Exile Princes Closed Beta Testing

[Jubal]

Some progress! The groquetes are now in, as are the gatherers though those need more testing. Today though I mainly worked on the "midway" bonus, which is a special set of four additional court cases only available if you're mid-range on liberty/authority or rich/poor scores: you can get a reputation as even-handed which means you might get paid to help arbitrate certain cases in your court.

More testing of all this needed as I get back into this, but plenty more to do in general after that...

[Jubal]

Started today on a new block of 3-4 additional companion quests, which should bring the game to the point where many companions have a couple of options and it's not just "oh this is a companion of X type so I'm definitely getting Y quest".

The first of these is pretty simple, it's a trading quest available to characters with the liberal or socialite traits where they want to start a new luxury goods trade and you need to search around for buyers and provide them with starting funds, with a unique resulting trait for them which should help you recoup the loss and more besides over time.

[Jubal]

Over the weekend I did a screeching turn away from the companion quest work and instead started on a new lategame feature: emergent threats. There will probably only be one of these in the imagined 1.0, which will never trigger on a first playthrough but then will turn up on 30-50% of subsequent runs.

The one I'm adding will be an "enemy king" event, essentially, when you've captured 50% of the cities, an enemy noble will rally the remaining settlements to themselves as king, to provide you with a new higher level endgame challenge. The king will have some bonus features, most obviously some much tougher honour guard units and a system whereby if they lose their city but their emergent faction still has at least one city, they just get to go there and replace the new ruler. They might also have elections against them switched off and their faction or city might get protection against renown based loss (where the player can flip a city through sheer renown)? This feels mean to players who really want to complete the game in a less conquesty way though. Possibly you can only flip/election the king's city once their faction is down to a single city? That might make sense.

Anyway hopefully this will make for a more interesting endgame on some runs. I don't want to spend too much time on late-game content because I don't think many people will ever see it, which is why I'm not adding other options. Other endgame threat plans on the list include an emergent wibulnib threat where the game spams them at you in actually dangerous scale hordes, something where you either face or spearhead some kind of wrath of the forests/fairy revival as the Duke in Green chooses a champion, a dragon threat where a dragon moves around causing major destruction to cities, and an external invasion where a new faction comes in with a whole new and more powerful military unit roster. I think those are all quite low down the list though, and along with the late-game story quests they might end up getting bundled into some kind of expansion plan if the game ever has a player count to merit it.

For now, the king threat has been implemented in its basics, though the king's bonus units aren't in yet and nor is the rule for their moving out of a captured city to a new capital. So those are my next steps - then I'll try to get back to the companion quests, and then after that probably achievements and early-game quest tweaks are next on the list.

[Jubal]

Okay! As of this weekend the king feature is much more functional:

• Flips & election triggers can only happen to a royal capital if it's the royal ruler's last city
• Capturing a royal capital if the royal faction has a remaining city will lead to the ruler picking a new capital and becoming ruler there
• Royals spawn two Royal Knight units in battles with the player, these are slightly beefier than Armoured Riders and have the Charge2 rule meaning that unlike most cavalry they can charge even in siege contexts.

I still need to do a few things to mostly-complete this feature:

• It should only trigger on about 50% of runs.
• Rulers should also get a chunky bonus on autoresolving battles for their royal knights - don't want it to be the case that the best way to beat them is just letting an AI ally do it.
• Need to test & check that if they do get beaten by an AI ally, the capital switch mechanic works.

I'd also like to add some extra bonus units that reflect the ruler's personality, and in my original conception I wanted the royal rulers to have some additional ways to challenge the player like sending duel knights or assassins, but those (especially the latter) may have to be nice-to-haves given the number of other features I'm keen to add and the fact that this is all late-game content that I wouldn't expect many players to see.

[Jubal]

Some new additions lately! I'm adding companion interactions for the city events, so there's now a chance companions will give you a comment while you're at feasts, and I'm going to add soon some little bonus mini-events for the different companion classes for tourneys - ranger, sergeant, minstrel and squire all feel quite doable, not sure what clerics and scholars will do at the tourneys yet. Thoughts welcome!

Also, had Spritelady's other half run a test, which was interesting. He stuck close to a core gameplay loop of lord quests, with little city searching, and so didn't pick up any companions etc, I wonder if I need to push the searching and exploration more at people?

[Jubal]

I recently had some testing done by a Ukrainian friend here in Vienna which was useful.

Also, a lot of work has been going into getting this towards Steam recently! The store page is prepped and I'll be announcing that properly in a day or so from now.

Alongside that, a long-awaited addition of achievements is the next thing on the list. I've got one working and, thanks to some help from psyanojim, piped up to Steam, so that's neat. Lots to do there though - I'm aiming for about thirty achievements in the initial release.

