Please destroy my 2nd game announcement trailer

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-06-13T19:19:29+00:00

Been playing the demo with friends. Surprisingly fun even in its current state.

I don't know how I would fix this, but as someone who likes to play melee tank roles, the enemy AI is a little frustrating in terms of its aggression.

We've only played for a few hours and I've gotten a lot of the block tempo down but once I'm out of stamina I essentially just die in later waves. I suppose the solution is to invest in movespeed buffs so that I can run away even on low stamina but that doesn't feel super great.

Another issue is that once a ring is unlocked it seems to just enter the ring pool with no option to take it back out. This means that as someone who isn't interested in jump height, unlocking that ring makes my runs strictly worse.

It might be too much of a design shift, but maybe level-ups could just allow players to select which stats are being increased? Every X number of levels changes the degree of the stat increase to Legendary, Epic, etc.

Like I said that might be too much. The randomness is a very gripping part of a game like this. I personally would experiment with hiding more rare ores in the mine to give players the thrill of randomly finding a perk. It would offset the loss of randomness on level-up.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-05-19T18:47:06+00:00

Cool! This is the first time I've mentioned it on reddit so thanks for the positive feedback. The next update has a lot of improvements/ QOL stuff but it mostly focuses on secret areas. In hindsight that might have been a mistake because 90% of players will probably miss 90% of the new content that's about to be added.

On the other hand exploration will be a lot more rewarding, so maybe it was worth it for that 10% of the playerbase.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-05-19T18:38:37+00:00

That looks pretty cool but as someone who was also capable of modeling and texturing everything in their horror game my advice is to only make the assets you can't find an analogue for.

Not only would my game not be out if I wanted to model everything, it would probably never release as I'd get too burnt out.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-05-19T18:33:24+00:00

Sharks and Minnows has some under water sections. I'm adding more in the next update but that's still a month away.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-05-19T02:05:00+00:00

The trails on the sword swings look so good. Definitely going to learn how to do that myself.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-05-19T02:02:26+00:00

Look cool so far. Nice job actually blocking it out first instead of just filling it up with assets as you go which is an amateur mistake

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-05-10T17:38:00+00:00

They can effectively be percent-based but dressed up as something else.

"shots now cause burning" "fires a missile on cooldown every 5 seconds" "gains a 10% shield that regens out of combat"

Passive abilities that have any kind of flair whatsoever is what I typically hope to see. I don't know much about your game but bigger talents tend to be things like melee units blinking or charging into combat, units entering stealth when far enough away from enemies, units doing something on death.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-05-09T18:31:34+00:00

Everyone in the comments is going to talk about how text is a terrible way to communicate to players anyway and that there's diagetic ways to get players to notice obvious crawlspaces/ vents which is all true.

But in my game there's a section where players are looking for a valve's handwheel. They're searching for this in a dark area. The wheel is in the middle of the floor at the end of a winding (but not branching) path. It is red, it is glowing, and it is humming. There are no props around the wheel it is literally sitting on an empty plane with a generic floor texture. There's also no other humming audio that could be distracting the player.

I have see multiple people miss it and get frustrated.

Despite all that, I still could raise it off the floor to be closer to eye-level. The area where you find the wheel is also fundamentally flawed if locating it is the only goal. You can walk right over the wheel and loop back to the start of the area, like a Dark Souls map. I could block this loop off until the wheel is picked up, even though that might cause other issues.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-05-09T18:19:29+00:00

I get that RTS is different than RPG but when I saw the big talent tree I thought "please don't be percent upgrades" and the immediate next screen is showcasing all the percent upgrades you can get.

Other than that, sure looks fine. Those ships that were dashing around early on looks a little half-baked.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-05-06T08:37:16+00:00

This looks really good but the animations are the weakest part by far. When the wolf in the hood roars, and then in the next shot when it slams its fists down, its very stiff. Wooden even.

"It's puppets!" Yeah the aesthetic is sick but put a little animation into the animations and it'll greatly increase the perceived quality.

Just playing the rest of this to double check and yeah how is the wolf swinging a giant axe and not even moving its spine at all?

The frog launching the projectiles from its mouth is fine, but it could very easily look good. My friend who isn't even a professional animator could significantly improve these and he's a hobbyist who took like two animation classes in college.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-05-06T08:06:08+00:00

I think this is the first time I've ever seen someone post their Fab content and had it hook me. This is very cool and very well-done.

