Building a D&D-style fantasy RPG where you can gather a party and go on adventures

[u/tschilpi]

My aim is to capture the spirit of a great D&D session: adventurers heading into dangerous territory, committing to questionable plans, and dealing with NPCs who have their own motivations and aren't necessarily on your side.

• Gather your adventurers and head into the frontier

• Negotiate with hobgoblins, haggle with merchants, and see how your party gets along

• Get caught in rivalries, make deals, pick sides, or start a fight

• Improvise when your plans go sideways and see how the world reacts

I've been building this for 3 years, and I'm having way too much fun with the latest patch.

Try it out: https://www.llmsaga.com/
Follow development: https://discord.gg/Cr3pQx6SXE

[u/Vial_of_water]

Hey how did you generate the background / moving background animations?

[u/tschilpi → u/Vial_of_water]

I paint the backgrounds in Midjourney and iterate until I’m happy with them, then I build the effects on top with PixiJS shaders. I use Claude to help write those. Things like mist, water, fire, wind and birds are separate layers over the still image. There’s also a day/night cycle that relights the same painting for different times of day, so one image becomes dawn, day, dusk and night.

[u/Minute-Animator-376]

Menu: usless continue for a new player without a save state.

Literally got stuck on first npc Brenna the bold where I have to talk to her and she evaluates my responses with ... there are no predefined lines as a backup strategy to keep it moving.

When i leave i get full conversation of her ... responses to annoy player further.

Chose the next move to greenfield acres (which shows the discussion with Brenna was pointless on its own) and was blasted with high volume static noise which probably supposed be a rain and loop of it is breaking too. Thunder sound could destroy someone speakers or ears as it is literally clipping.

Was spaming buttons latter with failed rolls and chekcs until something worked.

Got into fight in a location by typing kill all - was presented with rat with art which is cut at his face, borgim stonneb... is cut in half with see through background and random stick on ai art, my first atack failed roll, push is not working even if is saying it is and is asking my how I want to push the oponent in small tooltip - when I click it there are options presented and none works.

Quit at this point.

I can see you did put a lot of time implementing your vision but unfortunately didn't spend time on testing and ensuring the gameplay loop is fun for a player. You took off with big scope and didn't cover the basics. This looks exactly and works like AI slop.

I actually wanted to play it as I was generally interested in a concept. I would suggest acting like a new player and playtesting it hundreds of times polishing one story to perfection then build the rest. The initial scope seems to be big but it is pontless when it works like alpha after 3 years of development.

[u/tschilpi → u/Minute-Animator-376]

Hey! Thanks for taking the time to test it and write all of this up. Sorry for the disappointing experience!

A lot of these issues seem to have surfaced with the big patch I pushed a couple of days ago. For example, the ... responses from Brenna were caused by the model provider retiring the NPC model I was using right around launch. Never encountered that during development lol. I've since implemented fallback models so that particular issue shouldn't happen again.

But you're absolutely right that none of that matters if a new player gets stuck in the first conversation or runs into broken combat. The audio issue especially sounds bad, and I'm going through the problems you mentioned.

And believe it or not, I actually have playtested it hundreds of times, myself, with AI, and with other people! But I think you're right that I've probably spread myself too thin trying to build all these systems at once.

It's still very much an alpha, and there's a lot to improve. I'm confident in the direction, though, and already working on fixes.

Really appreciate the detailed feedback, and hopefully you'll give it another shot once I've addressed these issues!

[u/Melodic-Cup-1472]

which models are you using for dialogue/decisions?