[Jubal]

As of the weekend I'm up to 16 achievements, so that's good progress Making the pictures and thinking up good names is honestly often the thing that takes time.

I am also thinking about rebalancing the faction bonuses a bit, in particular to try and give the Scholars and perhaps the generals some bigger mid-late game thing - Phoenixes get, well, Phoenixes, dragons get Dragon summoning, and the Generals' arequebusiers are powerful. The Scholars' pangolins are a very good unit too especially due to their training ability (which makes no sense but it's staying in now) - but the Scholars don't necessarily have anything flashy for the later game.

[Jubal]

32 achievements now ingame! So that's progress. Here are some more of the latest ones:



I've also started work on the much needed dungeon crawl overhaul: I've been putting in "service" sections for piping more information around the various functions so far, but I've now got to a point where:

• Completing a dungeon turns it into a ruin instead (which could then be redeveloped, so it lets you "clear" the area in your own cities if you'd rather have another amenity).
• Ruins have a chance to turn into dungeon entrances (which is currently set way too high for testing purposes, this will be a very rare event).
• Dungeons have a type, which will set the final enemy, and which I'm also planning to use to flavour some of the miscellaneous events on lower levels.

The next and probably bigger section of the overhaul is to add three new enemies on top of the one already used. I want these to be some of the more interesting/unusual boss fight style encounters in the game, there to stretch its better players, so they're going to involve some difficult/unusual mechanics.

[Jubal]

Today's dev work: adding one of the tougher possible optional boss fights. The game includes mini dungeon crawls where you can only take your hero and companions (without your "regular" warband units). These are entirely optional and provide some extra challenge, and I'm working my way through adding three new unusual end fights for them which are designed to test players with well prepared parties.

Today I've been doing the mechanics for the Whisperer of Lies, which can turn one of your units around to attack you. If you need to face one, it's good to hire some weaker "fodder" companions to help (at some risk to their lives) because if the Whisperer grabs one of your most powerful heroes or player character you might find yourself hacking your way through your own party!

The Whisperer will have a couple more tricks up its sleeve too, but I'm not revealing those yet. I've already completed another of the three bosses, leaving one to go. Which I think will be an easier ride: the Whisperer has been relatively complex to code...

[Jubal]

Having a big round of testing so I'm making a lot of smaller improvements at the moment, here's a few of the recent changes:

• Tweaks to the sound player, nothing very major but should hopefully have reduced "double start" issues on tracks, and ensured that files are periodically closed which may help players with older systems or linux systems with low file limits.
• Started work on ascertaining what can & can't run the game in general - Windows 7 and lower seem to be out because Python itself isn't back-compatible that far (which surprised me as a discovery). Not sure about Windows 8, 10 and 11 will both be absolutely fine. I'm not sure if I could make a Win7 version by running the code through an older version of Python 3, but this is unlikely to be worth the bother I suspect. On the plus side, it looks like the whole thing should actually run OK on Linux systems with WINE.
• Fixed a silly saves bug which I caused just by not preparing the save storage file properly.
• You can now press Esc to leave the information or army menus and return to the map (or to the city if you're looking at a garrison).
• Added a new interaction for characters who've completed the Grand Merchant quest, where they'll basically occasionally give you chunks of free money when visiting areas of cities with alleys or markets.
• Tweaked a couple of dialogue lines for Ruthless characters so if you're in late-game and they're fully on-side they'll act more trusting towards the player character.
• Various minor text fixes.

[Jubal]

Big run of progress this weekend on the social networks side of the game, which is especially represented at feasts (though I will add some more possibilities elsewhere if I get time).

Perhaps the biggest game mechanic change is that for "city champion" victories where cities switch to your side, two additional things are now taken into account: how much the city's leader likes you, and whether the city's leader is friends with members of your faction. These factors will have a significant impact on how much relationship you need to build up to flip the city. The relevant elements will be things that feasts offer you chances to manipulate, letting you flip people into your faction and helping broker their relationships with the city's leaders.

Bits of this I've now implemented:

• There's a stored network of who knows who, which is updated at feasts.
• Feasts the player doesn't go to will create some semi-random relationship changes anyway.
• The algorithm for the city victory now takes into account lord relationship and friendly nobles.
• There are feast opportunities to observe pairs of nobles talking to help determine their relationship.
• The player now gets occasional opportunities to make or break friendships at feasts by spending adventuring points, in exchange for relations with the city (essentially taking part in someone else's schemes).

