To Ash and Ember [Horror Investigation RPG] by The Forgotten Workshop

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Latest Release: “Last Gasp of Winter” Alpha v010 (2/12/2021)

What is it?
To Ash and Ember is a singleplayer Dark Fantasy RPG about making hard choices. It plays like a board-game without needing to shuffle decks, set out a board, or read manuals. This is a game of time management and decisions, of who to save and who to sacrifice, and of a city whose windows and streets grow darker and stranger the longer your battles continue.

What does it play like?
If you like the Arkham Horror boardgame, World of Horror, Darkest Dungeon or the Consuming Shadow: this is going to be a bit like a mashup of all of those with its own unique flavors. If you don’t know what any of those are this is going to play something like an oldschool RPG that’s shacked up with a dice-based boardgame.

**(Still not a Trailer but it is an) Early Alpha Teaser **

(Not a Trailer either but is fun to listen to while browsing screenshots below to get a feel for the mood of the game)**

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(Bard’s Art is a placeholder here)
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Who’s making this?
Just me except for some of the music; the cool tracks up above are from memoraphile who is graciously donating their time and sound to the game for free. “The Forgotten Workshop” is just the name I set up to put all my works under the label of.

What’s this running in?
It’s Unity! I’ve got a ton of custom inspectors and editorwindows I built to make this project possible to do solo without going mad myself.

When is this thing going to be ‘done’ done?
I’m hoping to launch Winter 2021, but it may be as late as Jan/Feb 2022 for the full release. I’d love to go faster on all this but there’s a ton of work yet to be done on the game, I’m not able to work on it full-time because I have to work to keep the lights on and feed two mouths, and I don’t currently have the money to hire outside help. (Who knows what the future holds though)

Are you going to Kickstarter?
I’m thinking about it – but my release schedule for this thing’s already pretty tight I feel and I’m just unsure how much attention it’d even get on crowdfunding platforms. Slap me with some data and interest if you feel I should be getting on it and/or getting on it immediately.

Why does your username sound familiar?
If you’re one of the folks who was in the Star Ruler or Star Ruler 2 thread: howdy, long time no see. I was co-lead developer on those projects and did a lot of yacking about them here. This one’s a solo act though – there’s no studio or co-lead developer or publisher behind me (at least at the moment; I’m thinking about pushing this to Humble Games).

Useful Links

You can grab the Alpha on itch.io if you’re up for grappling eldritch stuff while at the same time grappling with eldritch software (be warned there’s no manual and no tutorial at the moment):
Link to the Alpha: To Ash and Ember by Firgof

Patreon (some game-related swag and you’d really be helping me survive this pandemic apocalypse hellscape to develop this game about preventing the world from becoming an apocalyptic hellscape):

And the Discord if you’d want to join it before the game’s even officially out:

I do journalist/lets-play things and think my audience is up for some eldritch horror
PM me! More than happy to toss a few copies out there if some folks want to parade it around. Due note: on a scale from 0 to 10 where 0 is a simple prototype and 10 is a complete game, I’m presently at 2 here. Currently there’s about 20-50 minutes of gameplay in the game’s tank right now.

Awesome, looks great. Keep us updated and good luck!

The Consuming Shadow and World of Horror are some of the finest reference you could name in this genre. Absolutely looking forward to it!

@Left_Empty
I think so too! I’m partly making this game because I saw such opportunity in those that I felt could be explored. A lot of the ideas I have for this came up while I was playing those two and going ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’ to myself.

@tylertoo
Oh hey! Nice to see you again. If anything, I’m worried about updating folks too much! This place is definitely going to get regular updates as I proceed with the project. Community feedback is pretty important to me, especially given the more procedural nature of the game.

Definitely intrigued.

Same! Star Ruler 2 was a gem, and I’d love to play more games from the same dev(s). I’m trying this out on itch.io right now.

I hope you like it! The next patch has a couple of big upgrades and changes to the gameplay, so I bet you’ll be in a good position to really ‘feel’ how the new stuff coming in changing how it feels and plays. So far in my testing it’s feeling like a big step up overall.

