Hello and welcome to the first playtest round for Pemkie Island!
The playtest officially begins now and will run until end of year (exact closing date TBD)
👉 If you did not already, go sign up now!
Now, let us start by first saying thank you for the interest you guys showed for our game!
For us this is a very big milestone, and although we are still deep into development phases of the game, seeing you guys already curious to try out Pemkie Island makes us very excited but also very nervous.
It's our first game ever, built from the ground up with our own resources, and due to that we would like to set the expectations for this playtest before you begin your first adventure.
PLAYTEST OBJECTIVE
With this playtest, our main goal is to really understand if the underlying game concept is fun and actually works, and if not what we should change to make it enjoyable.
We are aware that trying to merge the concepts of a monster taming game with a roguelite experience can be counterintuitive, but we believe we found our way.
There are many features already planned that will deepen the battle and gameplay loop from what you will be able to experience now, but before we move onto implementing those new features, we felt like we needed to have a chance to validate the current direction.
So, apart from reporting the actual bugs, consider to join the conversation in our Discord and share your experience with the game!
Gameplay data sharing
When starting a new game you will be asked if you want to allow the game to share your gameplay logs with us.
If enabled, what that means in practice is that every battle you do will be registered as an entry in our database which will be used to reconstruct game runs and identify patterns at scale.
This will help us build a fair and enjoyable experience as we keep adding new Pemkies, Skills and game features along the way.
Just a few of the many questions this would help us answer from a game design standpoint:
What is the least played Skill card?
Which Pemkie has the highest win rate?
At which encounter stage the lose rate gets above 50%?
At the same time, every entry you decide to share, will be associated with your SteamID to eventually build a Leaderboard of the most experienced Pemkie Scouts!
Be aware, that starting a new game will create a completely new entry in the leaderboard as a new trainer, but will be associated with the same Steam ID.
PLAYTEST FEATURES
Let's go over what Pemkie Island currently offers:
INTRO
After an initial mysterious dialogue, you will wake up on the shoreline of Pemkie Island and get your first taste of the battle system with a wild encounter.
A very unique Pemkie will be there fighting on your side, who you can later decide to swap with other 2 by speaking to the Mayor later on in Coralia Bay.
There will be a few dialogues and interactions where Kali, a loyal Pemkie Scout, will find you by the beach and bring you to town.
After getting a glimpse into the story of the game, you will be free to roam and talk to people around and eventually start a new run by walking into the woods, or pressing the big red start button on the bottom right.
PRECEDUALLY GENERATED PATHS
Every run generates a new path made of walkable tiles.
Each path can feature between 10 to 12 Encounter, 2 Evofusion and 2 Rest tiles.
At the end of each path there is always a Boss Encounter tile with a way stronger and powerful Pemkie with unique abilities.
PEMKIE TAMING
You can tame Pemkies in battle by casting the Taming Net over the target during Planning Phase, making sure its HP reaches 0 in the next Battle Phase.
Failing to do so, will result in the next Taming Net cast to cost 1 AP more. The AP cost will reset at the start of a new encounter.
You can bring up to 6 Pemkies with you at once throught your adventure.
EVOFUSION
In Pemkie Island you can evolve a Pemkie by fusing it to another one in a process called Evofusion.
The evolved Pemkie will upgrade its Trait passive ability while also obtaining one from the fused Pemkie.
This means that you can get creative on stacking different Traits together to create a Pemkie that fits your playstyle.
40 PEMKIES AND 50+ SKILLS TO COLLECT
Throught the game you will be able to come across 40 different Pemkies and more than 50 Skills.
Open the Dex when in Coralia Bay to inspect your progress, aim to collect them all!
KNOWN ISSUES
While playing this version of Pemkie Island, remember that the project is still in active development, so expect to encounter bugs and issues.
Most of the game-breaking bugs should've been handled in our last sprint, but since our current tester pool is basically us, we have only a limited amount of time to actually play the game so we are pretty sure there are many yet to be found.
But here is where you get a chance to help us!
Remember to report any bug by pressing [F1] or by clicking on the settings wheel icon in the top right of the game, and pressing the REPORT BUG button!
There are other bugs that instead we are aware of, but have not been the priority for us to address, as we were focused on making the game actually playable first.
UI/UX
This is not necessarily a bug, but the entire UI is not ideal and will be replaced in a later update. This was our first iteration, and we will keep some fun concepts from it, but we will move to a completely new UI system by the end of the year.
We don't have strong tutorial material, so the game won't be super easy to understand until you actually try it a few times. Sorry for that, and for now please again feel free to join Discord to get fast support over gameplay from us directly!
Battle Log is not really useful, and we know we have to make what is going on more understandable.
Cursor is a bit too tiny
Battle
Whenever a Pemkie has its Speed increased/reduced mid battle phase by skills, the game won't update attack order until the next planning phase
Bosses are unbalanced and after casting one Skill they will only use basic attacks.
SFX and Music
Not all Pemkies have a cry yet
UI has few/no sound effects
Some sound effects are reused across Skill VFXs
Models and animations
Animations of NPCs Talking may be broken during dialogues with more than 1 NPC.
With all of that said, the playtest is now open and will be given in batches just to limit possible game breaking bugs to ruin the experience for every player. Once we're sure the game is stable, it'll remain open for everyone!
Hope you enjoy what we built so far, and good luck!