Escape The Mad Empire Demo Gameplay + Delightful Thoughts and Suggestions

[Mr. Delightful]

So, I played the Escape The Mad Empire Demo; I liked it; clearing the demo on normal.

I recorded my experiences, in case anyone prefers a more audio / visual experience.
Please take a look if you like.
https://youtu.be/bT3cDqnI7QU

I like the randomized dungeons, and how characters automatically break pots; a good quality of life feature, as it would be super tedious having to click and loot each one.

I also really like how all your adventurers are trained dungeon delvers, so all the classes can disarm traps; very nice, as it means you don’t have to have a rogue!

The inclusion of the campfires to rest at to heal, and recover spent spells and abilities, is good as well, as they have a built in cost, making you hungry and thirsty, so there is a meaningful cost to taking a breather, presenting another interesting gameplay choice for the player.

While I did enjoy my time with the Escape The Mad Empire Demo, I did come across many areas while playing that could use more attention.
This is fine and expected for an early demo, but I have to mention them, as changes are easier to make the sooner they are spotted.
I will try and keep this organized.

Game Options / UI Stuff:

1: Want To Turn Off The “Talking” Sounds, Badly!

While I’m sure some find them hilarious, they are very annoying to others, and an ability to turn that off would be a welcome addition.

2: Rebindable Hotkeys planned?

Planned right?

3: No hotkey to Rapidly Swap Weapons?

It would really speed up weapon swapping, and make the game less mouse intensive, as the game is currently VERY mouse intensive…

4: I Want to Rearrange My Hotbar

It’s a minor thing, but I want control where the abilities are.

5: Need a Take All Hotkey.

There is a tiny, little button, but a hotkey would be both much faster, and feel much better here.

Gameplay Suggestions:

6: No Friendly Fire on Spells?

Maybe a bug?
It’s not very tactical when I can just fireball and meteor spawn right over my front line!
It seems Ice Storm does have friendly fire; so maybe a bug?

7: More RPG Please!

You can reroll the chests right before the dungeon, and it is supposed to reroll the characters stats and items; but there is still no ability to actually select party members, customize their attributes, skills, or feats, or even name them.
Are these features planned, perhaps in the section that you enter into after clearing the demo?

8: No Visual Customization?

Also, it seems all of each class looks identical; is this planned to be addressed?
It is important, as many would likely like to try alternate party compositions, that don’t roll the bog standard fighter, healer, mage, + whatever, as rogues don’t seem present here.

9: Can’t Move the Combat Log?

I know you can drag and make the window bigger, but I want to move it off to the lower left on the screen, as well as increase the size of its font; both seem currently impossible sadly…

10: Character’s Lvl Up, But No Player Choice?

Character’s lvl up as they fight, but there is no actual player choice to make on said lvl ups though…
Think character feats, additional weapon proficiencies, player chosen abilities, attribute boosts; impactful stuff like that for the player to choose from to create excitement, and not just ‘BOOM, surprise lvl’ and a seemingly random ability appears where it wants on the hotbar.

11: Announce The Results of The Test!

I like the event rooms; like a mysterious, purple cauldron that makes a character make a con test, or a spellbook with an Int test, but there was no up top notification on what the result was.
Buried in the combat log as it is currently, I found myself wondering what the result was the first time I encountered it.
I did find it buried in the event log, and yes, it should be there too, but the results should be visually announced with a big text box over the event as well, so the players don’t miss it.

12: Not Nap Time! Boss Time!

Bug?: maybe you shouldn’t be able to nap on dungeon lvl 3 when the boss is literally right on your tail!

13: Meta Progression Planned?

Would have liked to see the planned in between run progression that is hinted at in the very unexpected demo ending.

14: Tell Me When We’re Hungry!

Especially considering being thirsty starts costing hp!
I’d suggest that the hunger / thirst debuff should be announced in big text on the screen when it is applied.
Make it super obvious!

15: Searchable Rooms Planned?

Think big libraries, like the big bad’s library might have some nice spellbooks or scrolls in it, perhaps at the cost of time spend searching, making the party hungry / thirsty, or some monster respawns or patrols.

16: Looks Like Their Casting A Spell; They’re Not!

The caster does NOT have a free magic attack as it first appears, they are using a bow and arrows, regardless of how it looks.
This is very important to visually communicate to the player, as the caster needs arrows to fuel their ranged attacks, and to buy enough to fuel not just their fighter, but the back row caster as well.

Anyway, I enjoyed my time with Escape The Mad Empire Demo.
And I look forward to checking it out when it has had more time to develop into the excellent, easy to pickup, RTS Dungeon Crawling, Roguish RPG I know it can be.
Thanks for the early look!

[XperimentalZ Games]

Thank you so much for taking the time to stream the game and write about it! I was taking notes while watching your stream, when I noticed that you had posted here Very useful information for us, so thank you so much once again!

