The demo for God's Disdain is now available! Pick it up for Windows or Linux at the following links for your desired platform:
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3057330/Gods_Disdain/
Itch.io: https://after-midnight-games.itch.io/godsdisdain
The full game will be releasing next month on March 14th, but this limited demo will let you experience some of the game's towns and side quests. Feedback on the demo is appreciated, and if there is anything that can be addressed before the full release it certainly will be. From everyone who worked on God's Disdain, we hope that you enjoy playing!
The default audio settings feel a bit off - the music's a lot louder than the voice acting, so the default bgm volume could probably be dropped a bit so that it doesn't overpower the voices. Isamu's voice acting seems very good from what I've heard, but I'm unable to get farther than the first few minutes so I can't really give any feedback on anyone else's.
EXP seems to be based on damage dealt in combat - I'm not 100% sure but it feels like every point of damage dealt equals 1 EXP gained. If this is how it's actually working, then it feels like it could potentially lead to a snowball scenario, where the party member with the highest damage output grows the fastest and then quickly outlevels the other party members, leading to their damage gap getting bigger, thus making the level gap grow faster. I picked mage as a starting class, and my spells deal a bit less damage than the other party member's basic attacks, and far less damage than his skills. I haven't played for very long but I can already see the warrior gaining levels a lot faster than the mage.
@Alex That is more or less how EXP works. The mage has always been very difficult to balance because they start off fairly weak but by the mid-game they deal much more damage when gaining access to spells that hit multiple targets. Their balance is the thing I am most worried about. It is definitely something that is going to take more time to tweak and I wish I could have had more people testing it initially.
Then you can boost magic's damage in the early game and put, for example, a 0.4 multiplier on multi target skills.
@Jens_Rasmussen @Alex It could be possible. I'll have to look into it a little more. For now, I have tweaked the Mage and Warrior classes again just a little bit and boosted the amount of damage that the tier 1 and 2 spells do. I'm also thinking about adding in EXP share and then lowering the amount of EXP gained overall so that it helps smooth over the EXP disparity.
From a design perspective, the intended reason for damage/healing to gain EXP instead of it being split between the party at the end of a battle is to help soften the grind. When you level up you heal a bit, so it can help you in combat especially if you're being tactical with it. If you die in combat outside of a boss battle, you'll be able to revive at a church and keep all of your gained EXP. So that system isn't going away, it's just a lot more difficult to balance than I originally thought it would be.
If I want to grind exp late in the game, am I better off finding the weakest possible enemy, with lowest defense stats, and overkill for a huge amount and get the same huge amount of exp?
Or has this already been taken into consideration for example by making it so that it is not possible to go back to weaker areas, or perhaps by eliminating defense stats on enemies, instead only increasing their HP to make them tougher?
Or does overkill damage not give exp?
@Jens_Rasmussen @Alex I won't get into the formulas or anything, but I believe they would end up being roughly equivalent when you take all things into consideration. The enemies have EXP stats as well, so it isn't solely about the damage you deal to them. Enemies with more HP have higher EXP stats, so you can deal more damage to them over time and gain more EXP from it. I think it would mostly come down to "time spent fighting a higher level enemy" versus "time spent looking for lower leveled mobs."
@Jens_Rasmussen @Alex I've got EXP share working now in a way that I think works pretty well. I'll be updating the demo with this change in a little while.
I think the EXP share idea could help, even if it's only partial. Like person who deals the damage gets most of the EXP, then the rest is split among the other party members, or something like that. That way the person dealing the most damage is still getting the most benefit out of it, keeping the intent of the system in tact, while also helping to reduce the EXP snowballing effect.
@Alex @Jens_Rasmussen I've seen some players do some pretty wacky things with the way the EXP and healing upon leveling works. One tester, years ago, managed to take out a boss battle meant to be placed halfway through the game with it! The main goal was always to make it so that grinding wasn't super necessary, and I think I've achieved that goal. As long as you're not deliberately skipping combat encounters and playing on the normal difficulty, you should be a-ok!
@Alex Thank you for the report! A bugfix is now live that will fix it. A lot of files were deleted to keep the file size of the demo down and this one (alongside others) were mistakenly deleted. Hopefully this patch will smooth that over! Please report any others.
If the BGM feels a little too overpowering, you can always lower it in the settings. The balance between the voices and the BGM have been subject to a lot of tweaks and it's a little hard to strike it perfectly for everyone, but I'll continue to look into it.
The God's Disdain demo has been updated to version 1.1.0, which fixes a bug with missing files and adds EXP sharing for the party. Feedback is appreciated!