To do:

• The make/break friendships thing might be more interesting if it occasionally failed or had a negative outcome?
• Still need to add the player's ability to boost relationships and faction-flip NPCs at feasts.
• Feasts the player doesn't go to should let faction switches occasionally happen.
• Should have a couple more readout options for the "do you want to make/break this friendship" text.
• Companions should be able to dig the player out of some social holes at feasts.
• Companions should have reactions to making and breaking friendships at feasts.
• Need to add an "attend a feast" quest.
• Need a new streamlined function for changing city lord relations with the player, and need to deploy that in several places: a "damped" version for low level quests (only goes up to "approved"), and then a version getting to full approval for feasts etc. Maybe also need more ways to get disapproval.
• Need to make approval/disapproval affect a couple more things. Maybe escort quests get different text for disapproval, and assassinations shouldn't be ordered on someone's friends.

Further bugfixes also continue:

• Fixed a tutorial bug where the "give directions to another city" rumour caused a game crash because it didn't have another city to find.
• Caps lock doesn't break all the hotkeys any more.

[Jubal]

Another big weekend of work.

Big stuff:

• Players can now flip guests to their faction at feasts.
• Lord relations are changeable via quests and feasts.
• Lords will react differently to guests depending on whether they like them, and won't order assassinations on their personal friends.
• Lords react when you make peace or war depending on their personal viewpoints.
• The House of the Dragon has now officially been renamed the House of the Wyrm, because I don't fancy being sued by HBO.
• Summoned dragons now have dialogue lines and there are a couple more petting your pet interactions.

Lots of bugfixes, including:

• An annoying bug where you sometimes ended up trapped in a city after winning an election there which should now be fixed.
• At least one cause of late-game combat bugs should also hopefully be gone.
• Going into your army menu after viewing a city army no longer gives any wrong button labels.
• Misc typo fixes.

[Jubal]

Biggest news of today is that I've opted The Exile Princes in for Steam Next Fest in October

Also I've been doing a big UI overhaul. I had quite a lot of feedback that people wanted a bit more info on the main screen, so actions/week and money total are now visible. Also the side menus now have more buttons, giving more information options, perhaps most notably including a full read-out of units' special abilities and what they actually all do.

I think the next step may be implementing Demo Mode, and then I've got a bunch more bugfixing and checking and then maaaaybe I can actually put a bit more content in, I feel like I've been spending quite a while doing all the bits of this that I don't enjoy so maybe it's time for me to let myself add some nice stuff

[Jubal]

I think the UI overhaul is mostly done: I'm now working on stuff pointing in the direction of Steam Next Fest, which the Exile Princes will be present at in October! I've worked on making sure a presskit and developer page are available on Steam and I've been "locking down" parts of the game to create the demo mode for players to have a go at.

[thewildflowersong]

Hey! Thank you very much for allowing me to partake in the beta testing, it was a lot of fun! I definitely haven't gotten this back by August 15th lol but final thoughts:

I've never played a text-based RPG so this was VERY much a learning curve. I restarted a few times and definitely quit without saving a lot

- Bugs: two instances, but I think the same thing: ambushed by forest bandits and the fight turn button stopped working after a while. Copied the (hopefully) relevant part from the console and will link the files.
- Close to playable, definitely! I wouldn't be questioning my life choices if I stumbled into this on the internet randomly and downloaded it for free haha
- Priorities for late dev work: I would LOVE a choice of avatar and more PC customization (like classes?) omg!!!!
- How long: medium map size, easy/Vis difficulty, inexperienced in this genre gamer, few false starts. Reaching 50 relations for the first time took about 2-3 hours and the whole game took between 5 to 10.

- YES please to the money/health/morale readout on the UI.
- On that note, is there a companion approval/relationship mechanic, and if yes can we have that shown? (Not on the UI lol)
- I vote "yes" to the main quest appearing in the quest log personally
- Achievements: I'll link the file

- Other bits:
1) I adore your music but I had trouble concentrating sometimes on the game with the parts with singing (like the beginning/creation, and I had to pause the game when I was listening to minstrels) - but honestly, maybe this is just me
2) I would really appreciate having more save slots! But maybe I'm just a weakling
3) Are pernament stores in the plans? Especially weapons (but companion armor upgrades would be nice too)
4) Parts I struggled with are morale and how to raise it, and companion injuries and when do they actually heal, can I do anything for them, . Again this might be obvious to someone experienced with the text-based genre, just thought I'd let you know! (And I did play the tutorial, so if those are in there disregard what I said, I'm some twenty-six goldfishes in a trenchcoat.)
5) Are there any plans for a few pernament companions? The randomized trait thing is actually fun and unique, but I avoided a guy my whole playthrough just because he was pro-nobility the first time I met him! And I really don't know how much other people will replay this (personally I could do it a few more times definitely), but maybe it would be someone to get attached to

Link to bug and achievement file

Again, thank you very much, I hope my thoughts aren't completely disjointed and useless! It was a blast and I'm really looking forward to the full release <3