We decided to reveal a minor bit of information on Friday’s stream.
We’re launching on July 4th 2020.
Speaking of the stream, we showed off Skirmish mode and started up a new game of saga with the Hatfields. Over the course of the evening a hired gun with the “touched” quirk became a hero. In the final battle, in the midst of an ambush he hit the ground, it wasn’t until the end that it was determined he just needed some time in town to recover. His collapse though was all the rest of the posse needed to push on to victory in an unexpected tough fight.
Above is one of the things that makes Feud a lot of fun. You’ll have hired guns start to write their own stories and before you know it, you’ll be saying “remember that battle when….”
As far as dev goes, we’re continuing to work on bugs and adjustments. It’s going well but there’s plenty of work needed to get us across the line.
There will be another stream at 7pm PST on Friday. We hope to see you there on our Twitch Channel.
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Under 50….and more Streaming
Thanks to everyone who joined us on the stream last week. It was a lot of fun finally getting to show off the game to people. If you missed the stream, you can see it here. We’d only planned on doing a single Story match from beginning to end but everyone was having fun so we jumped right into Saga mode and started up a game.
We’ll be back this week streaming on our Twitch channel again at 7pm PST on the 24th. We’ll have a look at Skirmish mode and either continue the Saga game from last week or get into a new one. Pull up a seat and join us if you can.
In other news - we are under 50 issues. We’ve managed to close out a lot of bugs and it feels good. We’ve started prepping to get localizations handled as well.
That’s all until next week…unless you drop by on the stream.
Stream on Friday
Stream on Friday
So, we’re ready to do our first stream this week and give everyone a glimpse of the game live. For this first one it’ll be a playthrough of one of the story levels. We’ll get into how the different systems work for cover, action point usage, special abilities and talk a bit about the rest of the game. Feel free to come join us. We’ll hang around to answer the questions that we can answer and give more details on the game. Like we said last time, our intent is to make it a weekly stream and show off a bit more of the game each time, including play modes, maps, character progression and more.
Our Twitch Channel is where you can join us on April 17 at 7pm PST.
Looking forward to chatting on Friday.
While nobody was watching…
…we tested out streaming the game yesterday. The intent is to do a stream of one of the levels from start to finish next week. If that looks to be on target you can expect an announcement early next week. In the future, assuming it goes well, we’ll follow up with weekly streams that show off various aspects of the game from story to saga and skirmish.
As for the game itself, the bugs are still in the same range with steady fixes going in daily. We made some final tweaks the “endgame” part of saga with some changes to how town durability and recovery works. This is the last area of Saga mode that we’re actively tweaking in terms of AI and balance. It’s all centered on how quickly an enemy should be able to remove you from the game and how quickly you can remove enemy factions from the game.
Hope everyone continues to stay hunkered down and safe out there!
Keepin’ Your Territory
This week we’ll talk a bit more about Saga and what to look out for when trying to keep your fledgling western empire from getting put into an early grave.
When you begin you have your hometown and a couple posses. The first thing you’ll want to do is get scouting and exploring. The world map is randomly created for each game so things like resources and enemy hometown locations vary greatly from game to game.
You’ll want to grab up some resources and hold on to them. There are four types and it’s a good idea to have at least one of each under your control. It can be tricky, as the more resources you have, the bigger your territory will be and the more likely the other groups will want to come take what is yours.
Speaking of other groups, the three other factions on the map get more aggressive as time moves on. It’s up to you to get your own posses ready and to do the research you need to be prepared and powerful enough to drive them off. There are dozens of different research paths, experiment and find out what works for you in a specific game.
As a final tip, you’ll often see enemies moving around the map and one of the things you may notice is red lines heading towards your resources, posses or even your home town. This lets you know when a potential attack is coming, act accordingly. In some cases, it’s better to engage an enemy on your land so locals can help and your posse members have a better chance of survival, other times you may want to take the fight to an opposing posse for others reasons.
We’ll get into Saga more in the next few weeks. The game itself is doing well and heading closer to launch we’re hovering around 45-55 bugs and the goal is to get them fixed and the game out as quickly as possible.
See you next week.
Grabbing a resource
Keeping Movin!
No big feature discussion this week. We just wanted to let everyone know we’re continuing to fix stuff. We’re almost in an “Under 50” state in terms of bugs/issues with only a few critical ones in that group.
