AncientBeast.com - Free Open Source Browser Based TBS Game

[DreadKnight]

Hey guys! I've been working on a project with a lot of other people for quite a while now.
It's a free open source turn based strategy that's playable from the browser.
It had it's 0.1 release a few weeks ago, so there's plenty of work to be done.
Anyway, I have really big plans for this project and I'm constantly working on it while keeping an eye for more contributors.

http://www.AncientBeast.com
https://github.com/FreezingMoon/AncientBeast
http://facebook.com/AncientBeast
http://twitter.com/AncientBeast
https://plus.google.com/b/113034814032002995836/

Ancient Beast is a combination of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (focusing on it's combat system) and Magic The Gathering (being way more visual):
match based, 1vs1 or 2vs2, each player being represented by a Dark Priest on the combat field, being able to summon a wide variety of creatures, each having it's own strengths, weaknesses and special abilities.

[Gambit]

It's been fun watching this materialize from nothing. Looking forward to watching it grow even more!

Congrats on your successful 0.1 launch, and good luck.

[Sapient]

I have played Heroes of Might and Magic 3. This, sir, is no Heroes of Might and Magic 3.

Interesting enough, though. But not my type of game.

As for feedback: It would be nice if the passive abilities were marked as such. I kept clicking on it before I realized the top ability is their passive one.

[DreadKnight]

It's been fun watching this materialize from nothing. Looking forward to watching it grow even more!

Congrats on your successful 0.1 launch, and good luck.

Thanks Gambit! Hopefully will get some feedback from you as well regarding the gameplay

I have played Heroes of Might and Magic 3. This, sir, is no Heroes of Might and Magic 3.

Interesting enough, though. But not my type of game.

As for feedback: It would be nice if the passive abilities were marked as such. I kept clicking on it before I realized the top ability is their passive one.

I didn't said it's a HoMM3 clone, there's VCMI for that, said it has it's combat system overall combined with MTG type of summoning.
If you mean the animations/effects/etc, those will come with time, it's only 0.1 for now. Think of how Wesnoth was like in the early days.
I heard arguments before like "AB doesn't have creature stacks, so it's not similar to HoMM3" lol... truth is that most people even compare HoMM3 to Disciples 2, which is a far greater gap than HoMM3 and Ancient Beast.

Not sure what you mean by "not my type of game" since you're clearly into the TBS genre and Ancient Beast has quite a few similarities with Wesnoth (summoner making creatures, hex based, turn based, 2d, rpg elements at some point, etc), but whatever

Regarding passive abilities, I'm aware of the issue, but it's good none the less to have things confirmed by more people.
Atm, the cursor shows as regular to suggest "non-clickable", but yeah, we need to do way better than that in order to make the game more intuitive to new players.
The game gets patched on a regular basis so things improve pretty fast. Thanks for trying out the game so far ^^ You might actually get to like it at some point.

[DreadKnight]

Updated screenshot, containing a new in-game creature, the Chimera.

[johndh]

I just tried this for the first time... and it took me a good five minutes of clicking around and grumbling "how do I DO THINGS!?" before I managed to, well, do things. It might help if the screen to materialize creatures was a different screen than shows up when you click on everything else. Clicking on the materialize icon doesn't give any kind of hint that I'm actually doing anything different than when I select a creature on the battlefield, so I had no idea that I was doing something different and I only managed to materialize a creature by accident the first few times. Additionally, once I stumbled into making a battle happen and getting some monsters on the field, there doesn't seem to be any distinction between actions that your monsters can take, and passive effects that are always active. There is also no indication (for melee attacks) of what enemies can be targeted by it, which means you pretty much have to click to make the attack, click on a target, and hope that it's a valid target. If it's not a valid target, you get that unit description screen again, and have to exit out of that, then try a new target. It just doesn't flow at all. I would suggest highlighting valid targets in some way, and perhaps turning the cursor into a red X or something when trying an invalid target instead of bringing up the unit description screen.

[DreadKnight]

I just tried this for the first time... and it took me a good five minutes of clicking around and grumbling "how do I DO THINGS!?" before I managed to, well, do things. It might help if the screen to materialize creatures was a different screen than shows up when you click on everything else. Clicking on the materialize icon doesn't give any kind of hint that I'm actually doing anything different than when I select a creature on the battlefield, so I had no idea that I was doing something different and I only managed to materialize a creature by accident the first few times. Additionally, once I stumbled into making a battle happen and getting some monsters on the field, there doesn't seem to be any distinction between actions that your monsters can take, and passive effects that are always active. There is also no indication (for melee attacks) of what enemies can be targeted by it, which means you pretty much have to click to make the attack, click on a target, and hope that it's a valid target. If it's not a valid target, you get that unit description screen again, and have to exit out of that, then try a new target. It just doesn't flow at all. I would suggest highlighting valid targets in some way, and perhaps turning the cursor into a red X or something when trying an invalid target instead of bringing up the unit description screen.

Thanks for your feedback. Most of the stuff will be fixed in the near future.
Regarding targeting, with exception of "Mud Bath" ability (for now...), when you click an ability and it awaits a target, only valid targets have their colored hexagons from under displayed, so you probably didn't noticed that.
No ability selected means you'll end up in the overview screen; but yeah, we'll eventually have the custom cursor re-implemented and that should help on this matter.

[DreadKnight]

Been playing this game with best buddy about a week ago for like 6 hours and I've recorded 2 of the matches.
Here's the first gameplay video.

http://youtu.be/cAgf9hKGI3k

[DreadKnight]

Second gameplay video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7V4yzu_l9E

I did a terrible mistake and lost the match xD