next »

[iMaple]

Hello

I'm creating Legion Hearts, a strategy RPG blending tactical autochess battles with roguelite deckbuilding.

It's a mouthful to say and probably a handful to actually make, so let's see where this goes.

Here's a picture of my desk to kick it off.

[iMaple]

Initially, I wanted to make a JRPG with Valkyrie Profile style combat. Every character would have 1 attack and 1 special attack with differing cooldowns, and the game would slowly progress in 1 second "ticks". Your focus would be to accurately put down status effects and set up combos.

That's about as far as I got with it though, because the idea didn't even appear fun on paper so I tossed it in the bin.

Here are some concepts for archival purposes and future prosperity.

[sambloom]

Very interesting, what are you building it in? The 2D top-down you have in that "Formation" image looks dope

[iMaple]

Very interesting, what are you building it in? The 2D top-down you have in that "Formation" image looks dope

Thanks! Building it in Unity, but threw together these concepts in GIMP on a 640x360 canvas just to sanity check the pixel sizes of everything and get a rough idea of how much stuff I can cram into the UI screens.

Here are the revised designs for the combat system ft. Google Slides. It's similar to a mobile game I enjoyed called Brave Nine, and it's about setting up the turn order of your characters to beat the enemy formation in an autochess battle.

The gameplay is still about trying to time and stack status effects, but I feel this implementation is a lot less clunky than my initial design and doesn't require a controller to play.

On a higher level, I'm going to try and combine this with a roguelite deckbuilding element similar to Slay the Spire, where you make decks out of characters and then slowly build up a strong roster as you progress in a dungeon.

Still just some loose ideas on paper, but I'm feeling a lot more confident about this one.

[luckylogic]

This has potential to be my kind of game. It will be interesting to see how you integrate deckbuilding. Are you thinking that each character has its own set of cards, or the units will be a bit more disposable with the cards spawning units on the battlefield?

And everybody loves a bit of setup porn. How are you finding the ultrawide for game development?

[iMaple]

This has potential to be my kind of game. It will be interesting to see how you integrate deckbuilding. Are you thinking that each character has its own set of cards, or the units will be a bit more disposable with the cards spawning units on the battlefield?

And everybody loves a bit of setup porn. How are you finding the ultrawide for game development?

Hey, glad to hear. Funnily enough I'm not much of a deckbuilder/roguelite player at all but I wanted to try and use this mechanic for something I'd play myself.

So I'm thinking the characters themselves are the cards - each one having a different target behavior and skillset like in Raid. But you start a campaign with only a handful of characters from your "army deck" and they can only be deployed a number of times before they're exhausted and have to be discarded.

Then you could draw a new character from your deck after each battle, meaning you slowly cycle through your characters while you progress in the campaign. So you'd have to win battles on a tactical level with what you have at any given time, but still try to conserve some to make sure you can build a strong enough hand to overcome the battles that get more difficult over time.

It pretty much comes down to building synergies between the characters to make it fun I think. Say character 1 stuns their target, while character 2 deals double damage against stunned targets. Or set effects if you have three similar characters deployed.





As for the display, probably one of the best productivity investments I've made. I always worked with multiple monitors but hated the weird gap(s) and the constant head turning, so this is basically that but more convenient.

I'm using FancyZones which allows windows to snap to what are invisible rectangles on the screen, and I set it up in a way that I have 16:9 zone in the center with 8:9 zones on each side. So usually I run the main app in the middle, and then have some spreadsheet, youtube video or chat to the sides.

Now, it's not much of a gaming monitor at all, but I think for work it's really good and it runs off my laptop just fine.

[iMaple]

Alright, got the battle system barely working with some basic characters and skills.



Think it needs really tight animations to feel good while also not taking too long. Also not a fan of the current target selection, think it's both unintuitive and too complex. I'll probably streamline the attack patterns and go with the angled 3x3 grid. This would basically force units to attack the next closest lane, of which there would always one, in case the adjacent lane is empty rather than having an arbitrary criteria like there is now.



Creating all these different effect categories is going to be a massive pain though.

[luckylogic]

Fancy zones or similar sounds like the way to go. I might reconsider now. Thanks

Best of luck with the idea. Your ideas seem to be coming together quite quickly.

[iMaple]

Fancy zones or similar sounds like the way to go. I might reconsider now. Thanks

Best of luck with the idea. Your ideas seem to be coming together quite quickly.

Cheers! Been sitting around on the idea for quite some time beforehand, so I hope I can speed through the prototype phase a bit quicker.

Also got got a logo made for the game now that I roughly now what the genre will be. Quite happy with it, think it's going to be really versatile in regards to what it can sit on.



