[WIP] Hexborne, a turn-based puzzle game

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Hey guys

I am creating a turn-based puzzle game called Hexborne. The 2 main concepts behind it are casting spells by drawing gestures and choosing the right spells for your enemies.
Please let me know what you think of it and be sure to check out the facebook page: www.facebook.com/Hexborne

Play the free-to-play alpha version here
Hexborne Free-to-Play Alpha version

I’m looking forward to hear your criticism, compliments and will answer your questions asap.

First impressions 2 (explanations/concept/ideas)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QB9S_qJ6A8

First impressions 1

FAQ
What is Hexborne?
Hexborne is an upcoming turn-based puzzle game for multiple platforms. Your objective is to defeat various opponents, each with different strengths and weaknesses on a chessboard-like battlefield. Find out the weakspot of each opponent and build your strategy on how to defeat him.

What makes Hexborne special?
Hexborne is one of the very few games that involves drawing gestures. The more accurate your gestures, the more effective your spells will be. Draw different gesture-chains to create powerful spells that can crush your enemies or empower your own creatures. Since you will learn new spells over the course of the game and face a variety of different strategic opportunities, your intelligence will be challenged.
In addition to the spellcasting by gesture-chains, each opponent has a different AI which demands a high flexibility from you. Await far over 60 different levels that shall not take less than 50 hours to beat. Each level will have a par which leads to the opportunity of improving your own score

What is the story behind Hexborne?
You are an apprentice wizard learning new spells as the game progresses. You start out with only the little knowledge your old friend Kalimir gives you. His sparse knowledge leaves a lot of questions to be answered during your adventure through the lands of the yet unnamed country :slight_smile: The whole world you will dive into is engulfed by the aether, home of the six magical forces you learn to access. Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Black and White magic are the main categories that host powerful spells and creatures.
You start your journey because you hear that the neighbor village is under attack by savages and you decide to help. On your adventure you will meet new friends and foes and explore dark and mysticals landscapes.

How far is the development progress?
So far, I’d estimate the backend code to be 95% complete while the levels and spells are 10% complete, depending on whether or not you add analytic tasks. Extrapolating the current progress I estimate the game to be finished by the end of this year. This group will keep you up-to-date about the current progress.
When watching my progress videos, never forget that this will only be the prealpha and especially graphics and animations will be stubbed only usually. It is always important to have the basics solid; I don’t want to release a super looking assassin’s game with so many bugs that I have to reimburse you :slight_smile:

Who is developing this game?
So far, this game is a one-man-project by an experienced IT Consultant who recently found his deep passion for creating digital games. If you want to contribute in any way, feel free to contact me. The game is developed with the wonderful Unity framework.

How can I contribute?
All sorts of help are welcome. Especially useful are people that have modelling or graphical skills. Also, I will need background music and additional graphics. Some of my friends are already supporting me with graphics and music. Donations also help, you can check out the kickstarter project once I create the page for it.
But first of all, I’d like your feedback. Also, you are welcome to invite your friends to this group. Every follower is a potential fan of the game. And having a lot of people enjoying this game is my main goal!

What will the game cost?
In all honesty, money is not the reason why I develop this game. I develop it to make a cool game with new mechanics and bring back again intelligent puzzle games that are more than a mere shifting of gemstones or pushing a button repeatedly. I want you to like the ideas in this game. Nevertheless, my plan is to give a demo version for free which contains a few levels. Then, for the price of something between 2 and 5$ you can acquire additional level packs

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reserved

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Looks really good! $5-10 sounds fair :slight_smile:

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no more feedback? :frowning:

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Looks challenging
Very well done

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Asking for feedback? OK, even though everybody hates me for it like I care.

Is there a possibility for the player to not achieve above 90% when casting a spell? If so then what would be the cause? And considering how the game plays, it’s great that you’d like to say how much of the game there will be but I don’t see the rules of the game stated as of yet (this tends to come to mind when people see grids, casting spells, etc.).

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To the contrary, EVERY feedback is much appreciated :slight_smile: Even your questions because others may have the same.

Yes, it is definately possible to achieve less than 90%. But I wanted to show that this level requires you to not fail a single spell, thus when I played, I made very accurate gestures.
Moreover, I just recently heavily improved the recognition algorithm, especially when it comes to the circle gesture. The current threshold for an accepted gesture is 66%. E.g. if you draw a circle but omit the last 1/8, you will have something like a 66% circle.
The cause for not achieving above 90% would be if you skew your gesture or scale it into either x- or y-axis. Each gesture defines a bitmap and lays it over your normalized gesture. The bitmap defines perfect, good, bad and unallowed areas, each assigning a different value to a point you drew.

