Hello everyone!

[Shawn Thomas]

It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance!

I stumbled across Secrets of Grindea when steam promoted it to me as an item I might be interested in. The read up on the game was excellent and the screenshots (and video) got me excited for the product as well.
So, great job on that marketing front.

I recently downloaded the demo and had a lot of fun with it. I played using the keyboard and I would ask that you consider having a brief pop-up to showcase what keys are bound to which actions. Maybe a screenshot of a standard qwerty keyboard where you color code the keys that'll be used in the game. Is this absolutely necessary? Not at all, but I spent the first minute or three spamming buttons because I was unsure which ones did anything.

I'm hoping to lurk around the forums and see how things are going. I don't know how much I'll be able to contribute to help the process along (I haven't decided if I want to wait for the full game experience or to get into the early version and contribute to the Q&A sections).

----A bit about me----
I'm a father of 2 little girls and happily married to an amazing author. I work, primarily, as an IT solutions architect for an insurance company and as a book agent as time allows.

I've dabbled in game design for a long time but have very little to show for my efforts. Most of my work has been done on the RPG Maker engine. I've completed 2 short games and have made a 5hr unfinished game on RPG Maker VX and a 2hr unfinished game on RPG Maker MV.
I was a heavy playtester for a couple dozen other projects on that engine as well to help out other members on Degica's official forum.

I run 3 D&D 5th edition games as the dungeon master (all of which are in partial home-brew settings based in Faerun. I'm not a big fan of the prebuilt modules).

Feel free to bother me with questions. I like talking with people and networking is always a good thing.

 

[The G-Meister]

Ohey!

If you want some info on the game's current state with respect to its launched state, the story has 3 of 4/5 dungeons fully implemented now, and around 20-30 hours of content on the normal difficulty, bunk that up to 30-40 for 100%. The Arcade mode recently got significantly fleshed out, though is much more challenging, featuring a full 16 floors to fight through. Overall, the game is at least a good few years before launch, but if you enjoy the combat, you'll surely smash that hour count out the window

That is all from 3 years of external observation btw, nothing is official. But 3 years is a long time to get to know a game

Game design's neat There's a personal projects thread here that I update every now and then when I have stuff to add, and if you do have anything to show it would be great to see (Talking of which I'm yet to get beck into programming in the 3 months of summer break I have left, should probably do that sometime )

GMing is neat too! While I haven't quite played a full D&D campaign, I've been taking part in a couple RPGs for my whole first year of Uni, which was great fun. If you've done any world/system design I'd love to hear about it, been building an RPG based off the videogame Heat Signature for a while and am still very new to it all.

But yeah, welcome to the forums!

 

[Purrbidden]

welcome! :>

 

[Shawn Thomas]

@Zydrune Thanks for the welcome :3

@The G-Meister Cool. Thanks a ton for the information and the links. I'm just finishing up with an all-nighter for work but I'll be back at the grind in another 5 hours. I'll edit this post later because I'd like to address some of the items you brought up. I've got some game design stuff and D&D stuff to share.

Cheers!

Edit: A bit earlier than expected haha.
So, first off I'll be checking out your thread over the next few days. I'll consider posting mine in the mix based on what the community has done so far. I have no issues private messaging links but there is a stigma around the RPG Maker engine and I don't want to walk into a mine field.

As for D&D.

I've built my own continent / large island complete with factions and connections to extra planar realms. I have a unique approach to world building in that I usually start at the macro level and work my way down. I'm quite good at improvising storyline hooks and thus allow my players a great measure of freedom to explore and do as they will while building major plot points that fluidly tie into where they're going and what they're doing.

I've attached an example of one of the many homebrew creatures I've made. (This one is a bit more cleaned up than many of the others).
In addition I uploaded 2 pictures of the game in play with my miniatures and 2 other pictures of my attempts at outlining villages/cities.

 

[The G-Meister]

Sorry, took me a couple days to get around to replying!

Don't worry about RPG Maker here man. People give it crap for the graphics and the very similar games its ease of use brings about, but that doesn't stop great games being made in it, and nor does it mean that passion and hard work didn't go into making them. Mimicry Man is my favourite, and you can get it completely free here. Plus, you found the nice side of the internet. No-one's gonna be judging

Dude those miniatures and boards look siiiiick, reminds me of when I used to do Warhammer 40k. Didn't even realise there could even be a miniature component to DnD That table is huge as well

I still need to master the art of seamlessly sliding in plot events wherever the players happen to be, even though my system isn't quite as free flowing as DnD. Works on a mission/downtime rotation, a lot like Blades in the Dark, the first full campaign I took part in.

Love your designs as well, especially for the Orgok. Will have to shoehorn that level of detail into the character design I'm doing for an art project at the moment