also become quite a big time investment, which is why we're releasing it with a combat-focus first.

I believe Adobe Air requires you to install Adobe Air first, doesn't it? It seems we'd have stronger penetration without having to make the user install Air. I'm not sure why Steam would care about Air, or how it helps them

We're going to be carried by Impulse, and Direct2Drive is considering us, Steam has yet to respond

Wow, I checked out the video trailer for this game and it looks INSANE!!! @_@ Did you make this game in Ren'Py?!!?

I think they mentioned in the first post they moved over from Ren'py to Flash.