Welcome to the Mage's Initiation Forum

[RogerXY]

Soon $95k
I am really glad (and also a little surprised) that this KS has been so successful 

[Balinaeri]

Welcome aboard, Anaxphone!

[ratpizza]

Wow, until a few days ago I wasn't even aware that this game was being worked on. It was a pleasant surprise indeed, I think this will become a really awesome game, of the same calibre as the QFG-games in every aspect and perhaps even outshining them. I had a great time just looking at the gorgeous visuals and listening to the wonderful soundtrack. My favourite was probably the training hall, both visually and auditory. And I enjoyed the puzzles to, they were sufficiently challenging without being to convoluted. About the combat-system I personally enjoyed it. Although it is technically in real-time it actually felt more like a turn-based system since it has a slow pacing and relies much more on strategic thinking than quick reflexes. Yes, vs. ordinary me-bash-you grunts there is indeed a lot of run-and-shoot tactics involved but I understand it must be very difficult to design it in any other way, it boils down to that old problem of "linear fighters vs quadratic wizards". However, I can easily imagine battles becoming far more interesting when you have to engage in magical duels against spellcasting enemies. I also appreciated the small touches such that goblins will flee if hurt to badly and that they try to block fireballs. (though it struck me as a little odd that their shields make a clanking noise as if hit by a physical weapon and not a spell) What I could nitpick on is that it is very easy to get surrounded and stunlocked to death and that the standard cursor seemed to imprecise for aiming. Also, a more general nitpick is that you couldn't load/save games by simply double-clicking, I did this on instinct several times to no avail, it would be nice if this would be included in the final version. And it seemed a little artificial that the characters in their close-up portraits never did blink.

I discovered a few bugs while playing the demo, they have likely been detected by now, but I thought I'd mention them anyway:

- The green gem can be picked up an infinite number of times.
- During combat the game crashed to desktop with the error message "Error: The character "Redcap Goblin" could not be displayed because there were no frames in loop 0 of view 259."
 
   
Oh, and my favourite line was for clicking the mouth icon on the mortar ("It can't grind stats") 

Keep up the good work, really looking forward to play the full version.

[GameDevChris]

Hey, ratpizza. Thanks for the great write-up (and also for your awesome forum handle!)

I'm happy to know that you had a good experience with the demo and hold it in such high esteem. Being compared to a QFG is high praise, indeed, as those games served as the source of our inspiration. Even though it's a similar game, Mage's Initiation isn't intended to be a direct facsimile of the QFG experience. Sure, a lot of elements in Mages are the same, but several of the RPG aspects differ and there's also no day and night cycle. We planned it this way so that our game would have a somewhat unique angle.

Thanks for the combat feedback. The demo you played is actually the one we released back at the very start of the year (February 2013) when we were running our Kickstarter campaign. Since then, we've completely adjusted the way the combat system works to make it more intuitive and friendly. There's now an auto-targeting system for the spells, the ability to pause the game mid-combat so the player can drink potions -- as well as a bunch of other improvements. We've released an updated combat demo showcasing these improvements, which is available exclusively to backers who helped fund the project on either Kickstarter or PayPal.New PayPal backers can still get access to the forum, download it, and offer further feedback to us in the backers' forum.

I appreciate the time you took to write this feedback, and hope that you'll enjoy the final product when it's done!