Took a while until actually settling with the name - other shortlisted names were Vagrant Skies and Lotus Kingdom. Basically, something that thematically supports collecting characters. Vagrant Skies ended up being too abstract to visualize and Lotus Kingdom was some gambling trademark, hence settling with Legion Hearts.





Credit to Nina Pykthina, check out her portfolio here.

[iMaple]

The box art for the game was done by Max Berthelot as I'm a big fan of his style. The theme is inspired by a PSP game called Jeanne d'Arc and a coin from my home country.




Thematically, I wanted to show a medieval knight coming into contact with advanced technology. The story beyond that is still very much up in the air. I'm not even sure if she's going to be the main character.

Think it fits the "strategy RPG box art" trope well, but it might need a refresh down the line depending on what exactly the genre of this game will be.

Couldn't decide on a color for a while, so I made wall prints out of the rejected versions.

[iMaple]

Legion Hearts has a simple website now. It consists of Home - News - Gallery - Presskit and some Legalese.



Can't say much about the design, it's a Wordpress theme called Rein I liked and customized a bit. It's main goal is to increase our organic search visibility over time and keep interested players engaged through our devlog.

I think having a home for the game before we can get a Steam page up sounds pretty useful - especially if we want to add an online component or release on other platforms in the future.

We also launched a newsletter, which sends monthly recap of devlog entries directly to our subscribers. Sources say you become mildly cooler if you subscribe. Click here to become mildly cooler.

[iMaple]

Got some more character concepts done by Max Berthelot in a similar style to the box art. Really happy with them!



I wanted something "not too anime" but "not too western" either. I guess Metal Gear Solid style might be the descriptor I'm looking for. It's also much more affordable compared to very clean lineart.

Not sure what story role they're going to play, but I quite like the idea of getting the characters first before creating the world they live in. Designing around limitations and all that.

[iMaple]

So after trying out all kinds of different assets, I've decided to remove pixel art from the majority of the game. This is no longer a pseudo SNES JRPG, so I'm not sure why I didn't reconsider it earlier.



Making Legion Hearts a pure pixel art game while having it look good and functional is going to be prohibitively expensive and restrictive I feel, so I'll go with 2D illustrations for all backgrounds and work with a more clean UI.



I think I'll keep the battle sprites pixel though, I think that looks kind of nice even in isolation and makes them feel more collectible to me, while also standing out from the illustrated sprite style that most autobattlers have. Going from 48px to 64px feels quite good and reminiscent of PS1 era sprites.

[buto]

Wow - especially the last 3 screenshots look really awesome! Really like the illustrations and the detailed backgrounds. Gives a very nice sense of place and depth.

[iMaple]

Wow - especially the last 3 screenshots look really awesome! Really like the illustrations and the detailed backgrounds. Gives a very nice sense of place and depth.

Glad you like it! Took a while until I was able to find a background artist that I thought would complement the character designs well. I'm not much of an artist at all so instead of trying to direct I mostly look for portfolios where I can just point at something and say "more of that please". I don't really have the budget to go all out with art just yet though, so I'm just looking at getting an asset for every screen to see what works and what doesn't.

To that end, I also got a UI friend designer friend to help out and make my google slide designs less amateurish. I think the illustrations / battle sprites / ui all having separate styles works quite well.





The UX itself feels quite decent on PC too, although the mobile version might need some tweaks for the drag and drop interactions. Trying to make it as modular as we can so we are able to reuse menu's all over the place. Autobattlers in general are very menu heavy so I think this will pay off in due time.

While it lacks any kind of styling right now, I think that might be the way to go with the artwork taking most of the focus and colors being used for a UX purpose as they really pop. If I get any money together to make this game for real, I'm probably gonna gun for a technical artist to help me get the most out of the visuals.

[iMaple]

Got some environment mood illustrations done by Gourd to help flesh out some loose story ideas.






Think we're going with a pretty flexible narrative premise of you playing as a rogue Valkyrie who travels around the many worlds of Yggdrasil to build up a personal army and take revenge on the gods who wronged you in some way.

This plays into the character collection mechanic quite well and I think it's a nice way to bring a lot of thematic diversity to an entirely human cast of characters.

Quite ironic how we did come back full circle back Valkyrie Profile, but hey, whatever works.

[iMaple]

The first playable prototype is out! It contains a test campaign, 15 playable units and a janky dialog system featuring a gripping narrative written by yours truly.



If you want to give it a try, sign up to our newsletter to get the password and the download the build from the play page on our website.

Really happy we got to this milestone - while it's super rough around the edges, I think the core loop has potential. Balancing this will be tricky though to find the right spot between too challenging and too easy.