Coming up

  • Dungeons (and the ‘Dungeon’ Mystery-type)
  • Actions no longer have a chance of missing the target but have a maximum damage and roll the relevant stat. (e.g. Punch presently does 2 Damage; in the upcoming patch it’ll do (a roll of your Strength dice’s number of successes +1 instead with a cap of 2; you also deal double damage if all the dice you roll are successes; this can break the damage cap)
  • Escape is no longer a 50% chance of success. Instead you roll your Agility against your opponent’s Pursuit stat and escape on that many successes.
  • Increasing your stats increases your Level and also increases the cost of all upgrades by a little and the stat you chose to upgrade by a larger amount.
  • (Hopefully) Actions can be bought, upgraded (e.g. raising the maximum cap on a Damage action’s damage), equipped, and sold (to particular individuals) for Funds. They can also be Reverted by particular NPCs to a default state that’ll give you a portion of their XP investment back.
  • When a Mystery’s Objective would take over your Events, you only will encounter that Mystery’s ‘Next Step’ Event when Investigating its target district. This will allow you to, say, decide to spend some time battling foes and selling tales to the Street Bard to gain enough Funds to bribe the Unscrupulous Urchin instead of being forced to resort to very difficult or very sketchy means to advance that Mystery’s storyline.
  • The follow-up to the Flowers in the Mist Mystery, “The Rose’s Thorn”, a new Mystery: “In Darkest Night”, and expansions to the ending of the Flowers in the Mist final confrontation since it presently feels a bit abrupt and unpolished. (Also the Alternate Ending to Flowers in the Mist should be in)
  • Weapons will be equippable.

e: Speaking of, here’s what the Dungeons are looking like in this early stage of their development.

I’m interested to see how the act of investigating takes place in the game. Are any clues awarded after combat, or maybe during story beats etc? But it’s likely I’m reading way too much into the “Investigation” description.

I look forward to the tough decisions of sacrificing allies/lackeys (or citizens?) in the name of progress/success. This is a feature I always liked about FTL (sorry, @BrianRubin ).

So far this looks like something that would work well streamed to (or played on) tablet devices too.

I’d love to get an idea of what your custom inspectors and editor windows do in Unity. I’ve never really considered customizing those and I’m wondering if I’m missing out.

Phew! Well, this turned out to be an article rather than a reply but I hope y’all like it all the same haha

@kerzain

I’m interested to see how the act of investigating takes place in the game.

They’re currently not awarded since you can’t perform the Ritual to pierce the Veil and go punch a zombie god in the face. But once they’re in a God will ‘seed the game’ with random events you can find in various locations. With the right choices or rolls, you can pick up Research Items from those events. Research Items, if you take them back to your Safehouse, can be further dissected and looked into for the chance to gain XP, Items, and possibly a Clue from them.

What Clues are for is to tell you the ‘right answer’ to a series of questions you’ll be asked when you get to the Ritual phase. They serve as ‘ingredients’ to particular questions, though you have to guess which ingredients are ‘right’ and which are ‘wrong’. Gods will have stuff associated with them and you’ll have to ponder over your evidence to make an educated guess on their Identity.

As an example, one of the questions may be ‘where will the God be Resurrected’. You might have some Weird Soot as a Clue you got from the Forest, some Ichor you extracted from an Amulet you found in the Sewers, and a Mutated Flower you got from the Residential District. Your Deduction failed on two of the Clues, but you got a Critical Success from the Mutated Flower and know that it ‘won’t tell you where the God will arrive’. You’ll want to cross-reference with your Diary on things you’ve encountered and notes you’ve made to more firmly ID the god in question and then submit the Evidence you feel ‘calls that God out’. Presuming you feel that the Weird Soot matches up with other things you’ve seen or experienced, you could submit that as Evidence and presume the God will show themselves in the Forest.

What all that guesswork does for you is give you some extra power and assurance when you go to face off against the Slaughtered God. Each right guess will nullify a Divine Curse you might receive during the battle and getting them all right will let you skip some or all of the God’s Dungeon and possibly encounter them in a ‘weakened state’. Divine Curses last a long while, are expensive/hard to remove, and can have some pretty horrifying effects. (Failing all of the questions will result in the God being strengthened when you arrive and you’ll immediately gain a Divine Curse when you enter their Dungeon)

If you’ve played The Consuming Shadow, it’ll be a bit like that with the ‘guessing the God’s identity based on collected evidence’ but with slightly more item-based reasoning rather than just toggling through a series of possibilities. PHEW! So, yeah, that’s what Clues are for and how Investigations ultimately work (or, rather, how I’m presently planning for them to work; some game designs don’t survive contact with testing and need mutation) for the gameloop!

In the smaller loop of the Mystery itself, the Investigation phase is sort of a semi-structured series of steps to solve said Mystery. Usually it involves moving to a Location and carrying your investigations out while encountering random events in the meantime. You’ll occasionally run into Story Events which can change the course of your Mystery’s Investigation and can lead to different possible Endings to that story. Some Mysteries are repeatable and others are only playable once.

