Hey Daniel,

I'm sorry for the frustration. The game quite literally has no controls (except for the camera), it's an unfinished submission to a game jam. Despite being unfinished, it surprisingly fits the theme of the jam though  '-_-

Hope you guys like it, it was a fun project to work on!

lets keep the conversation on Discord, cheers :)

No worries, let me know if you have any more problems!

Hey Pigeon, thanks for checking out the game. There are a few reasons that can happen, usually it has to do with Chrome plugins interfering with the game engine, ad-block is usually okay, but I have seen problems with some "anti-virus" plugins messing with the engine. A lot of plugins basically go in and modify code at run-time, which usually doesn't interfere with how the original code works, but plugins are made by people, normal guys like your or I, they make mistakes. Plugin might be working great on 99.99% of the code, but my game engine is not "usual" piece of JavaScript code, so it trips up some of the these Chrome plugins.

The game has no ads or miners or anything like that, just the game code.

Anyway, TL;DR: Try to disable your Chrome plugins

Also, the game will work even if it's not 100% loaded typically, if some resources don't load - you should still be able to play, as long as they are not "critical" resources, such as world layout data. Try pressing "play" - see what happens :)

Thanks, glad you like it :)

Thank you, I will pass on your comments to my artist, she will be happy to hear that :)

Hey @MyCasualGaming,

I have de-listed the game, as there's been no feedback and I'm preparing for a steam release. I'm glad you're enjoying the game, I added password access to the game, so you can still play it via a direct link.

Here's the password:

m6']T6J8@$#676Kv

here's the link:

https://lazy-cat.itch.io/ex-nihilo

No problem, I'm glad the issue is resolved! :)

Hey @MyCasualGaming,

Sorry to hear that the progress is not being saved for you!  I will look into it. I am testing my game against Chrome and Firefox, so I haven't encountered this issue yet. Can you tell me which version of Firefox you're using? Also, It would help me to know your Operating System, like Windows, Linux, Android, iOS etc. If you can also share your console log with me, it would help even more! :)

To get access to the console, it's quite easy on Firefox, just press F12 on the keyboard, you will see a bunch of tabs there, one of them is called "Console":

You can copy the console log to https://pastebin.com/ and copy the link to the bin here or send it to me via a private message.

The save data is stored in something called IndexedDB, it's not the same as a cookie. It's a more modern kind of browser storage, and it's super fast compared to other options, that's why I'm using it.

thanks!

-A

Hey MyCasualGaming,

Thanks for writing! Glad you enjoy the game. 

• How to add more troops to your party: Your party size has a limit, this limit depends on the hero level. At level 1 you have 2 slots unlocked, so you can have your hero and 1 more unit, at level 2 a third slot gets unlocked,  next one at level 5, then 8, then last one at level 11. Here's a helpful table:

•  Class system. There used to be fewer classes and male/female used to be purely cosmetic. We wanted to add more variety into the game, but didn't want to spend time to create a lot of additional art, so we decided to specialize male and female versions into separate sub-classes that function similarly, but have strong distinction. The "hashtags" are just there for help the player, if a unit has a tag "tank" - it doesn't change how the unit plays. This information is also used by the "Army Generator" system inside the game to decide how to arrange units and which units to create. For a player the tag is just a visual thing. A female archer has a little more health, a little more armor and a little more absorption than the male archer, so she can survive better, especially later on in the game. 

• Progress Save. Currently the progress gets saved automatically every turn, when you come back to the game - you can continue. The progress is saved in your browser, so if you load the game on a different computer or a different browser - you won't have access to that save data. Also, if you clear your browsing data - that can delete the saved data too, lastly - if you're in "incognito" mode, that data gets deleted by the browser automatically once you close the window. Other than that, game save should work. Let me know if you have any issues!

hope that helps :)

-A

Hey Lazyjay,

what do you mean by "enemies growth rate"? Currently there are no difficulty settings, the game is fixed difficulty. I plan to add difficulty settings in the future, but for now it's completely fixed. Sorry about that!

