Little Indie Games Worth Knowing About (Probably)

Diplomacy is not an Option is in early access and looks promising. Castle builder, tower defense with a low poly luster. Hold off waves of angry peasants with their dirty rakes, or join the rebellion and throw off the yoke of oppression.

DasTactic quite enjoys it.

When did demos become a thing again?

In any case, I am very happy they’re back.

Steam Next Fest, I think, is what brought them thundering back.

While I think it’s a nice development, personally I don’t find it terribly useful having access to a demo for games still in EA.

Yeah, which I think itself really comes from the value that’s emerged in wishlisting games on Steam. You notice how hard every dev pushes wishlisting. It’s because without it, you can hear about a game and then completely forget about it by the time it launches or by the time it goes on sale on Steam. Demos make a lot of sense in a wishlisting ecosystem.

As someone who’s helping a dev bring his game to Steam, I can totally get behind the value of wishlists. It’s a real indicator of interest.

I think having a demo maybe cheaper for a small company than having gamers buy it only to use Steam return policy. The return policy basically made everything a demo. I would think there is some cost when a game gets returned.

Oh, I hadn’t thought of the possible influence of returns. How many players actually return Steam games, though? I’d be curious to see numbers. Probably I will underestimate it because it’s not a thing I’ve ever done.

This does raise an important point, though, that demos in themselves aren’t cheap to make–especially for small teams. It seems like it should be easy, and in some particular games it might be relatively easy. But sectioning off a demo portion of a game, not sharing content files that might give away full-game features or story, and testing it to make sure it works as expected… these things take a surprising amount of time. Now that demos are becoming really common marketing tools again, I expect we’ll have something similar to the classic “E3-demo delay” scenario games had in the early 00s, where having to show something cool off at E3 would derail projects for months.

I’ve returned probably a half dozen or so games - around one per year.

A Mage Knight knockoff from a small team. Looks pretty solid, plus there’s a demo.

Best of all, it’s NOT Early Access!

Looks like a digitised version of Mage Knight, which merits closer inspection!

I’ve never played Mage Knight, but that seems to be the consensus. I want to spend more time with the demo before pulling the trigger, but if I do get it I’ll probably be starting a separate thread.

Looks VERY interesting!

They also have some tutorial videos. The one for game configuration:

Those videos are excellent, as they are of the developer playing the different tutorial scenarios, and he explains what to do far more clearly than the tutorials themselves.

I’m 99% sold at this point. I’ll probably grab it today.

I’ll be anxious to hear your impressions. I too have never played Mage Knight, so I cannot fall back on that.

May I ask what Mage Knight is, beyond a name in a whole category of Tom’s frontpage articles?

Edit: Oh there is a demo, nevermind, gonna learn by trial!

Mage Kight is also of boardgame fame, before it was digitised.

The dev actually chats a bit in this thread - systems definitely taken from MK the boardgame, looks like specifically based on the solo mode, and sounds like they freely changed/adapted things to work for digital. They mention folks on the 'geek complaining that it’s too close to MK, and folks on the discord complaining that they didn’t get everything exactly like MK.

Reminds me of the one time I played Sentinels of the Multiverse in real life, and realised how easy it is to play it slightly wrong and how weird it is to know so many edge case card interpretation rulings (especially when cards/effects interact). Sentinels is still fixing weird edge case interactions since they consult with the designer and have had many Q&A sessions where they got rulings on everything and they committed to implementing them faithfully so getting a boardgame 100% right is a pretty huge undertaking so it’s probably better? and definitely easier! to make your own. We do have a million deckbuilder clones now…

I tried it, got blocked in the third tutorial, lots of display/interface bugs. I couldn’t exit the village screen. It looks interesting, but I’m gonna wait for it to be baked a bit more (even though it isn’t early access!).

Are you talking about the tutorial where you have to heal a wound and hire a follower? The village screen should close as soon as you are successful.

One of the things I really like about Paladin’s Oath is the transparency. You can always see in advance exactly how much of any resource you’ll need to meet you goal. Then it’s just a matter of manipulating the cards correctly.