The Villium Shards - A top down RPG - Now on Kickstarter

Hello everyone!

Website: www.turtlesquadron.com
Email: admin@turtlesquadron.com

Please support us on Kickstarter: Click here for the link

The Villium Shards is a top-down fantasy action-adventure RPG. You play the role of a young adventurer, setting out to find answers to the mysteries surrounding your life, including the loss of your parents as a child, your prosthetic arm which you can somehow feel and move as if it were your own, and the strange creatures that suddenly launched an assault on your quiet home village.


Along the way you will learn about the world’s history, and forge your own part in it; lining your path will be hundreds of deadly monsters with elite bosses to test your skills. You will have to explore many procedurally generated dungeons to find weapons and equipment to help you on your way, but your true strength will lie within the illusive Villium Shards themselves. Interacting with these Shards will grant you special abilities to use against your foes. It is up to you to do whatever is necessary to gain these powers; helping groups of refugees, solving political disputes and taking on mystical forces will be part of what you’re faced with on your adventure, while you use your abilities to rebuild the broken world around you.

The game will include four classes to choose from (with the possibility of more to be added in the future), which determine what type of weapons you will be able to use and what abilities you will be able to learn. Abilities are gained through finding Villium Shards which play a key part in the game narrative, you will later be able to Morph your abilities into different elemental forms to suit your play style.

Any help of feedback would be great!

Thanks in Advance!

Since providing feedback on Kickstarter campaigns is sort of my thing now, here goes:

Screenshots - First of all, the game looks great. Very polished and fleshed out, if not wholly original. You definitely need to show MORE of it, though! Only 4 screenshots, and 2 are pretty much the same thing! No way, man. Show that shit off! Get some characters and/or the player in those shots, too. Especially the one shot of the caravan, which has the UI overlay, has no player and it gives me the impression the world is going to be very empty.

More art! - If the game is about your player’s character, show him off. Let’s see a beautiful render or hand-crafted drawing of him with that crazy arm. People love Kickstarter games because it makes them feel like they’re part of the process. So show them your process! Throw in some concept sketches, and show how the game has evolved from nothing into what it currently is. Then talk about what else you want to add. It creates a flow and places your potential backers right in the middle of it.

What makes your game special - Being totally honest, other than the crazy arm, everything else about the story is generic and kind of, well… bland. Maybe that’s not the case, but that’s how it’s presented. “Personal struggle. Lots of enemies! Magic… Save the world!” has been done a lot. From the video (I watched with sound off, since I’m at work), it looks like your way of interfacing with the game might be kind of unique. Expand on that. If there are more interesting elements of the story, don’t hold back to prevent spoiling things. You need to get people interested NOW.

Right now I feel like your game is “kinda like” a few other I’m a fan of, but if I can’t see what’s special about this one, those games are probably better (AAA studios and such), so why should I spend my time and money on this one? Give people an answer to that question.

Your team - Put some pictures of your team up there with little bios for each one. People (generally) like people. They’re helping you make your game, so let them know who they’re helping. It’s a small touch, but I think it really helps push a certain type of donor to click that button instead of just adding it to their reminders and eventually forgetting about it.

Promote - Unfortunately, this should have started months before you launched your campaign. Your team’s first tweet is from a month ago, and you have 8 followers. Facebook is a good bit better at 135, but you’re not posting nearly enough to it. And you should have been informing people about the upcoming Kickstarter a long time ago, in my opinion. The first few days are the most essential part of a campaign. When people see something is popular, it makes them want to be part of it, too. But if they see it sitting there and no one’s paying it any attention, it suggests to them that they may not even need to bother getting involved either.

At this point, try to fix that by promoting the campaign EVERYWHERE. Any message board related to indie games you can find, contacting gaming publications (large and small, but smaller are more likely to even pay you any mind). This should be your one and only focus for the entire day today, and take up at least half your day for the next month.

Update - Keep it fresh by adding information and any status changes (“Hey guys, we’re at 25% funded! Tell your friends!”) and throw more incentives in there. Your rewards are just… okay. If you do end up getting close to your goal, add some well-thought stretch goals to incentivize people to keep going.

It’s going to be an uphill battle for your team, but if you push as hard as you can, you have a fighting chance!

1 Like

Hi Schneider!

First off, I want to thank you for the nice reply, It’s a breath of fresh air to get positive support for once!

We’ve taken into account your post and are already steaming away getting our content all over the web and churning out more quality screenshots to show! We’re going to post a huge update to the project within the week.

