Chain Mail by AdamCYounis

Save the kingdom one parcel at a time in Chain Mail!
A guild-manager style RPG where you lead a troupe of heroes to redeem the mistakes of the past Master of Mail, who sent the kingdom into turmoil.
Instructions for play can be found in (?) buttons throughout the game. Enjoy!
| Link | https://uppon-hill.itch.io/chain-mail |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/chain-mail-1 |
Ratings
| Overall | 169th | 4.014⭐ | 254🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 523th | 3.508⭐ | 253🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 378th | 3.586⭐ | 253🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 688th | 3.813⭐ | 253🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 30th | 4.659⭐ | 253🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 34th | 4.365⭐ | 247🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 537th | 3.17⭐ | 229🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 203th | 4⭐ | 252🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 38🗨️ |
Otherwise, I loved the game. Great art, great music, cool concept. I wasn't able to finish it (see above), but I had fun anyway :)
The gameplay loop is surprisingly fun for how passive it might seem. Though I'll note that towards the end of the 14 days, I was sometimes in situations where I was just waiting for time to pass, first because there were no missions my available heroes could succeed at, and later because there were no missions left! I managed to get a favourable outcome with my guys for the last mission, but I did wonder what would happen if I hadn't, since there were no more missions left.
There were some UX things that I would have liked to see. One is in the mission select screen, where it would have been nice to see which of my heroes are available for missions, so I know if I can end the day without having to go into a mission to test. And speaking of the mission screen, I don't know if I'm just blind or something, but I couldn't tell which of my heroes were available to be selected, which means I often had to just click through to see if they were available.
While my heroes leveled up, it wasn't clear how many completed missions would result in a level up; it's not necessarily necessary, but some indication of progress towards the next level might have been nice? Also, a message that says that they leveled up, maybe at the end of the mission report?
That's about it. Looks really good, and it's a nice gameplay loop.
I ran into an issue where I was managed to skip the end of day and recruitment by clicking too fast on a quest after clicking end of day, but other than that it ran perfectly.
Well done !
Really liked the hex map. Fun touch with the waves.
The music by Ryan was just awesome and gave the game so much atmosphere. The only sad thing is since there isn't much actual hands on gameplay, you end up cutting off the awesome music so often by going to the next screen! The art was perfect for what the game is and it was a super smart choice to leave the backgrounds untextured and focus on the character art since that is what the player is meant to connect with.
Nice amount of content and I really felt connected to a few of my characters and didn't want them to die.
In terms of difficulty, I think it was a little too easy. I never failed a quest and finished all quests with 3 days remaining. It seemed like synergy was weighted too heavily as I could put in characters that didn't match the quest's terrain at all but if their synergy was right my success was assured anyways.
Also one little gripe is that when a character was out on a mission, their portrait was not greyed out near enough so it always looked like I had all my characters available.
Overall, I'm blown away that you accomplished this in three days. I never expect more than a minute of solid gameplay from these things and this game gave me 5+ minutes of polished, enjoyable content.
Great job Adam and team!
The art and music are super nice and they definitely fit with the actual gameplay.
But being not too much of a strategy player, I struggled a bit with understanding the mechanics.
Release it on steam, i buy it :D
Pros
- visuals
- clever quest descriptions and story-telling
- tutorial in form of question marks were nice addition
Cons
- recruitment process felt redundant after a while, maybe in later days you can acquire stars to existing characters instead
- some parts of UI were mildly annoying, after picking a character to recruit, if I want to pick another I need to deselect first and then click on a new one ... also nice quality of life would be terrain icons in heroes list, there was their "behavior" (or how to call it :D), so I guess technology is there
But for 72 hours pretty cool!
I would have like for the game to be a bit harder. I never lost any mission, and I don't think I was trying that hard. It felt more like a visual novel in that regard.
Also, I would have like to fit the theme a bit better. It feels a bit the game was made before and then retrofitted to the theme somehow.
Engaging gameplay, beautiful art. I found myself quickly getting attached to the characters; forming groups based on their personalities lends itself well to that. Very nice.
I would have liked some more missions near the end of the game, as most of my couriers were waiting in the barracks, and the characters I sent on the final mission were woefully underleveled.
Once again, fantastic game. Really wowed by the music.
Managed to get this far before essentially losing all my men

Good stuff :8ball:
I sucked real bad and all of my heroes were dead by like day 4 or 5 :P. I feel like I'm gonna be playing this one a lot!
The things I guess I had trouble with would be:
-Selecting a hero once and then selecting another does not switch to the other which feels bad.
-I think you can see the day outcome in a split second when you end the day by looking at the map expanding.
-The text felt hard to read for me and I reached a point where I stopped reading it.
-I think it bugged for me at the end since I had no missions left and nothing happened until I lost due to days passing.
But those are honestly easily fixable things, this is really nice...

Shush, ignore the number of days I had left hehe!
This was massively ambitious for a jam game! You were definitely smart to avoid doing animations and stuff, seems like focusing on the systems was the best bet.
I enjoyed the concept more than the execution though, and I think that was mostly down to UI issues. For instance, on the recruiting screen, if you click a character, you have to first unclick them before selecting another. There were a few instances like that where I felt some friction. I think a more detailed overview screen of your characters and their synergies would've been welcome too (although, obviously, difficult to implement in such a short time.)
Overall this is really impressive. Enjoyed the adaptive, epic soundtrack, and of course the art was beautiful. Well done, and good luck!
I managed to win with 3 days remaining and exactly 0 losses. I really enjoyed strategizing around the sinergies and terrain, and I guess it paid off hehe. I can say I left craving for more. Great job!
I did run into the bug others had mentioned where I finished all the missions but it still said I ran out of time - I think what happened is that at one point I was able to send the same people on two different missions, then the game constantly thought that one of those missions had not completed?
Regardless, great job!
Loved the general tone of it, the way information is conveyed by means of official reports, and the lighthearted mission descriptions (I loved the last one, actually had a chuckle)
Mechanics wise it was solid.
A little easy (beat it on the first try, only failed 1 mission, it was "doomed" but I tried it anyway), and I thought the personality type synergy could've been a bit deeper. I basically just hired pragmatics, and so I often had good synergy. Perhaps thats an RNG thing, maybe you could weigh it so that it doesn't offer loads of guys with the same trait. Perhaps there could be a more complicated rock-paper-scissors thing instead of just likes/hates.
The other mechanics are great though, the terrain types are intuitive, the "push your luck" element where you could try a dodgy mission with your last few remaining guys, or wait a day to create a better team.
Well done!
altogether a really solid game, i had a lot of fun!
I really enjoyed the graphics! It's really pretty
Great effort, very cool game :)
Anyway, this is some excellent work, well done!
The puzzle-ish gameplay lacks a bit, decision making could use some sensible options for the player.
The game feels incredibly polished. On the last few days I ran out of things to do and couldn't train my favorite heroes anymore unfortunately, but that's a nitpick. Incredible entry as always. Honored to be participating in LD for the first time and be able to rate this game personally. :)
Missed a bit of information (maybe I missed it) about the quest on the main screen so I didn't have to click on the niches every time to see which heroes were best for the quest, and the list of heroes on the main screen as well.
The music and visuals are breathtaking! Gameplay loop is entertaining !


But .... WOW! :thumbsup_tone1:

The art, sound, and UI all come together to create a stylish, cohesive experience. The actual gameplay I would say, however, feels passive. Amazing job on putting it all together!
The game was interesting.