Exile Princes Closed Beta Testing

[Jubal]

- 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.

Choice of avatar I think is fairly doable and relatively high on my list, I'm not sure how wide the choice will be but I had an idea of making achievements unlock some extra avatars maybe

Player customisation I think would be a case of adding one or two "skill/bonus" picks in the game, maybe one early-game and one when you get your first city or something? I'm thinking things like "+3 attack if you're using a ranged weapon" or "hiring ships is half the price" so significant bonuses but not quite a full character class range of possibility. I'm not sure if that's going to get done before November though.

- 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

Yes, companions (and every NPC) have a 5pt scale - greatly disapprove, disapprove, neutral, approve, greatly approve. It's intentional that there isn't a simple readout of it, but companions will act differently towards you depending on their opinion and e.g. companion quests only trigger at high approval! In general it's pretty easy to get high companion approval unless you keep refusing all their little interactions (getting a drink with them, gambling with them, etc).

Money and actions left in the week will be on the main UI in future versions, I've done that

- 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

• You can use the M key to toggle volume. There's no sound other than the music so you can just hit M once to turn it off.
• Yeah, I've had other feedback on this. I'm not sure if there's a great way to do multiple saves per character, but I'll keep thinking on it.
• There won't be a visible inventory (that's one of my "I'll go mad if I add this" lines). You can change the player weapon, but you can only carry one weapon at a time. You can upgrade companion weapons and armour though, and your own weapon! It's just a one-off +1 bonus that you can get for companions, but it's worth visiting crafters and smiths if there's any in your cities to get it. And player weapons can get up to three tweaks made by smiths in the cities. I've shied away from more high-detail modelling of everyone's equipment because the complexity of the much larger array of camp followers is really the bit that can vary your loadout in this game.
• Companion injuries don't heal like the player's do: they're just a permanent reduction to one of their stats, so they can "heal" and get over it by getting more XP. As for morale, basically don't take lots of losses in battles and keep paying people, and spend more time in the pub. There's also a useful common "search area" result in farmland which lets you pay for nicer food to get a morale boost. The big things that crash morale are not paying troops or taking heavy casualties.
• I think if I do more on companions it will probably be adding more diversity of traits and personality types, rather than adding super scripted individuals. When you say you avoided a guy, do you mean you avoided all characters who had the same introduction interaction, or were you finding the same guy repeatedly somehow? Maybe I should add more variety to the character intro scenes to make it clearer they're not all the same person?

I think my next game might be a more conventional RPG - a small number of fully scripted companions, inventories, a less emergent and more static plot - possibly back in the Kavis setting, so I'm also saving some ideas up for that rather than throwing them into this one

[Jubal]

I've added a bit re pets this weekend! There are two new pets available, a dog because I figured people would want a dog, and a lanfych, one of the weird two legged fishes that appear next to water bodies and down some dungeon tunnels in the game. You can raise either from a whelp/fry respectively to get a nameable pet now Also there are a couple more unique petting-the-fluffy-animal text vignettes, and a whole new set for interactions with pets that, like the lanfych, are a bit more slimy and less fluffly.

[Jubal]

I've started work on post Next Fest bugfixing!

Recent changes:

• Fixed a bug in the music engine that meant that if any track was allowed to play fully twice it would crash the music engine. I haven't so much stopped this as added a failsafe that reboots the engine if it happens.
• There were various dialogue trigger flags wrong for nonhumans (pets and dragons) which could lead to party members having political arguments with the dog, a dragon trying to romance the player, etc. These have (sorry, monster-lovers) now been fixed.
• I think I've fixed another of the intermittent battle-crash bugs, which could trigger as a result of the hero collapsing from exhaustion and/or a player unit fleeing, which wasn't properly triggering losing the battle.
• A couple of text bugs (or as they're better known, typos) have been fixed with some of the more complex romance dialogues.

I'm not sure what's next. I had someone asking about the creatures a bit and pointing out that there isn't necessarily a lot to give you a sense of what a kinklade or wibulnib is beyond the artwork, so I'm wondering if some of the more common creature types should have some occasional trigger vignettes where you get a little dialogue or example of what they're doing when you find them? That seems less heavy duty than a bestiary while still helping give a bit more colour.

[Jubal]

Worked on the game again today - this time the main thing has been working on the save game feature. You can now have multiple saves for the same character, and there's a system for deleting saves and characters as well in the Load Game section of the menus. So that's something? I think at least one person asked for it in feedback so I hope it's useful.

[Jubal]

Today's work:

• Release date announced!
• Some common enemies (kinklades, quarquares, wibulnibs) now have little randomised readouts to describe what they're doing when you find them on the map. These will appear at the start of battles.
• Timed quests (merchant escorts & trade goods) are now variable in time length according to map size. Large maps also now have +2 actions per week, and Mappa Mundi maps have +6. This should make deliveries more viable on larger maps.
• If you have the achievement for winning a game, the game changes its new-games default up to normal difficuty rather than easy.
• The code that stops the music changing if you face weak enemies is now more aggressive (that is, it will stop battle music triggering against slightly tougher enemies than before, broadly you now need to have a start lineup 1.5 times as tough as the enemy rather than twice).
• Tutorial has been tweaked so that the battle infodump is in two segments rather than one, it actually requires you to use the unit switch buttons before letting you start fighting turns.
• Tutorial has some prettier music tracks and the city of Harionasis has a background to its city banner when you enter.