What exactly is unclear about the rules? There have been other people asking this question but maybe because this game is in my mind for months now, I don’t know where the difficulties in understanding lie :slight_smile:
The rules say that you have a limited amount of action points. Each action (walk, cast) requires an action point. When you successfully or not cast a spell, one AP is subtracted. After your turn (no more AP), it is the opponent’s turn. You win usually if the opponents die while you must not less than 1 AP (as stated in the video).
The gestures are explained to you over the course of the game. Your creatures can only be controlled in later stages of the game.

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“What exactly is unclear about the rules? There have been other people asking this question but maybe because this game is in my mind for months now, I don’t know where the difficulties in understanding lie”

You followed this sentence with, what else… the rules of the game. This should probably fall under you F.A.Q. area.

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Is there any effects which can cause the game to be more difficult to draw the shapes? I kind of think it may get a little redundant after a while just from watching the video.
Just some thoughts - ‘what if’ from an effect cast upon the player or where the player is standing or - from a direct result of something in the game - the mouse has lag, or is sped up? That would complicate things!

Also I didn’t understand why the spider in the back was able to attack the player character. There was an enemy between it and the player and usually melee attacks require the player/enemy to be on conjoined grids.

Pretty cool concept and good implementation so far.

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yes, in later stages of the game you may have less time to draw your gestures + the shapes themselves will get more difficult (the hardest one being a double pentagram).

Yes, I have the same impression. So I thought that once you cast a certain SPELL with more than 97% accuracy ~10 times in a row, you will receive the option to fastcast this spell. But this then will only use a 90% version of the spell. Since some levels will require you to at least hit a few “perfect” spells, you still may have to draw them manually.

This won’t work on Android, hence I won’t implement that for now.

Melee attacks are only possible on the 8 adjacent fields. Maybe you got it wrong that the spider attacked the Will-o-the-Wisp?

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remind me the GBA game MEGAMAN EXE =)

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A new video is out, this time with a lot more explanations, check it out:

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The official Alpha is relased! It is free-to-play. Check it out and let me know what you think

Hexborne Alpha

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Here are my criticisms. Warning, when I post feedback on a game, I don’t sugar coat it.

After the intro scene, I was confused on exactly what the heck I was supposed to do. I see a bunch of shields, and some undefined numbers.

Most games would have you select the destination and then hit a button to enter it. You didn’t do that so it took me a while to realize I was supposed to double click on it.

Tutorial was a bit of a pain. The first time through I thought my game had crashed. I was given very specific instructions for the first two actions (The gestures), but for the third action (Selecting the target) the game gave me no instructions and I thought that it had frozen and wound up restarting it. At the end of the tutorial many elements of the HUD remained undefined. This could be rectified without expanding the tutorial by having an “On mouse over” feature so that when players hover over a HUD element a small tip box appears to give a brief explanation.

I didn’t like the spell timer. If I go too slow, I automatically fail. If I go too fast, the game doesn’t pick up part of the trail, causing me to fail. The timer doesn’t seem to add anything to gameplay other than stress and frustration. It’s one thing if players only need the shape, but apparently your system looks at shape, size, placement, and orientation. In other words, there is a lot that can go wrong and cause the player’s gesture to fail. I’ve had dozens of triangles fail. Computers really aren’t the best at discerning shapes. That’s the whole reason websites require capchas; to prevent bots from creating hundreds of accounts.

Tutorials should be skippable. No players should be forced to play a tutorial, ever. I did like that I could skip some dialogue. On my second run I used the cheat to unlock all levels, only to get slaughtered because even with cheats it’s mandatory that I go through the damn tutorial to unlock the spells.

It might be better to ease players in with single gesture spells, then learn 2 and 3 gesture spells as they progress.

Would be nice to have the tutorial watermark for gestures available at any time. It’s one thing for the first 2 spells, as you’re able to practice them exactly the right way in the tutorial. For other gesture signs, there is no way to practice them without risking losing your turn when you inevitably fail.

Game glitched on me, so the spell trail is about a half inch off of the mouse on my screen. Perhaps have some option to realign it?

Had the Goblin Shaman’s info pulled up, but exited the battle, and their info remained on screen. Tried to clear it but couldn’t. Since I was in full screen I had to actually log off of my computer. CTRL+Alt+Del didn’t work, and there appeared to be no way to exit the game in a way that wouldn’t cause me to lose work in other programs I had open. So that sucked.

Goblin Shaman fight is bugged. On a few occasions at the start of the fight it said I took 80 damage, even though it took twice that much. Did retry spam to check the rate. It’s pretty rare but still happens.