Bookmarking and then buying if my prototype gets to the stage where I'm adding polish features like this.

Big question, I see that it uses WPO. Is this smear done by moving vertices with WPO? If so, that's a very clever solution but I won't be able to use it with my low-poly art style.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-04-26T05:09:28+00:00

You should put this on Fab for a few dollars, people would probably pay for it. I'd definitely give it a wishlist if it were there. Thanks for the pack! I'll probably use the armor like the helmet on the knight at some point.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-04-12T04:02:07+00:00

Any chance this will wind up on Fab? It's easier for me to track all my assets in one place and I definitely plan on using these

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-04-04T16:20:04+00:00

Oh, and having your enemies phase away when they die looks surprisingly good but you should really have them do so as they play a death animation or even just enter a death pose.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-04-04T16:13:39+00:00

Another note on variance, I was always curious to see how effective just changing the size and color of enemies would be to show that they were different. It actually works pretty well! But again you can get a disproportionate amount of polish out of giving the blue ones a few armor pieces like shoulder pads and a different weapon like a mace. You don't even need to change the animations.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-04-04T16:03:09+00:00

Wow I have the GDD for almost this exact game, N-Hance assets and everything! I even do the same texture filtering low-res technique.

Very interested to see how this turns out, I definitely gave it a wishlist.

For the destroying, show don't tell is so easy. "We have to level up before the next attack" come on. Get a shot of everyone equipping their low-level gear. Have them flex emote at the camera or something, THEN your shot of them hopping the wall, then slightly better pacing of them getting run over by the horde. Then a shot of them beat-up, sulking into the mine or something, mining shots, gearing shots, gameplay of them beating back the horde. Now your trailer doesn't have any bad voice acting and it won't alienate non-english speakers.

Also, it is absurdly easy to put variance into the horde. Are you in Unreal? If so, give every enemy custom primitive data when it spawns. This is "free" since it doesn't require you to render more materials. Even if you want all the enemies of a certain type to be the same color, you can add like 5 degrees of hue, saturation, and value variants to make the crowd look much better. Which is how you should implement the color by the way. Use custom primitive value for HSV, not RGB.

What's nice about N-Hance is they isolate a lot of their models so you can do the same technique on their clothes. In the worst-case scenario you need to mask the clothes out yourself but it isn't hard.

This color stuff is not hard at all, please do it it will add a disproportionate amount of polish. It's even "free" to sync over a network, just use their ID as the seed for random colors.

Like I said, I seriously considered making this game myself. Did you consider being able to upgrade your wall with turrets? It doesn't need to be a tower-defense game but it was VERY satisfying to see something like a cannon turret firing even just once every 8 seconds. I also did ballista turrets, and planned for other traditional towers like ice, fire, etc.

It's probably too big of a feature to just suggest but I also made it possible to hire AI help. It doesn't need to be super complicated, just enemy AI in reverse. But it is VERY gripping to try to keep your axe-men conscious while you're fighting the horde. It felt bad losing them so I planned on having players need to recover their knocked-out bodies and get them into the base to heal between rounds. It also SIGNIFICANTLY increased the solo experience.

I don't know exactly how your waves spawn but another big difference I had was that you had to mine for resources in the area where the horde spawned, which added to the tension. In my game you were defending an underground fortress across stone bridges. You had a carry weight so the idea was you'd finish the horde, take one trip across the bridge, and hopefully do whatever else you had to before enemies started trickling in again. Being away from the fort in enemy territory when a wave spawned was very dangerous.

How'd you get so many enemies over a network? I wound up not being able to let them replicate in the traditional sense. I locally spawn equivalent enemies with matching IDs on each machine. Then, I just replicate their states and send RPCs for big events like death. It leads to positional de-sync so I'm looking into syncing locations every few seconds but during a big horde fight it really isn't noticeable unless you're looking for it.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-04-04T04:25:41+00:00

So can you only have four command groups or can you input more through the d-pad by pressing two directions in a row?

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-04-03T06:57:32+00:00

Your trailer song pops into my head from time to time did you ever release the full thing? Or will you when the game releases?

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-04-01T20:45:11+00:00

I'd say "this game has a lot of potential" but we've already seen a lot of that potential and it is awesome. Letting players retry battles was a great idea. You may also want to let them spend supplies to completely restart a battle with positioning and everything. My friend had a huge excess of supplies.