We made a couple touch ups to the “defensive AI” configurations which gave them more options and replicated some player behavior like “hiding” which involves an enemy breaking LOS and sneaking around a bit.
In other news we finally have a PR person, so we’re working out what launch looks like on that front.
We’ll be back next week. Whether you are holed up in cabin or trying to stay sane in a big city, we hope everyone is doing well.
Attack of Opportunity
Along with many of the AI changes and additional abilities we also had a close look at Knife/Melee enemies and decided a change was needed to make them feel more effective. There were several ideas tossed around but we settled on giving them an Attack of Opportunity.
This new state allows a melee enemy to make a free automatic attack on anyone that attempts to move away from them. While it’s a somewhat common thing amongst tabletop miniature games it was something that hadn’t graced Feud yet. Due to the fact you can intentionally spend your action points any way you like it was just far too easy to move and then shoot a melee attacker. You could even double move to a spot far away to lure a melee attacker into an ambush. Now when you attempt to use those types of strategies they come with a painful price.
Speaking of “painful prices” we know many, including ourselves are dealing with a number of changes and challenges to life due to the virus making its way around the world. Everyone is a participant in a “strategy challenge” with no reloads and very real consequences. Our hearts go out to everyone who is having to deal with the situation. If we all can remain calm and remember we’re all part of the human posse, we’ll undoubtedly come out the other side stronger, smarter and healthy.
We’ll be back next week with more info. Until then be vigilant and kind.
Advanced AI Abilities
One of the last major things we added were AI behavior additions and Advanced AI abilities. Before we did the game was fun for a “normal” player, but we wanted something more challenging for a very skilled player in the harder modes in saga. These abilities go well beyond the normal “perks” an enemy could have and push towards making players have to adjust to combat from fight to fight well beyond the ordinary challenges of each new fight.
Where did it all begin? We had an ability called “Guardian” which essentially prevents you from hurting and enemy in cover if they have it. Any enemy that has this ability changes a fight dramatically as you must expose them to kill them, which means you have to move more and risk more. The concept between all the other Advanced Abilities was to encourage an even greater range of strategies to be necessary.
What followed was the creation of a dozen new advanced abilities that enemies could have. No enemy can have more than two (which is more than enough to make things interesting). Some things include enemies with Battle Advance, which are very hard to kill when they move in the open along with the ability comes and AI change for that enemy that makes them more able to advance in conditions that would be considered dangerous for a normal advance. Another was a simple Ability Lock which is extremely effective against posses that include multiple hero characters. Enemies can get interesting combos of abilities for example Battle Advance + Armor Breaker creates an enemy that can move in aggressively and debuff members of your posse without risking dying while exposing himself to do so.
With these new advanced abilities, battles can be brutal and you really want to choose carefully who should be eliminated first and that can vary per posse and map. We’ve included a couple screens of enemies with these abilities and a 1 round “before and after” setup.
That’s it for this week. We’ll be back next week with more info on how Feud is going.
Before
After
Under 100
During the last few weeks Feud hit a “small” milestone of its own. The game has been well below 100 bugs for the entire time. Some get added and others removed each day. The next big hurdle is getting it consistently under 50. Even better, a vast majority (90%+) of them are not major, however they are issues we’d still like to fix before Feud goes out the door.
Also, some may have noticed the FB and Twitter posts coming back. You’ll be able to see some new shots on Instagram as well. Just search for TheFeud_WildWestTactics.
Next week’s update we’ll get back into talking about the game and some of the recent, final enhancements.
Post Dreamhack Update
We are back from Dreamhack! It was a great show we got to talk to dozens of people and introduce them to Feud. For the first time ever, we brought the entire game: Saga, Story and Skirmish modes and allowed people to jump right in wherever they wanted to. They could gallop around in a posse in Saga or get down and dirty with guns and knives in battle. We kept a game of Saga running for three days that got deeper and deeper in as random people stopped by to play. Overall it was exhausting, fun and worth it.
We saw the posts regarding the stream. Sadly, we had no details on it either until the day of the show, to make matters worse it appears that the Friday stream isn’t loading at all.
So….
I guess we’ll just have to do some streams and videos for you. In the coming weeks we’ll be getting things set up to show some scenario playthroughs and parts of saga to give everyone a good feeling for what the game is. Until then we’ll be back and active on Steam, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram posting shots and updates.
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