Just cast a spell, game told me that I didn’t have enough energy, then ended my turn. So I was punished for not knowing what the numbers meant when it was never explained. Initially I has assumed those numbers meant something else.

Just tried Sandstorm, it asked me for an upkeep, and then damaged me as well. That combination really doesn’t work. I had to pay the initial cost which is AP, mana from the totem, magic points, as well as the turn, then I have to wait another turn before any damage will be dealt, then I have to pay an upkeep, then it damage me as well, and to top it off it does a fourth the damage that other spells do. I get that it’s an AOE where other spells aren’t, but it’s still a very underpowered spell which hurts you more than it helps. In terms of cost/benefit, it simply isn’t worth it.

Wisp needs to be improved. In certain situations it hurts the player more than it helps. The point is that it takes damage instead of me. What typically happens is a null turn. I dealt the enemy no damage, and they damage the wisp instead, killing it. Well on the next turn, the enemies are now closer to me, and I’m down mana and magic points, so it actually wound up making me worse off.

For challenge mode, does that mean if a player tries to fight the Goblin Shaman before obtaining fire resistance, they would have to disable challenge mode to be able to use it?

There’s no way to see a spell’s range before you attempt to cast. This will lead to players occasionally getting screwed.

Perhaps you have it planned for the main game, but as far as the alpha goes, there were no puzzles. What you have is a turn based strategy. I understand your confusion and can even see how it is a bit of a grey area, but really it’s best if you just classify it as a turn based strategy rather than a puzzle.

It feels like you’re trying to have an uber hardcore game. Like Goblin Shaman, maintaining a 95% spell strength isn’t enough to beat it. You’re forced to go get the fire resistance spell. And with the 2 wolves casting 90%+ strength fire and water wont’ beat them either, and wisp dies too soon to really help at all. And as you said earlier, you’ve designed some missions so that players will have to get perfect spells. Maybe it’s easy for you because you’ve been doing it for six months, but nobody else is going to want to put that time in. Perhaps it’s simply because I was using the web version and slight lag caused gestures to be less accurate, I don’t know. Over the course of the hour I had to do several retries do to the dozens of spells which failed.

I recommend you go check out Dark Souls. A very well received game notorious for being difficult but fair. Your players aren’t machines. You have to leave some room for error.

Now, I do believe the game has some potential. The “Gesture” mechanic is in all honestly a gimmick. Not that it’s a terrible thing mind you, I think each game should have something to differentiate itself from others. That being said, I feel that if you rely on it too heavily that the overall quality will suffer. The game can’t only be gestures, the gestures are the bait to lure people in, but there needs to be something more. Look at a game like Meteos on the Nintendo DS. It would be much harder to play only using the d-pad. The game is designed so that the mechanic enhances the game. Your gesture mechanic makes your game harder to play. If I hadn’t spent the last hour constantly failing spells and having to restart battles as the result, I think I would’ve had a blast playing the game.

I also like that you’ve included a skip dialogue button, as well as a button to retry the battle (Though it would be nice if I could press it even during my opponent’s turn). Nobody wants to wait to lose to try again, so quick retry is awesome. Yes the small touches require more time and effort, but I like to believe that people notice and appreciate them.

I absolutely love that you’ve taken the time to sit down and see how each battle will play out turn by turn in order to make sure that battles are tense. At first I didn’t like that the player didn’t grow stronger (Apart from new spells of course), but it works. The player starts each battle at 100% and you know exactly how strong the player will be for each battle ensuring a better quality experience for each battle. I’m sure that takes a lot of time and many people clearly don’t do that when designing their battles. I feel like that is the main strength of your game. Loosen up the requirements on what is a valid spell, and give bonus damage on 95% to make it less mechanically demanding on the player, but keep it strategically demanding.

At any rate, these are of course only the opinions of one man. You’re free to disregard it entirely; it’s simply food for thought. Good luck with your game.

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THAT

was the best feedback anyone has ever given to anything!! :smile: Thank you sooooooooooo much for that.

Let me explain a few points

A friend of mine told me the same. Will change that

Really? I heard from ppl talking about game design that you should assume the (sorry, nothing against you ^^) dumbest player possible. But once the spell is cast and you need to select a target, the arena field turns green. Did you really have problems understanding that you need to select a target? If that is so, I will think about adding a text that says “please select target” or sth.

