Path of the Djinn - combat alpha
Cut your way through servants of the Djinn in this combat-only alpha! The game is a tight loop of combat and perks that enhance your skills, even radically changing them!
The game is under active development, we'd love to get feedback, opinions, and ideas. We're on Twitter, and we have a NEWSLETTER. We'll try to get a steam page out as soon as possible. ABOUT US
Disclaimer: Refresh the page if you're having low FPS on your first browser play. Computers without an OpenGL 2.0 compatible GPU driver might experience issues with the browser player. Mostly happens for laptops without dedicated graphic cards.
Attributions
- Icons: game-icons.net
- Elder from chierit.itch.io/lively-npcs
- Insects from jeevo.itch.io/insect-enemies
- Bringer of Death (boss) from clembod.itch.io/bringer-of-death-free
- Ambience from freesound.org/people/dhallcomposer/sounds/697217
- Music from freesound.org/people/Airwolf89/sounds/346455
- In-game title font: https://lokivintagepropaganda.com/en/, https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/vintage-propagandist
- If we forgot anything please let us know!
Download
Development log
- WISHLIST TIME!Dec 17, 2023
- Patch 2023-11-12Nov 12, 2023
- Patch 2023-11-07Nov 07, 2023
- Patch 2023-11-03Nov 03, 2023
Comments
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Feels very powerfull. Beat the boss now twice, once with mana+stun on bash with poison stacks, the other just with passive armor whittling it down.
Thanks for the kind words :)
I like the game, largely. Theres some good bones here. But I never feel like I have any agency, like I never get to make meaningful or interesting choices. Success seems to entirely stem from what upgrades are offered and when, and whether or not you face enemies that will kill you outright or burn your health so low that you can't stabalize.
I don't know what the solution is, but it feels different than it does in something like slay the spire. In StS I always feel like I get a say. Combats are much quicker, and you get a ton of opportunities to choose between more than just one or two options. So even if you choose something early on that you need to build into, you can be fairly certain you'll get to do some version of that over the run. The same really can't be said here.
Also, a speed up combat option is *super* necessary lol.
Anyways, just my two cents. Good luck with the rest of development!
Hi tsilver33, thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback. Broadly speaking, we agree with you. The pace of combat can indeed be improved, and a sped-up mode for fights will likely get there in the future, but first, we want to improve the "normal" combat flow as much as possible.
We're super interested in what you said about player agency and would like to make sure we fully understand your point of view. As far as I understand, there are two different areas that you feel are lacking agency (correct me if I'm wrong) 1) the direction of the team build, 2) the combat itself.
For 1), the current "loot table" of upgrades is completely random, and together with the fact that there aren't many upgrades that combine (or, better, combo?) with each other across different characters it might give off the feeling that you aren't really building into a particular direction.
2) The combat can feel on autopilot in some fights, given that between cooldowns and the available skills and perks the move is obvious.
We'll actively push to fix both issues, the next 2-3 weeks we'll be busy setting up a Steam page, after that, I'll have more bandwidth to look into this.
Would love to pick your brain some more, so here are a couple of questions:
Between points 1) and 2), which one do you feel is the worst?
As of now, I think the combat is a bit closer to Darkest Dungeon rather than StS, would you agree? Have you played DD? Is that combat more fun, and if so, what makes it more fun?
Sorry for the wall long of text :), and thanks again for playing!
Hi Ceak, thanks a lot. Having somebody record its first play is extremely valuable. You've been spot-on with your comments!
The stun effect on Bash was extremely useful, as was getting two copies of +10 damage, regen 5 mana on Anxiety. Poison seems pretty weak-- against the boss, where I would have expected it to do the best it can, since its only really valuable against high-hp targets, it just gets dispelled by Dark Blessing (granted, I could have prevented that with Bash, but I didn't know and besides that's more an upside to bash than an upside to poison). Additionally, the ranger seems the weakest of the three without upgrades. I avoided taking distraction, since the ranger's only reliable damage is from quick shot and I didn't want to be forced into changing intents when I didn't want to, but maybe that skill is good enough to bring him up to par. Regardless, I think a buff to one of his starting skill would help him seem less of a third wheel in the party.
Hi there, thanks for playing and for taking the time to write down your feedback.
Agree with the ranger being the weaker class at the moment, the fact that the boss can cleanse itself from physical conditions is also another factor that makes the ranger less effective. We'll definitively give the ranger some love with the next patch.
About distraction, it's indeed a bit of a bittersweet pick as of now. We'll likely need to think about how we approach this kind of modifiers design-wise Might make some of the skill modifiers toggle-able and see how it goes.
