The Curse Of Mantras beta 0.8.3

[jack1974]

Decided to not touch the Djinn for now, because I believe with the latest fixes I've done spells shouldn't be an issue anymore. We'll see :D I was able to load your Air 10 battle and the CPU wasn't stuck anymore.

[Franka]

The delayed death spell is still a problem btw, if something else kills the critter before it's supposed to die.

[jack1974]

You still get the same crash on remove(x) ?
Strange I tried it the following way: Decay, then Turn Undead. But maybe I caught the issue only if you kill it with a spell. I need to try if I kill it with another creature maybe.

edit: I just tried casting Decay and then killing target with normal attacks and the error didn't trigger. Are you sure it was that or maybe another thing?

[Franka]

I got the error 3-4 times during my last playthrough. I think it was Decay + some sort of spell or ability damage / remove effect every time.

I'll try if I can catch a save where it happens next time.

[jack1974]

That would be great, thanks

[Alex81]

A few first impressions.

The art? It's so incredibly well done, I absolutely love it. It's spot on gorgeous.
The facial expressions are -so- real, so correct. When Lily gives a deathly stare? You can see it in the art.
A superb job how the characters expressions change throughout the dialogue. I felt it's way up there, among the best looking (WW) games visually.

The dialogue however? I'm happy to hear you have an editor on the job. Because at this point? The -words- are there, I can't say I came across many typos. But -so- much of the grammar, and especially syntax (the way the sentences are built up) are.. I'd say strange.
Quite often during my first 30 minute's play, I had to stop, read the text out loud, and ask myself, "What are they trying to say / relay?"
I believe I have a fair grasp of English, but this? You know the feeling when you write something, then look at it..and feel "That's not right"
"That ...looks wrong". I'm getting that feel so very often in the current build of Curse of Mantras (0.7.

Often it's the case of "I suppose.... you -could- say it that way, but it's an unusual way to express something.

Early conversation with Mantras, Lily thinks to herself" "I am not reassured, but I keep my mouth closed this time because opening it has not helped me in the slightest" This as well as so many other sentences just "feels" or "sounds" strange, when you try to read it out loud.

Next Lily "emote". "I screw up my face, bunch my fists and then pound them like a three year old on my knees".... Here I'm struggling to understand what is happening.

Magma's first visit to Lily - "What do you know about what they want to do to me" (Magma asks "What are they planning for me, what do you know?"
That's one to many "What"s in a sentence that short.

It really is all over the place, sentences that -feel- wrong.

Lily after no longer being choked - "I massage my aching neck and cough some lungfuls of air" . (....lungfuls? It's a word for sure, but I imagine it's uncommon,

Every other slide, there's text that makes me want to pull out a red marker pen. The writing is not in a good state.
I honestly think that, this will be an issue if you were to run it by the dreaded "STEAM REVIEWS".

I'm a Norwegian with a -decent- grasp of English, but I'm far from an expert. Hopefully you let someone from the UK, who passed their English class have a look at it. It really needs to be edited. Curse of Mantras is early beta, but it really needs a lot of work, if we're talking editing.

Next? The card game is SO MUCH FUN.
It's obvious how well you know game systems / card systems. (If there's one really GOOD thing I could say about Planet Stronghold - Colonial Defense, it was the card battle system. I made a mistake of playing that game in VN mode first... I initially missed out on the good part).
:D Listening to Franka made me a believer, that card games can b e fun.
I'm not good at it, but the tutorial bits help. And I'm happy simply having won my first few battles

-> Thank you for letting me (us) play Curse of Mantras this early. Hopefully some of the input you get is useful.

[jack1974]

Hi, thanks for the feedback. The game was already edited by my usual editor. Like you I'm not native English, but lungful is perfectly fine. The first part of the story was written by a writer, the rest (all memories, endings,etc) by me plus other ghostwriters. Let me know if you find a difference in them!

[Franka]

My take on the language: First off, English is not my first language, but I've read thousands of books in English over the past many years. I love (most) of the writing in this game. It's not everyday English. It wouldn't have fit very well for a modern slice of life story. In this magical reality setting, I think it's (mostly) perfect, because it has a very whimsical fairy tale like quality to it.

I realize that some of this simply comes from the Italian sentence structure, that formed the basis for much of the writing, being a little bit different from English. That doesn't matter to me, since I really enjoy the slightly offbeat syntax. I strive to play with language in my own writings. Unlike certain past WW games (no names mentioned), this one doesn't make me nuts; I really like it.

At the same time, I can see how it could drive someone crazy if it feels completely unfamiliar.

Content wise, I still need to go through a little more than half of the stories, but I've been very impressed so far!

[jack1974]

Cool! My goal was to make people cry at least once while playing the game and so far base on the reaction, I managed to
One day I'll write a postmortem about this game and it will be VERY interesting since it had a very long and troubled development journey but I think the real epiphany was when, 2 years ago, I decided to use this "past memories" system for the plot (nothing original, basically stolen from Lost as narrative mechanic).
I wanted to go back to my roots/early games and do plot twist like Bionic Heart and so on. Of course there's no real branching but that's due to how the game/main story develops. My next TFTU game will be done in a similar way (shock reader sometimes with sudden/unexpected twists), but with branching.

[Franka]

Why is Force Shield and Shell the same card, except one costs 1 more than the other? Either Force Shield shouldn't let you draw a card or Shell should give you something extra, imo.

Ideally, one should be in Order and one in Chaos, actually.