Beastmancer is a monster tamer tactical RPG. Play as an adventurer in a fantasy world, capture monsters and use them to fight turn based tactical battles.

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I uploaded an early alpha demo for Beastmancer. Please try it and share your feedback.

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Hi

It's been a while since my last article. As you probably know, the Steam Store Page for Beastmancer is up so I decided to stop promoting my game a bit in order to focus in finishing it. Sadly its not being enough, I wanted to have this game ready during March but I'll have to postpone its release. At my current stage I think I'll need between 2 and 3 months more before having a decent sized game. Of course, that doesn't change my plans, like I promised I uploaded an early alpha demo and I hope to convince you to download it and give me useful feedback while there's still time to make big changes and improvements to the game.

First version

The current alpha demo is only for Windows 64bit systems and its around 1.1 gb. I'm open to make builds for other systems if people ask for them. You can download the first version here: Win64 version

This demo has a few scenarios from the beginning of the game. Basic features like exploration, combat, inventory, crafting and dialogue are ready but the content is limited, that means there's only a limited number of monsters, special moves, effects, items and spells.

I also want you to know that the Saving and Loading features are not yet ready.

One of the places you can visit is the main and only hub of the game: the town of Nusquam. At the moment the town is pretty empty but there's a few stores. I hope to add much more NPCs, loot and in general more "life" to the scenario.

The demo can be finished in around 1 hour and a half (in my experience) but it can take a bit more if you decide to try and capture more monsters. At the beginning you start with a single monster (from a selection of three "starters") and you are also limited to deploy only one big monster or two small ones. You can increase the number of "slots" when your beastmancer levels up by adding points to your "Monster Control" perk.

What I hope to get from this demo

While I'm aware of several issues my main concern is the problems I can't notice as a dev. In the case of Nomad Fleet I couldn't detect the problems with the controls because I was already an expert in handling the game (as any dev that test their game constantly does), its these kind of issues I want to find and for that I need fresh eyes.

Known Issues

- Monster Stats page doesn't show the correct stats for monsters over level 1 (the correct stats are used during combat though).

- Combat camera doesn't get to its initial position after a battle (a minor annoyance).

- Western Road scenario has two roads leading to nowhere (its in my to-do list).

- Sea Priestess has too much hitpoints and a special attack without cooldown (I forgot to nerf her before uploading this version).

- Some grammar and spelling errors (don't worry I plan to hire edition and proofreading services for the final product).

There's also several things that can change like the moves selection for every monster, at the moment most monsters have only basic attacks and a few experimental moves.

Please be free to share any feedback you can think of. I'll be working hard to finish this game but there's still time to improve it.

Regards,

Jorge

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~Leafshade~
~Leafshade~

If you would like someone to help with proofreading, I'd be glad to help. :)
Question, are all three starting monsters (available) 2x2 in size? I don't recall seeing that information upon selection.

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Autarca Author
Autarca

Yep, all the starters are big. The idea is pretty simple, all the best monsters are big, the downside is that they require 2 slots to be deployed in combat (for the same price you can deploy two small ones). I wacthed a video recently of a player testing the demo and I think I need to explain better the idea of "slots".

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~Leafshade~
~Leafshade~

I think it would be really interesting to have some potentially rare monsters be strong but also small, just make up for it with extra mobility or something like that.

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~Leafshade~
~Leafshade~

Also, I have to hand it to you, this has me interested.
I.imgur.com

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~Leafshade~
~Leafshade~

I've found the demo to be really interesting so far, and quite promising, It does in fact need some proof reading as you said yourself, but that's not a major issue, that's mostly "polish".

Biggest complaints as of now are:

Crashing/freezing bugs, I spent a few hours playing and it froze when exiting a battle in the beach area, the game went grey and I had my cursor, but it never loaded past that point, because of this I have not yet completed the demo.
Another time, I entered the building where you heal yourself in the magic circle, and I mid conversation, my character seemed to fall through the floor or something, and the world went black, fortunately when the conversation came around to it I said yes to healing me and that teleports you to the circle, but I think if I had said no I would have been stuck.

When exploring, the order I went in the first two times playing, was Beach > Cave > Forest-y area.
It was not until my third attempt at playing the demo that I found the cliff-y area with the wooden bridges etc, it's the second area on the map, but because that appeared after I left the cave, I assumed it was the cave.

I may be forgetting something, but I am not sure.

I greatly implore you to work on the save and load feature for any future demo versions, as it would massively help with finding bugs and issues to report to you so that you can work on improving the game as much as possible, as much as it deserves.

Keep up the great work!

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Autarca Author
Autarca

Thanks for your feedback!

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~Leafshade~
~Leafshade~

Another point I wanted to make that I forgot, is that the city map, feels a bit... too big? The streets are very wide and empty, will these be filled with random NPCs or something later? It takes just a little too long to traverse the city to feel natural, personally, if it was going to be this size, I would hope the healing building would be closer to where you enter the map.

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Autarca Author
Autarca

I uploaded a new version and took this into account (remade the town and other scenarios). I'll post an article with all the changes soon.

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