next »

[jarett]

Wishlist on Steam!

and

Follow on Kickstarter!

About
Beaten Path is a turn-based, tactical RPG following the story of a mage and her student as they traverse a shattered world, recruit allies, fend off foes, and strategize their way to victory. Strengthen your characters and learn new skills to repel the monstrous Grarl and learn their origins.


Features

• Over 20 unique maps featuring turn-based tactical gameplay on a hex grid.
• A variety of map win and loss conditions. You'll need strength, stealth, and much more to emerge victorious in each.
• Each character has personal abilities, multiple skill trees, and class.
• Upgrade your characters with various equipment.
• Plan your moves carefully with units taking turns based on their action order.
• Position your characters to perform follow-up attacks and receive stat bonuses.
• The game auto-saves after each character's turn. Don't worry about forgetting to manually save.
• When something goes awry, rewind! Rewind to any previous turn, adapt your strategy, and seek victory.
• Actions going by too slowly? Fast forward!

Links

• Steam Page
• Discord
• Kickstarter
• Twitter
• Website

Devlog Plans

Hey there! I'm a solo developer working on my first game and this is my first attempt at making a devlog. I have a lot more I want to show off -- diving into the gameplay mechanics, rpg elements, and character designs. I'll be working on writing up the first detailed post next week and will try to keep this thread consistently updated with more information.

[Tangleworm]

This is looking really cool and polished, especially as a solo dev! Wishing you the best of luck.

[jarett]

Hello! For my first in-depth post I wanted to talk about skill trees since I recently updated some of them so they better match each character's class.

Every character has a class associated with them -- like mage, dualist, or phoenix -- and each of those classes have a unique skill tree. I want players to be able to choose their owns paths in a skill tree based on what niche they want their character to fill.

Have a look at this gif, showing the skill tree for Panna, a dualist, and Shim, a mage.



Panna's skill tree is split into two smaller trees (the "dual" in dualist) with the left one focused on attacks and damage and the right focused on stat buffs. Within those smaller trees, players can choose which nodes to unlock first -- going straight for abilities (circles) or seeking out stat gains (squares) or upgrades (hexagons).

Shim's skill tree is also split into smaller trees, but since she's an elemental mage, I wanted each tiny tree to follow an elemental theme. Wind, Mystic, Fire+Ice, Holy.



You unlock skills by earning skill points on level ups, so you can put these new abilities to use immediately! The plan is to create a larger number of abilities per character so you always have interesting choices each turn.

That's all I have for now as I wanted to keep this first post short and sweet.

If you want to chat about any of this, or have other questions, please join the Discord server!

[jarett]

It's been a busy past month of adding some new features and iterating on some existing ones, but I'm back with more!

Today I want to dive into items and equipment. They work essentially how you would expect -- items are consumables that individual units can use and equipment is attached to a unit, giving them various bonuses, like stat buffs or status resistances.

Items can be used during a unit's turn as their main action -- so instead of attacking or healing an ally using an ability, they can use an item. I wanted to make the items varied because of this, so they range from normal healing items to constant-damage weapons or temporary stat buff items. The constant-damage item can be especially useful for weaker units, like a mage focused on support rather than damage.

Equipment is fairly straightforward currently -- any unit can equip any type of equipment. You get 1 helm, 1 armor, 1 pair of boots, and 1-2 accessories per unit. You can turn a wimpy mage into a tanky mage or more of a glass cannon, depending on which equipment you set on the unit. The stat changes won't be too drastic so that I maintain some balance, but it adds a lot more variety to the character builds.

All items and equipment are stored in a convoy, which is shared by all units. Only the main character and those adjacent to her can access the convoy during a level, so you can't abuse items throughout a level. Except for the main character, that is, since if she falls in battle, usually that will mean you lose the level.

I'm working on creating a lot more items and equipment that you'll be able to find -- or purchase at the market -- and hopefully find exciting when you get something rare!

>> Kickstarter! <<

In other news, I'm still hard at work on putting the Kickstarter together and gaining followers. If you're interested, please give it a follow! If you're interested in any aspects of the game, let me know and I'll happy to answer any questions.

[nathy after dark]

The visuals are seriously good! Nicely done.