Same here. Did you actually have problems understanding the HUD elements? Did you have problems understanding the HUD elements in Diablo 2? Because there was no explanation either and I feel like ppl still can grasp this level of UI by themselves. Please correct me if I am wrong but I feel like explaining every little detail (especially in the beginning) will make the player think that I think he is stupid ^^ So I intentionally did not explain every single bit. Same with the upkeep. The game asks you whether you wanna pay it or not, I assume you understand what that means without a big tutorial lesson about that. Also you mentioned that you wanna skip tutorials so I thought less may be more :wink:

I had different players play it and some of them really wanted to draw the gestures quickly while others tried to make them slow and as perfect as possible. Imo, this timer is a fair tradeoff between those two types of players. When I draw gestures, there will always be at least 0,7s time for triangles so I don’t see any stress. Can you tell me how many fps you had? You can turn that on in the options. If it was below 35fps, then I can understand why you draw them so slowly.

Will definately be included in some way. Still thinking about it.

Can you reproduce that and tell me when this happens? I only have this if I change the resolution because once you start the game, the resolution will be fixed, since this game is designed for mobile actually where the resolution won’t change. If this happens, this may have to do with the point in time at which you enter the fullscreen mode.

Can not reproduce this behavior. How did you exit the battle?

Holy shite, that’s true. Seems that has to do with the restarting or conceding.

What numbers are you talking about? Uhm OK, if the spellbook doesn’t suffice on the cost, where else would you advise to explain the spellcost? When you learn the spell?

You forget 2 things here: Sandstorm will be useful if there are a lot of enemies on the arena. Imagine 6 flies with 50 HP each approaching you. You don’t have time for 6 fireballs so you need to take the 50 dmg yourself.
A wisp will be cost efficient once you have more than 1 AP or if your opponent needs 2 hits to kill it. Even if he just needs 1 hit, that means you won a turn in which you could regenerate other aether energy.

You NEED to acquire the fire resistance spell before being able to defeat the shaman. Challenge mode means that you cannot use e.g. the wisp in any level from shaman downwards since you did not have that spell at that time.

Will be implemented :wink: but still, you cannot see the range before drawing a gesture anyway. So a place in the spellbook must suffice.

So you were able to beat the Alpha Level in 9 turns in your first attempt? Also the 2 wolves?

I will definately not require the player to cast a lot of perfect spells to perfectly beat a level! Maybe think about that 2-wolves level. Check out the arena. You probably will start to understand why this is a puzzle game :wink:

Did you unlock a smartcast or play the Alpha Level? I am aware of that and thus implemented shortcuts/smartcasts that cast a spell with 90% quality. Only if a higher quality is required you need to draw the gesture yourself. But you need to cast spells with a certain quality a few times. The concrete algorithm on that is a secret and will usually be achieved by the time you reach the second map overview.

Yea, level design takes a shitload of time :wink: but: when I draw gestures I rarely get below 90%. So I feel like improving on gestures AS A RL-PLAYER is also a mechanic I want.

Again, thank you a lot for your input

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Alright so here’s what happened during the tutorial which caused me to believe it was glitched:
Game tells me to do gesture 1
I do gesture 1
Game tells me to do gesture 2
I do gesture 2
Blue crescent appears to show valid range
Oh, that’s a cool spell (Because it’s blue I assume it’s the water spell)…it’s not doing anything…the game’s not giving me instructions anymore…did it freeze?..well it is an alpha, bugs are to be assumed.
Closes game

Additionally I don’t play games like Diablo, so I couldn’t comment on the HUD. Yes if people are very familiar with those games, they’ll understand the HUD elements on your game more readily, but not everybody plays that genre.

And no, including all of that in the tutorial probably isn’t best. Perhaps explain 1 or 2 HUD elements per mission, depending on which ones are relevant for that mission? And then include an option to toggle tutorial tips off?

Checked my fps, was hovering at around 25. It really didn’t like me I suppose.

Now that you mention it, the mouse alignment glitch did happen when I changed resolutions but I just didn’t think of that at the time.

Yes the spellbook is a good place to put that stuff, I just didn’t realize it could be clicked until well into my experience. None of the other HUD elements did anything when I clicked them, so I didn’t bother clicking on the spellbook.

I can see that Sandstorm would be good against an army of flies, but that’s not what was in the alpha. I can only judge the spell according to the enemies I’m allowed to use it again.

No I didn’t beat the 2 wolves on my first attempt, but I still wouldn’t define this game in the puzzle genre. There are many games with sections I don’t beat on the first attempt, doesn’t mean they’re puzzles. I get it, it’s more of a “combat puzzle”, but it’s really best to just call it strategy. If I bought this game as a Hardcore TBS I’d feel that I got exactly what I paid for. If I bought this as a puzzle game, I’d be a bit upset.

Again best luck to you. Cheers.

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