I don't know exactly what makes it that much more enticing to me, but I'm just itching to play it immediately after the update drops.
I think it's the sense of scale, and grittiness of the background maps... What blew me away back when I first saw it was the area and doodad art - the way it's stylized, and accented with a ton of black (you don't notice this because there's so much color everywhere, but there's a
ton of black in all the art). The character miniatures are also big enough to see, but still small enough to offer a size contrast to the surroundings. So your brain fills in the missing pieces from lack of visual information. It feels like playing through a wargame diorama! The old
Infinity Engine games had the same thing going for them, which is why they look great even today.
I'd like to say that we thought of everything ourselves, but a lot of what you see in
ToLLA was inspired by old 2D RPGs; we analyzed things we loved about those games (
BG1/2,
IWD1/2,
PS:T,
Arcanum,
ToEE,
Diablo1/2,
Fallout1/2, etc.), then adapted certain elements to fit our needs while trying to hit those same visual notes in
ToLLA. I wrote about this in detail a few months ago on our Patreon, it's a public post so anyone can read it:
You must be registered to see the links
Btw, the teaser video in the quoted post looks great, but I have a few questions about it. Is this the final build, or is it more of a showcase video?
Showcase video. We removed most of the quests and NPCs to avoid spoilers. I had to beg our lead artist to allow a showcase - she wanted to keep everything under wraps 'till release, but I managed to convince her because it's been a while since we showed any game footage... The map you saw in the video(s) is actually a small woodland area just south of the main Fort - Ninevus itself is
double the size, with two dozen buildings and even more icons (it's a loot hound's paradise). The area art has been finished for a long time, but very few characters there have miniatures and portraits, so there was no point showing it since it feels empty (and we want to save it for the big release).
EDIT:
You must be registered to see the links
The day/night cycle seems incredibly rapid.
Done on purpose to show time cycling and ambience change. We originally had it set to
1:1 with real time, and played through the demo together at one of our previous team meetings... problem is, we cleared the whole map before even a single ambience change. So our scripter just sped everything up by like
x100. The final release build will have a much, much slower day-night cycle. Time only advances quickly if your character sleeps in his cabin for 6/12/18/24 hours.
The other issue is that there are so many items in random places. Like the armor stand in some shrubs. At this point, I'm positive this is a test build, but just in case...
Yup, showcase again. You might find armor or weapons out in the wilderness, but they'll be in forgotten crates or locked chests, not on weapon stands... and the item generator will lean toward giving you broken wargear to account for environmental degradation from being left outside for so long. Building interiors are the ones that house things like scrollcases, bookstands, armor/weapon racks, reliquaries, etc. But the interiors are far from finished (and aren't scheduled to be in the next release), so we just tossed everything outside to show looting functionality and item randomization.
However, there
is a layer of abstraction to the game - for example, recruiting soldiers into your
Retinue is done via a special helmet-icon which you can find just about anywhere... This was a necessity, because there's no way our tiny art team (currently 2 people) can churn out dozens of separate sprites to make this look 'realistic', and just copy-pasting the same soldier miniature everywhere gets old fast. So we're forced to take some liberties when dealing with certain systems and mechanics, like aforementioned
Soldiers/Materiel/Supplies that make up elements of the Captain's Retinue.
I really hope your next 2-3 updates garner enough support that you guys can eventually can make the transition into full time devs.
Fingers crossed!