I love it. Sounds nice, looks nice, plays addictive, fast and entertaining. I beat the game with one hero standin (the magician, who excelled in the final battle with more than 200 armor until the end).
I liked the three different heros with their very distinct abilities. However I found some abilities still unbalanced or somewhat silly. Example: throwing sand against ALL enemies is SUPER powerful, but silencing them seems quite week (for just 1 round, this really pointless).
On the other hand, I strangely liked the warriors armor buff. What I miss is a simple, mana-neutral attack or minor spell. While I like the resource management between turns/armor/health/mana I found it a little weird that everything costs mana. So often I had to rest for one turn cause I was out of mana. It is a valid game mechanic, but it is also unsatisfiying. Maybe an additional resource or a resource pool could also do the trick.
Another thing I did not like: I had some trouble understand the different buffs and effects, it gets too crowded there for my taste. Example: When I bash an enemy, it gets WEAKNESS (icon looks OK), but the it is gone suddenly, quite odd (only valid for one round?).
Hi, thanks for the kind words. We're really happy to receive such comments, they make our day.
About the balance, it's pretty much non-existent, i.e. we aren't taking a serious approach to balancing the skill modifiers just yet, so some runs might go really crazy. The throw sand modifier that blinds all enemies is indeed a bit OP at the moment, which might be because most enemies are melee and ranged at the moment.
When it comes to the mana-neutral attacks missing, are you referring to a character in particular (i.e. the magician lady) or to all characters in general? Bash starts with no mana cost, but I can see that, once upgraded with something that increases its cost, the warrior can end up having to pass turns to gather mana, and that can be not so much fun. About the additional resource pool, it's something we'll brainstorm about in the future, but likely not soon.
>I had some trouble understand the different buffs and effects, it gets too crowded there for my taste
Could you go deeper into this? Are you referring to a skill having lots of skill modifiers or a particular character getting many buffs/debuffs?
About bash & the weakness modifier, I just took a look at the description of the modifier and indeed it does not state how many stacks of weakness it gives, will be fixed by the next patch. Thanks for pointing it out!
About mana-neutral attack: You are right, I took the bash upgrade that costs mana - that is when I started to realize that mana management can be an issue. Indeed, also the magician sometimes ran out of mana - which I found OK, as I expected that. Only later did I find out that even firing the bow costs like 5 mana (which is still a net +5 I think, I found that to be well-balanced). For the magician I would love some natural talent of hers like "regenerates +10/all mana when skipping turns" - that would make the mana issue more visible and also allow maybe to activly let her skip to use powerful spells afterwards.
About the buffs getting crowded: The stacking of buffs and effects seems to be a very important part of game mechanics, I remember the bleeding, poison and severall spells. For MOST of the time I could understand it well (tool tips work great!), but I got overwhelmed in time by combined (a) number of effects, (b) the high number of stack (c) their different behavior. Example: Bleeding does its damage at the end (?) of the turn, while the stacking damage spell of the magician does damage when it is cast, others do it under certain conditions. Well maybe the game is DESIGNED that way, but that is something that (at least for me) dramatically SLOWs the game down, the more complicated the effects become (because I must calculate a lot, what damage will happen to which character in the next turn or so). I am not sure that is intended. It might be OK for some BOSS fight, but I think that a mixture of different, yet less-complicated enemies might work well to keep the game fast (and still entertaining).
Noted about the mana. We received some feedback about putting the mana cost and CD at the icon level, so that it's visible without doing a mouse hover, might be a good idea after all.
About the "natural talent", we're toying with the idea of, essentially, having each character have a sort of sub-class in the form of the 4th (or 5th) skill slot, a completely passive skill (similar to how oppressive aura works now) that gives this kind of cross-cutting effects. What you suggest might be a good fit for such things.
About the buffs getting crowded, also noted. Indeed the combination of buffs and effects is a core part of the game, but we absolutely want to keep things as streamlined as possible. So far we've toyed with the idea of capping the number of active skills of each unit to 3 rather than 4, and/or making the mana bars of enemies not visible or even removing the health bars, so that players don't have to calculate numbers to the exact extent (because they can't compare with the current HP), to encourage playing more with their guts/quickly
Thanks again for the valuable feedback, it is really of the utmost importance!
battle of attrition
:D. Any favorite skill or skill modifier? Anything you would change within the UI?
i think a turbo mode will be nice.
Do you mean turbo as in faster animations/turns etc. or different scaling?
The basic battle system feels really solid! Looking forward to seeing how this comes along.
Thanks, much appreciated. We won't let you down! Sorry for the late reply, took a few hours for the account to be reviewed so I could reply to comments :D