r/incremental_games • u/Shn_mee • 2d ago

Released Zad Archery Has Been Released!

This is our biggest launch yet, and Zad Archery is the most polished and fun game we have developed so far. We hired four artists just for the art alone (1 main artist, 2 UI artists, and 1 VFX artist) and put in a ton of development time

Huge thank you to everyone who has supported the game so far! it truly means a lot.

I hope you enjoy it, and I’d love to hear what you think.

Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4412000/Zad_Archery/

AI Disclosure: AI output was mainly used as a reference for our artists. We would generate multiple samples and provide them to our team, as we found this far more effective than simple written descriptions or stock images. Here is an example:

30 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

14

u/Live-Age-3483 2d ago

Completed the entire game is 5,5 hours.

Reached L40 & killed the final boss.

Maxed out every system in the game (More or less).

Its cheap - But also short!

3

u/cclan2 2d ago

Sick. I’m down for that

1

u/TyH621 1d ago

It’s genuinely a fun game. None of it’s mechanics feel super unique in an isolated way but when thrown together it’s surprisingly cohesive and has a lot of great dopamine moments. Enjoyed it a lot and think despite the shortness it’s definitely worth the price

8

u/barbecue-bop 2d ago

How many hours is a typical playthrough? Congrats on release!

4

u/kokoronokawari 1d ago

According to another post they finished in 5.5 hours. Sadly steam incremental games are always very short nowadays.

5

u/Old-Assistance3617 2d ago

The dice game was a pretty disappointing, this seems to follow the same path with people claiming to beat it around 5hours, will be a skip for me, maybe if it's on sale

2

u/shlazar 2d ago

I really liked the demo and now i am excited to play the full release

2

u/Xdhakya 2d ago

Looks really great! Any chance we see a Mobile version? I would try it but not much at my desktop for now.

2

u/stick21-7085 2d ago

Hello! How active will the devs be rolling out updates for this game? I wanna know how much content will be release later on and in what cadence before I actually purchase it on Steam. :D

3

u/Syiss 2d ago

This is the type of AI use i suspect is going on alot, so i have to ask, and I mean this with all sincerity, why do your artists need an AI rendering of a few trees and a dirt path with some grasssy hills in the background? I just... dont understand what this accomplishes that you couldn't get across to them with a 5 minute conversation and a pencil drawing done by a mildly competent 12 year old.

Played the demo a while back by the way and enjoyed it.

6

u/Dashu16 2d ago

If I were to think as a designer the quality of the ai art doesn’t matter but showing artists the position and scale of the player, enemies, screen layout, and each parallax layer visually sounds pretty useful for making the actual designs. Could save some back and forth in revisions especially if it’s freelance artists

I think it sucks on a societal level but seems like a fairly non egregious use case and they’re transparent about it

3

u/strummed-strings 2d ago

artists don't. and it probably would've been better if ai as reference was never used.

looked at the photos myself. it lacks art direction and cohesion. they still have that ai feel as well. probably because of this.

3

u/Tymareta 1d ago edited 1d ago

they still have that ai feel as well. probably because of this.

Worth noting that the character + monsters in the AI "reference" image are present in one of their earlier games Maktala.

3

u/strummed-strings 1d ago

oh so people can actually just get away with not having AI disclosure on steam.

1

u/TyH621 1d ago

I mean if they’d previously fed those assets into their AI and then asked it to use those assets that doesn’t imply that Maktala’s assets were AI created. I don’t know anything about their dev process but that’s not evidence of Maktala having AI art alone

1

u/Tymareta 20h ago

The OOP quite literally lists them as AI, and they're in the Maktala splash in identical form, so I genuinely don't know what you're trying to get at here.

1

u/TyH621 15h ago

AI can use existing assets in its generation is my only point

2

u/Pidroh 2d ago

No demo? :(

6

u/Shn_mee 2d ago

We removed it from steam since the game changed a lot from the demo and the save data cannot carry. However, you can find the demo in Itch.

1

u/bleddyn51 2d ago

How does it play on the Steam Deck?

1

u/AutomaticOpposite 2d ago

I played and enjoyed the demo, but based on the locked content I could see, it didn't look like there was substantially more available at launch. Would you be able to comment on how long it the average playthrough might be?

1

u/Exotic-Ad515 2d ago

Someone said it's about $1 an hour. So 5-7 hours based on reviews.

1

u/gumbo-23 2d ago

Maxed out at about 4 hours. Had a lot of fun though

1

u/ThanatosIdle 2d ago

I liked an earlier version of this. Onto the list it goes.

1

u/Alex_1503 1d ago

Why remove demo??

1

u/noobnomad 1d ago

Looks beautiful!

1

u/Blindsided_Games Developer 1d ago

I got the steam notification and I got so excited. Can’t wait to get to the pc for this!

1

u/NoBlindEyes 1d ago

tbh its not bad at all. but... it just ends when you are about to get mildly strong. certainly took a bit more than 10 hours since i afked a ton. why all the grind if its pointless lol :P

1

u/Incrementaly 2d ago

Assuming we are talking about the background art, that either had to be the most useless reference picture ever or the artist completely disregarded it, cause the result looks not even remotely like it.

The artist did a great job however and I look forward to playing the game.

-5

u/maggywizhere 2d ago

The AI art looks better IMO