Going get some early feedback and see if there's any low hanging fruits to fix before heading off and trying to get money to actually make this thing.

[iMaple]

So we're applying for some small grants in order to actually fund the development of this game.

Ballpark budget to soft launch Legion Hearts is probably going to be around 500k. I live in Switzerland and government funding is super limited, so we'll probably have to scrape it all together with a combination of crowdfunding and private investments.




Here are some of the pitch slides we're using for the initial application. Should be a given to anyone who's done this before, but it's always fun to see how much different a pitch is when geared towards players compared to a corporate entity.

I think we have decent shot here, but it's also a test run of sorts to see what sticks and which parts of our pitch need refining.

[Alain]

Hey iMaple, I think Legion Hearts has a lot of potential and I am excited to see how the project will evolve. I also did some pitching recently and am happy with the results so far. I am no expert with pitch decks but iterated on mine a lot and got some professional help with it. As you said, a deck is geared toward corporate partners and the slides you are showing look very professional. I would not suggest to "design it differently", just wanted to mention that there is also the approach to style the deck in a way that it resembles the game more. It might be a chance to get people excited for the project, if not only the content resembles the game, but also the visual design of the slides.

[iMaple]

Hey iMaple, I think Legion Hearts has a lot of potential and I am excited to see how the project will evolve. I also did some pitching recently and am happy with the results so far. I am no expert with pitch decks but iterated on mine a lot and got some professional help with it. As you said, a deck is geared toward corporate partners and the slides you are showing look very professional. I would not suggest to "design it differently", just wanted to mention that there is also the approach to style the deck in a way that it resembles the game more. It might be a chance to get people excited for the project, if not only the content resembles the game, but also the visual design of the slides.

Hey Alain, thanks for the kind words and tips. You raise a good point with the theming - the deck feeling a bit too clinical was something we noticed as well, so we sprinkled in our most polished art assets (character illustrations) when there was space for it. Doing more with the style is definitely something we'd like to do more of in the future (and this goes for all public documents), it's just that we don't really have an established style yet so we're staying a bit on the cautious side.

Speaking of public facing stuff, we created pages on itch.io, IndieDB and Gamejolt to test run our copy before we launch our Steam page. These are the results a little over 3 months in (2 months devlog only + 1 month with playable prototype):



IndieDB generated a modest amount of traffic considering we just crossposted our devlogs as is with minimal effort. I think mostly devs hang out on this place so I'm not sure how valuable this traffic is, but there does seem to be a tendency to get random tweets and articles made about your game if you post it here.

One caveat though: Organic discovery is not a thing on IndieDB - the traffic here is pretty much entirely dependent on spikes you get from posting devlogs, meaning you need to constantly churn out new content.



Next up is Gamejolt. I think this site attracts younger users and fans of FnaF or Roblox, so they're not exactly our target audience but diversifying our reach doesn't hurt either.

This site has a "communities" feature which I'd compare to subreddits. So you're looking to post bite-sized posts in the relevant communities - pixel art in pixel art, concept art in concept art, gifs in gamedev and so on.

I'm not sure what to make of this place - it seems pretty irrelevant for us in the grand scheme of things but maybe it's a good place to permanently park a free demo once the game is out on Steam.



Itch.io's performance was so, excuse the language, abysmally terrible, that I didn't think it was even worth analyzing. That was until I pinged their admin team to check if I got caught in some weird filter. Lo and behold, I was.

Afterwards, our traffic improved to what we normally get on Gamejolt, albeit with a higher download rate. Unlike the former two sites though, devlogs do pretty much nothing for your visibility here and I think you're better off making a nice thumbnail and tagging the game correctly to increase the chances you get found via discovery.

Couple takeaways here:

• 1) I thought the indiepocalypse was so bad that getting 17 views over 3 months on Itch.io made any kind of sense.
• 2) My ego was too big to accept this, causing me to blame it on a spam filter I didn't know existed.
• 3) Getting out of the devlog-only stage on both itch and Gamejolt as fast as possible is the best way to get any meaningful amount of traffic as they get better visibility.
• 4) The "free" traffic from here is nice but won't make a dent long-term, especially when compared to even a tiny paid promotion. Sadge, but that indie for you.
• 5) I think these sites are a great place to figure out how you can promote your game in different contexts. In our case, we have decent long form content with our devlogs, and our character concepts make for really good still images. However, we realized that we lack the material to make killer 5 second gifs, so that's what we'll look at next. Similarly, we found out that we had a hard time making teaser videos, so we'll need to think of something more flashy to add to the core game loop.