Of Mice and Harpies: A Vampire Coterie Tale
A downloadable game
Made for Vampire the Masquerade game jam 2021, Of Mice and Harpies is a story about a vampire coterie trying to receive the right of residence in a new city.
The game is a text-based puzzle. The player's goal is to guess right which of the characters to which locations/missions to send based on their descriptions.
The quest system is made in accordance with the VtM 5e system, with characters assisting each other, critical successes, and success margins.
To increase replayability, the missions and locations are generated for each play session.
The current build still has a few bugs. Some of them are known to us, but we'd be grateful for any bug reports should our players send us any.
=====
V1.1
Fixed the possibility to end up with characters being busy after moving from the first night to the second one.
=====
V1.2
Fixed the bug that made it possible to stay on an empty screen with no locations before the end of Phase Two content.
Fixed breaking the player's progress at the start of a new night.
Fixed the text bubbles partially displaying off the screen.
Fixed text overlapping in the coterie status string.
Download
Install instructions
Download, unzip and launch the OMAH.exe file.
Development log
- Of Mice and Harpies v1.2Dec 17, 2021
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
I really enjoyed the idea behind the narrative and the system on which the game is based. Having different missions every time was great, and the challenge of the choices was exciting.
This game could be original and entertaining, but I encountered so many bugs that my experience was negatively affected. I'll report them in case you want to fix them:
- some missions were not disappearing after being completed
- during one run I went through the second night twice
-during another run, the meeting with the harpy was triggered before the end of the second night and some of the characters were still in a mission so they could not be selected to represent the coterie
- at one point all the messages you get at the end of each mission started layering on top of each other, becoming unreadable
-at one point the music got stuck on a distorted sound and soon after, the game simply crashed and I had to restart it. The error message I got said something like "object not specified".
I hope this can be useful to improve your project. This is not meant to be pointless criticism, I'm truly trying to be helpful because I think that the inspiration behind this game was commendable!
Hell, it turned out to be more buggy than I thought it was. Thank you very much for your feedback; I will look into those bugs.
Did you play v1.2 or v1.1?
And those missions not disappearing after completion - were they random ones (red circle) or unique ones (red circle with the Camarilla ankh)?
I downloaded it from itch, so I assumed it would be the latest version. Was I wrong? I'll be more than happy to give it a replay if that's the case!
Concerning the bug you mentioned, it happened with both kinds of missions.
There are three versions on Itch, with v1.2 being the latest and most fixed one. But you're probably right, I should hide/delete the old ones to avoid confusion.
The concept/hook of your game was one of my favorite from the whole jam, it's such a good idea for a chronicle that I will for sure use at my table one day! It almost felt like it originated from some really cool roleplaying session!
Thank you, outstar!
It kind of did originate from a roleplaying session, yeah.
If I may ask, how was your experience with the game besides the story/hook? I sadly noticed that our game kinda ended up in the dark, not favored by players/streamers, and I'd love a weighted opinion from outside of our team :)
Sure, I try not to give critique for games unless asked, mainly because I don't want to suggest that you have to put these changes in - simply, it's a learning experience for everyone, and with next jams and next games things will only go better! The main issue OMaH has was the crashes, for one of the team members the game crashed after night 2, and they weren't able to proceed. Further in the game it seemed like more testing early could do a lot, to weed out any potential bugs.
On my end, I liked having to pick the right people for the job, but I'd love to see characters more fleshed out throughout the game - you started really strong with showing beautiful pictures of them, which could suggest they all have their own story, desires and agenda throughout the game, but I didn't feel like it later on!
Yeah... Night two and later were made in a hurry and do have a few "holes" in them. Anyway, should you guys hold a new jam in the future, we'll be there keeping our mistakes here in mind :) Thank you for your last comment. It's great to see an opinion from an experienced game dev person; you pointed out the places that are actually weak here (and I know why), so... Yeah, that means we're good enough at some areas and have to improve at others, and we know those other areas :)
We hate bugs as much as the next person :)
Thus, thanks to your feedback, we fixed those pesky errors that allowed you to get stuck in the game.
Really enjoyed what I could of the game. However I experienced an issue where passing to the next phase, sleeping during the day and into the night caused characters to remain at the previous locations. I was left only with the Venture sniper and was unable to continue the game as all four of the other members of the coterie were unavailable. Unable to talk to the Harpy and receive any sort of the ending; I was unable to continue with the game even during nights to explore other locations hence passing by everything and continuing to the next phase. Some overlapping text and text that went off screen was a little unfortunate as well.
Otherwise the graphics were wonderfully made, the OST was perfect for what was going on and the writing was fantastic. I loved the overall look of the game.
It is simply terribly unfortunate that I was essentially I was locked out of playing the game.
Hey Vynn!
Thanks a lot for the kind words about our game and especially for the bug report. I'll check the bug out and fix it as soon as possible.
While I'm at that, it's never late to start the game anew :)
And fixed :)
I think :) At the very least, I tried to reproduce the "being busy" bug after the fix and was unable to.