Thanks again,

Matt

@ANTMAN0079 Again, my statements were not conflicting.

The visual quality of the game is very good. The art assets, the UI, the smooth camera movement, the animations… It’s all clean and contains a good degree of quality. That’s what I was saying when I said “The game looks great.”

The story is a totally separate subject. There’s a paragraph of text near the top of the Kickstarter page that tells the basic plot of the game. My comment on it being “generic and bland” is indicating that it’s too similar to every other fantasy RPG out there. There was a hint about he character having some sort of mystical prosthetic arm, and I was encouraging the team to provide more detail on that to flesh the story out more.

The two things are entirely separate. Saying they’re completely conflicting is like saying “That woman is super hot, but she has a real bad attitude” is a conflicting statement.

From what I can gather reading your posts, you’re just a pool of negativity. You like to criticize other people’s work or just pick at their statements, but you bring nothing to the table yourself. It’s so easy to look at something and say it’s bad. Maybe it’s because you want other people to fail so you’re not alone being someone who has never contributed anything worthwhile to the world.

3 Likes

The game looks great! I like it. I hope someone like Schneider21 is around to give me feedback when I need it. :slight_smile:

When one gives constructive criticism, is is always good to start with what you like about the project and then also explain what needs work. I think that was done well. Very nice to have someone who really does want to help.

Good luck on your Kickstarter campaign. I do agree that you need to grow a larger audience, probably better to do before launching the KS campaign but better late than never. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Cleaned up some needlessly harsh and dumb comments. If people will comment, do so honestly but with restraint, knowing this is a wip. Else I’ll belt you.

4 Likes

Thank you for the comments guys, our update should appear on Monday!

Hi there!
I’m sorry, I haven’t really followed up with the thread so I was wondering why all the negative comments were posted? This looks so incredibly beautiful, both artistically and in environmental terms.

Also I really like the concept art, it looks amazing - keep up the good work! I would love if you could also give some feedback about my game Lens? Sorry, if you don’t like the small ad about my game being here I can edit the post to delete the link, I am just very curious to hear some opinions! :slight_smile:

Once again, good job and keep it up! Also, ignore all the hate. There’s a ‘funny post’ on the internet - “they hate because they ain’t us”. It may sound like a “meme joke” or something but it’s actually true ^^.

[Link removed by moderator, it’s against our rules to advertise in another thread].

1 Like

Hey Sykoo

Thanks for the positive comments, it is good for us to get a general picture of what people like and dont like in the game so all comments help!

Hey turtlesquadron you have a very promising product on you hands. Great job so far getting to where you’re at.
Not to harp on things too much but I don’t think the game is ready for kickstarter simply because visually it looks like everything is in a 50% complete state or less. I’m not taking anything away from the back end work you have done up to this point and it is evident to seasoned developers like most everybody who has commented before me.
But the initial selling point of every game is the visual quality and aesthetics. That’s what draws people in then the rest of the awesome stuff that can be presented to the player - story, game play, uniqueness, fun factor.

I think the #1 thing you could improve upon - right now - which would help out your kickstarter progress is the focus on character as stated by Schneider21, and also the in game character controls and animations. It is pretty visible the controls and animations aren’t fleshed out completely and it presents a slight negative to the delivery.
Don’t get me wrong, as a budding developer myself - I do see the potential in what you have so far, but as a prospective customer I see every little flaw presented on the ks video.
The second thing which your probably aware and can’t update for kickstarter, is the sparseness of the environments, they are rather dead minus a spinning thing, a couple tadpoles in the pond and the portal animation (which was cool looking).
Everything just needs to be pushed beyond what it is now, Push it to 7 then 8-9 then 10 and if you can hit 11! Make the world alive with stuff that isn’t important but the player can pause and say “cool they did that and they didn’t need to and they did it just for me”. I call it secondary action/animations, I don’t know what it’s called professionally, but it’s all the extra stuff that makes a game more appealing because it has character and it’s alive.

You have a game that has the potential to have character and be alive.

Good luck with the rest of development. I hope I wasn’t as discouraging as previous posts which fortunately I didn’t get to read. Thanks for the cleanup @hippocoder . I’ve had to bite my tongue a couple times and not respond to comments from specific individuals who got ‘cleaned up’ here.

1 Like

Thanks everyone who has given us some advice so far, we have added some new information to the kickstarter going into more depth about the character and world.

Also here is a bonus picture of a pet you can get in game.

1 Like

Looks like a little dog we used to own, minus the strange contraption on his/her back leg. :slight_smile: Very cute.