-A

Haha, Even Sourcing is an interesting thing. I never seen that particular name for it, I used to just think of it as Operation Log. My engine is written with a lot of that in place, many things are written as small virtual machines with very small instruction set. I do record some of that, but I haven't found it very useful with Google Analytics. Having complete traced in a somewhat managed way would be super nice, I might get to writing such a management system one day or find a good enough fit.

I work with git branches for features, seems to be fine. The project is so small that there's barely 2 people working on it, and I'm the only developer. So there's very little "process" in place.

Feature flags are an interesting concept too, I will give it more thought, right now I'm not sure it's a good fit for a few technical reasons specific to how the engine is implemented.

Thanks for the suggestions :)

Hey,

You're completely right about the defense. Right now you can only get lvl 1 mercenaries, these are too weak to defend against most enemies. I'm working on a feature that will allow you to train your troops to a higher level for money. It will be ready sometime next week. 

With respect to analytics, I collect some event data, but not enough to draw solid conclusions. I'm having trouble figuring out what type of metrics to collects that would be helpful. I have win/loss metrics for the player in general, for each unit specifically, talent learning metrics, item usage metrics, button clicks metrics. But it's hard to draw conclusions as the metrics engine (Google Analytics) doesn't let you transform the data (for free that is). I have learned a bit from these metrics, but not a huge amount. Do you have some ideas?

Hey, I really appreciate the feedback. It really helps to know which areas to focus my work on.

About the "end-turn", I agree, I have made it so that there are notifications that tell you "Your turn" and "Enemy turn", but those are not sufficient I feel. I will get to it, hopefully soon!

I take what you said about the engine as a compliment, it makes me feel less like a fool for writing the engine myself :)

I have played Arcanum and Fallout and Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 and some jRPGs, I have definitely been inspired by the RPG genre! :)

The game draws a lot from turn based strategies like Heroes of Might and Magic and Disciples, but with the RPG progression system and much deeper combat mechanics. 

Things you like/dislike - super useful, thank you!

I think the idea with saves is really good, for the reasons you described, but we wanted to also make sure that the actions feel consequential, you can't just reload and undo what has happened, since that's not even an option. It's not 100% successful, since you can still "reload" after a bad fight due to the fact that Auto-save is done at the end of your turn. Putting it in the settings might be a good way, like you said.

About the memory leak - you're right, there was a fairly serious memory leak. It's fixed in the new patch (1.2). The problem was inside particle engine, some resources were not disposed properly.

I really appreciate the feedback, thanks a ton!

-Alex

Hey myffril! Thanks for checking out the game, I will be releasing an update later today that changes the balance a bit, I brought the level of those attacking enemies down quite a bit and reduced the frequency at which they spawn. Hope you'll find it more enjoyable! The patch also fixes a large number of stability bugs, so you should see fewer crashes/freezes.

Thansk! glad you like it

We're super happy to share new splash art for our game Ex Nihilo

and here are a few earlier stages:

Ex Nihilo

Hello Dear Reader, 

I've released my game, Ex Nihilo, on itch about 10 days ago, and I have been working on making it into a success since then. Here are some of my thoughts and observations on the subject. I hope you find them useful, I'd be very curious to hear about what you have experienced also.

Making yourself visible

There are a lot of games on itch, and more are released every day. My game was released on 12th, since then over 500 other games were released, by my rough estimates. That's 50 games each day.

Here's what I did in those 10 days

• added 3 screenshots, a cover art, description
• created a post in "Release Announcements"
• made a post on reddit
• wrote about the release on the forum of three.js - the graphics engine that I use
• spent 20$ on third-party ad
• released 9 small updates, along-side "Devlog"s

Here are the results

I got about 400 legitimate views, alongside some 800 views from some bot net (800 views over about 2 hour interval, yeah, right).

Of those 400:

that leaves about 25% unaccounted, since statistics table cuts off at top 20.