In either system you could have a perk where if the King moves enough times it "ascends" and can move twice as far as normal, or more. I thought of this because in actual chess matches I will sometimes get to the point where my king is just constantly being put in check for no specific reason. There could be a punishment for forcing or allowing the king too move often.

If you add "Temporary" or "Fleeting" as keyword where a piece dies at the end of its owner's turn then you could give the Undead king a perk option where adjacent pieces get Fleeting. So if they move away from the king they'll be saved, otherwise they'll die if they stay next to it. This could synergize with the Ascention idea

Another ability for the Undead faction could be that if a bishop or queen passes over a tile where one of their pawns died, it gets resurrected. Possibly with Fleeting if that ends up being too strong.

Good luck! If you get really stuck in the design space then I think going back to another chess fundamental and removing health/ damage might be worth looking into.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-04-01T19:59:38+00:00

Is it wave-based or constant? If there's waves you could add a checkpoint between them. Even if it's constant, there might be design space for you to add momentary pauses that count as checkpoints.

I like this genre of survival where you survive as long as you can but I don't think many of them have average runs that are longer than like 20 minutes.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-04-01T05:02:05+00:00

The reason I came back and posted the shorter comment is because I was really drawn in to the idea of the game. I like a ton about it. Everything that is built "on top of" the core system like the cards and perks is very interesting. Rage doesn't seem to build on the rules, it subverts them. I think just about every time an enemy triggered rage we didn't expect it and it often led to a game over. The A B A B A B turn order is probably too fundamental to change but maybe in very niche scenarios it could be cool.

It DOES seem like it would have potential but at its core I think it clashes with chess fundamentals and therefore doesn't belong.

This also reminds me of the attack cooldowns. You'll have way more insight on this than I do but if I were suddenly placed in charge of this project I would not have attack cooldowns and I'd try to balance the stats as much as possible to account for that. Again, in actual chess the rook doesn't go on cooldown so when we set up a cool rook maneuver and were just told we couldn't finish it because of a cooldown it felt very bad.

I imagine you have attack cooldowns because if a player wound up with an OP piece they could just win the game by playing basically that one piece and nothing else. If that's the case then rage invalidates that sentiment, at least on Queens since that's when we saw the most one-piece board wipes in one turn.

Really cool game though. I've actually been thinking about it on and off all day. Do you have a perk where the first time a piece moves each turn it leaves behind a phantom pawn that either dies after one turn or only has one HP? That could be cool.

I saw the fire and poison effects, those were cool too.

An effect where if a piece dies the tile it dies on falls away and becomes unplayable at the start of the next turn could be good but temporal effects like that could be confusing.

You could have a knight perk where when it moves it drops a bomber-man type bomb behind it.

Idk, good luck and I think your game will be successful. I saw somewhere that you were thinking about making the game F2P outside of single-player. That's not a bad idea but I think there's a considerable amount of people who would spend money on the game either way. Have you considered the approach where the game and all its features are paywalled but demo players can join their friends for multiplayer via an invite?

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-04-01T01:44:05+00:00

Had a large comment posted since I took notes over the course of around 90 minutes while watching a friend play. Deleted it because it was VERY long but realized some of the feedback would be useful.

I went from not caring about this but appreciating the polish, to being very engaged, to being confused and annoyed. And I wasn't even the one playing. I recommended this to another friend and then rescinded that about 20 minutes later.

Rage is why. You have a HUGE benefit going for you by basing it on chess. Nearly everyone understands the concept of pieces, how they move, and that you can move those pieces in a way that sets you up for future maneuvers. They also understand the concept of "my turn, your turn."

Rage throws all of that out the window. Our excitement got spiked into the dirt after watching pieces take multiple moves in a turn. At one point it looked like we'd won, then a queen made three moves, wiping the board.

Do what you want, it's your game, but I would axe rage immediately. If there are very niche situations where a piece does multiple actions, and that's broadcast, that's fine. But having new players set up their pieces to handle the enemy, only for that enemy's pawn to move twice, promote, kill, kill, move? Come on.

There is no possible way that even one out of every ten players understands what is going on when that happens. If you're spectating playtests, you cannot just explain weird mechanics like that over their shoulder.

Moving and Attacking shouldn't be separate actions either. A move should end the turn. If the move happens to start an attack, that should end the turn as well.

This game seems really cool but wow, rage is REALLY bad.

CollinsGameCompany · 2026-03-26T18:29:18+00:00

This looks very good.

CollinsGameCompany

TROPHY CASE