1: We could do that easily, I think.
2: Yeah, definitely need to implement that at some point.
3: Huho, yeah we need to add that. Generally speaking, we're trying to implement shortcuts for as many action as possible.
4: Interesting thought. This sounds tricky to implement / prone to bugs, so we'll see if this kind of request is common among players.
5: Yeah we could do that as well. Currently, shift-click can also be used.
6: Friendly fire is a spell-by-spell thing, which adds a level of depth to the game. Outlines are meant to warn the player of the good/bad outcome of a spell, but perhaps it does not glow enough.
7: It's a demo thing. The party's classes & stats are fixed in normal difficulty, otherwise the difficulty was too wildly varying. If you play in insane difficulty, you can re-reroll the party and get different classes combos & stats.
8: The real game is meant for the player to try all sort of classes combos. The player can recruit the characters they want and assemble their party as they wish. Much more classes will be added over time.
9: The UI will probably keep evolving over the next months or years.
10: Overtime, we'll push a lot more functionalities to allow the players to control character customization & development better, including a choice of skills on level-up, instead of it being random. In the campaign mode, there's currently also character upgrades, but we'll keep improving that as well. This is going to be one of our main upcoming focus.
11: Yeah, definitely need more UI feedback there, there's not even combat log info!
12: We probably should block resting while in combat, it's slightly abusable.
13: Will be shared in another demo!
14: Not completely sure if you had noticed the bars on the portraits, but you seem to have seen the thirst icon as soon as they popped in. We could add another overhead notification icon which pops in when a character gets thirsty, but the info might be redundant. The issue might be more of a needed reflex to check the bars, which gets acquired after playing a few hours. Will keep an eye on this!
15: Definitely ideas to dig into on the long run!
16: Completely agree, it's more of a work bandwidth issue. Drawing those sprites take a lot of time, especially since the animations have to be repeated in 4 directions.

Thank you once again for sharing your thoughts and cheers!

[Mr. Delightful]

6: On further testing, I see that some other abilities have the “No Friendly Fire” in neon green in the spell text, or “Friendly Fire” in orange, which is good and clear.
And fireball and meteor swarm are now hitting my party in tutorial tests.
Maybe my party members just got super lucky before and I didn’t notice the low damage aside from the burning while fighting and taking monster chip damage?

10: Exciting!

11: I think I was getting the notifications in the combat log on the spellbook one, but not on the giant, purple cauldron.

14: Well, ya, I noticed it, but others might not, and I had the UI set as low as it would go, as the giant player inventory was massively distracting when the UI scale was at its starting default.
It is likely maybe others won’t like the super big inventory screen up at all times, so they cut the UI scale down like I did.
Then, say their older and their vision isn’t as sharp as it once was, or they were just distracted, and happen to miss the surprise ‘Super thirsty’ debuff, I just foresee some angry down votes on release after a few people die from this; maybe the bigger notification can be a button you can turn off in options, but is on by default?
It should NOT do this for all applied debuffs, that would get very annoying very quickly, but for the perhaps unexpected ones when the party is not in combat and the player might feel safe, like the thirsty, hungry, or maybe surprise acid damage, it could be a very helpful feature, and it could help dodge some review salt as well!

Thank you for the response, and for the great game in the making.

[schnooogens]

Played about 30 minutes last night. Game has potential, but I think the tutorial needs to provide some arrows or a quest log with indicators as I found myself wandering around the map, not realizing that some of the adjacent rooms were hidden behind the fog of war. I tried to go through the portal 3 times before I finally found all of the training rooms.

I also couldn't close the inventory screen on multiple occasions. It filled a portion of my screen and was annoying. The hotkeys on the abilities were not clear.

Dialogue was difficult to notice. Very small type.

I see I've started with all of the bad. What's GOOD is the idea behind the game. This is exactly what I'm looking for: a real-time dungeon crawler that you can play in quick bites yet feel like you're managing a very tactical RPG. My favorite combat system ever was Dragon Age: Origins and this is designed in a similar fashion. I want to be able to plan out how the combat unfolds.

[PorkyporkSword]

Originally posted by schnooogens:

I think the tutorial needs to provide some arrows

Please don't add arrows. No Idea how you could possibly get lost in the tutorial tbh it's layout is simplistic as hell.

[XperimentalZ Games]

Originally posted by schnooogens:

Dialogue was difficult to notice. Very small type.

Thank you for sharing your feedback!

Are you playing on a large screen resolution? I think that we may have an issue with texts being displayed too small on 4k and such.

[schnooogens]

Originally posted by XperimentalZ Games:

Originally posted by schnooogens:

Dialogue was difficult to notice. Very small type.

Thank you for sharing your feedback!

Are you playing on a large screen resolution? I think that we may have an issue with texts being displayed too small on 4k and such.

Yes playing on 27" 4k