So far this looks like something that would work well streamed to (or played on) tablet devices too.

I’m hopeful that this might get ported to console if there’s enough support. Part of my investigating HumbleGames would be to get me some official support in that regard.

@abrandt

I’d love to get an idea of what your custom inspectors and editor windows do in Unity. I’ve never really considered customizing those and I’m wondering if I’m missing out.

If you’re not using custom inspectors and editors and your game is heavily event/data-driven you’re probably losing a lot of time doing stuff you can just ‘have done’ with said inspectors and editorwindows. As an example, I built a new EditorWindow to build, inspect, and manage all the Dungeons for To Ash and Ember before I started implementing their mechanics. Just having this editor is going to save me tons of time in development because I intend to have a large variety of Dungeons and expect the need to edit them frequently when I reach the polish stage.

The dungeon in the video above looks like this in the editor. Since that Dungeon is a Non-euclidean Structure I don’t bother with room connections (thus why it just looks like blocks on a grid) but I’m sure you can see just from looking how useful this thing is for managing these large data objects.

https://imgur.com/VqyWCpJ

And it gets even more handy when they’re a Structured Dungeon or even a Dungeon that I’ve built by hand such as the following (though this screenshot was taken before I implemented the graphics to show what different room types were). If I want to link a room’s East Exit with another room’s West Exit, this editorwindow makes all of that incredibly painless.

https://imgur.com/0hizjnQ

And I’ve built a number of custom editors and inspectors for the more complex data across my project. In particular, I have no idea how I’d even do the Game Events without a custom inspector. They’re very complex things that do a ton of stuff. Just tracking what Events goes to where, making sure it gets packed into its event deck, and being able to just say ‘this decision leads to a new event whose parent is the event I was just working with’ in a button press saves me at least eight seconds per event – and I’m over 100 Game Events as-is haha.

https://imgur.com/gR0YDDz

Anyway, that’s my use-case! I hope if nothing else seeing all this stuff proves useful to you! If you do decide to start making custom inspectors and editors I really recommend getting Odin Inspector. It makes doing that sort of thing incredibly easy for 90% of your use cases.

The Dungeon Layout Editor above was built from scratch just using Unity’s GUILayout and EditorGUILayout libraries because OdinInspector just doesn’t quite have the flexibility to handle exactly what I needed without me having to deal with stuff like the 'every other row has another rect drawn on it, which means the lines I’d draw with GL go ‘under’ the titles they need to be shown over.

No worries, I seem to be getting better at mentally dealing with it, thanks to so many games borrowing its successful formula.

This game looks great by the way.

Awesome info, thank you!

So great! Wishlisted on steam - best of luck to you Firgof!

Have to say I was nervous about how the game would be initially reacted to given how niche a genre it is and how early all the art and mechanics are. Granted, @RothdaTheTruculent hasn’t posted their opinions on the subject but y’all have surprised me with the sheer volume of interest on this game here on the forums.

It’s heartwarming to see everyone’s excitement and I’m delighted to have you all onboard to connect and discuss this project as it takes form. I even got my first Patreon subscriber and joiner to the game’s Discord yesterday. This has been a very bright moment in an otherwise dark winter for me. There’s a lot of work to do to bring this dream/nightmare to life – calling the game’s present state ‘skeletal’ would not be unfair – but it’ll feel like a lot less with this wind under my wing.

I hope I can reward all of y’all’s excitement with worlds you enjoy escaping to and stories to tell of triumph ripped from the jaws of tragedy.

Newsflash: you already did with Star Ruler 2, and we trust you to do it again. Take your time. We’ll be here. ;)

I had seen mention of Odin before, but never actually looked into it. Considering I just need to buy one seat, I think that’s definitely something I’ll check out. My one complex case is my map editor, but I actually built that as a scene in my game since I intend to distribute the map editor.

Put together a tiny teaser trailer for the game using the footage I had laying about. Not the most professional trailer but I hope it gives folks a bit more info on what the game looks and plays like (or will in the next patch).

Nearly done with my pitch to HumbleGames. Will let you guys know how that pans out – or will let you know that I can’t let you know how it pans out if NDAs get involved :P

Phew! I finally got a whole host of bugs fixed and tiny polishes made and just now, finally, Mysteries can unlock and lock other Mysteries when completed. With that confirmed to be working, I can now concentrate on fleshing out the game’s second Mystery and the spelunking mechanics of Dungeons.

3 minutes of gameplay from the latest build! I’ve got some wrist flare-ups happening today so I’m taking it easy but hopefully it won’t be much longer before y’all will be able to play this thing.