To put it differently, itch.io itself generated about 7% of the visits, or about 28 views. So the lesson here is that you have to plan out a marketing strategy and promote your game, if you want it to be seen.

Engagement

Someone "viewed" my game, yay! There is a big difference between someone following a link to your page and maybe even clicking "play", and them actually spending more than a few seconds playing your creation. On my landing page I have a so-called "call to action":

"The game is under active development, so please leave your feedback!"

After all, comments are a decent way to judge how invested your audience is in your work. In the 10 days I've had 0 comments. That "1" that you see?

So what does this mean? A few possibilities

• presentation has poor engagement, the screenshots are not appealing, the test is not clear or interesting
• the work itself is not interesting
• base-level engagement per view is too low, you need a lot more views to see any level of engagement

Profit

I have decided to put the game up as "donation-ware", you pay what you want, or nothing at all if you wish. No minimum price. My total earnings are 1$. It was a friend who donated that after I sent him a link to the game. Bless his soul :)

Lesson: try out different payment models, and have wonderful friends.

That's all for now, I'll add more info later on as time goes on, provided there's interest in the topic. 

What has your experience been like? Got any tips to share?

What did you think of our game? We'd love to get your feedback! 🐈

What did you think of our game guys? :)

I appreciate your help guys, the game is now released: https://lazy-cat.itch.io/ex-nihilo

thanks a lot!

Hey Guys,

I'm stoked to announce release of our new game Ex Nihilo! This is a love child of me and my friend, an effort to bring back fond memories we've had long ago, playing turn-based strategies. 

In Ex Nihilo you will take on a role of a commander, leading your hero in a group with up-to 5 other characters, battling other squads, collecting treasure, leveling up your team and specializing them in unique ways.

There are currently 4 hero classes, and 9 other units. Each with a deep and complex talent tree. Want to have a tanky mage? - sure, why not :)

https://lazy-cat.itch.io/ex-nihilo

The game is under active development, so any feedback is greatly appreciated. I hope you enjoy our game.

I have tried to contact someone for help for just about 2 weeks now. 

I tried forum, I tried official email listen in the project release instructions, heck, I even tried twitter. I have been polite and patient.

I have spent some 4 years making the game, it's not a joke or a hobby to me. 

If my experience is anything to go by, itch has a serious problem when it comes to developer support. Without said support this seems not to be viable platform to release a game on. 

TL;DR;

itch.io - you're dropping the ball. hard.

If you properly disclose what is happening - that's fine, i guess. Personally - if i was aware of a game using a miner, i would just skip it entirely. If you don't disclose it super clearly - it's malware, pure and simple. 

Here are some of the things you may want to do when your headset is not on:

•  use computer 
  • watch a video
  • use a browser (yes, those things use GPU, shocker, right?)
  • look at your screen (who would have thunk it that GPU is used to generate and send images to your screen?)

Also, in the place where I live electricity is not free. I live in a fairly small apartment in mild climate, so when my GPU gets hot - it affects the temperature in the room significantly, it's part of the reason why I have a powerful GPU - to make sure it stays at fairly low load most of the time.

I'm sorry for my attitude, I don't really mean to judge your choices, but calling that miner "genius" is, in my opinion, a premature conclusion at best.

This is a game engine issue. The message comes from the browser itself, it's part of the initiative of browser vendors to prevent annoying stuff from playing automatically. You have to manually resume your context from some kind of a user interaction event.

Hi Guys, 

I'm looking for some help, I've been trying to release a game on itch, but it tells me that I have too many files in the archive. Reducing number of files is not really an option without having to re-write a major chunk of the code. I've tried writing about this in a relevant topic https://itch.io/t/144349/html5-files-limits-are-bugging-me and I have written to the support email, as suggested on the publishing page, about a week ago but got no response. Do I have any options left to me? I've really been looking to release the game on itch first, as it has an awesome community.

Dear leafo, facing the same issue, 784 > 500.  I worked on the game to specifically provide a good user experience as a browser game by downloading content incrementally, and there's only 84mb. Can you help me please?