The Cauldron Eats First
Every round is a race against the darkness. Gather resources, grow and upgrade your team, and prepare for increasingly dangerous waves of enemy attacks before the light runs out!
Gather, recruit, and expand. Begin as a lone survivor, then build a team that keeps resources flowing towards the Cauldron while you explore, fight, and take bigger risks beyond the light.
Survive wave after wave of enemies crawling out of the darkness. Charge into battle with your greatsword, rain down fireballs, and grow your army and cannons strong enough to stop the horde!
Shape your strategy with a massive skill tree packed with upgrades for combat, economy, automation, workers, soldiers, resources, and powerful buff.
Development log
- Small Patch 21 day ago
- Small Patch 12 days ago
Comments
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5 Times played, 5 times i get an error about "quotaexceedederror: failed to put 'setitem' to 'storage'. And unable to copy/paste the entire error text, so... i quit :-(
All 5 times this happened when the timer ran out of time, and i had put something in the cauldron that had dropped from a plant kill.
guys... I'm sorry.
now the game wont load for me, unity is stuck at 90%
Did you try to refresh? From what browser are you playing?
yeah its working today. must've been a me thing.
chrome if that helps.
Finished up the content thus far.
- Beginning is just a bit too slow and short. While I understand the need for balance and progression (which there definitely is a strong feeling of that) I feel that many would bounce off of the game as a result. You are just so slow and there is just such little time at the start. Consider potentially increasing walk speed and initial timer to assist with this.
- Objects are too much of a brick wall. I feel walking against a tree should not completely halt all movement; instead, the player character ideally should slow down and slide around it. Feels too much like everything is an unforgiving rectangle while they probably should be more like cylinders. This is especially noticeable during the boss where you will mostly fight respawning rocks and trees while kiting as opposed to the boss and ads.
- I feel as though the magnet range on the campfire is just a hair too short. It felt like many times the angle of it specially made approaching from behind the campfire take longer than you would expect to deposit your items. Consider increasing the radius in more of an oval with a slight increase on range behind the campfire to alleviate this.
- Boss arena feels a little too cramped. This is both in relation to the issue with objects stopping all movement and just the issue of the amount of npcs that end up spawning (including companions). It just gets a bit busy and I feel like restricting the arena in other ways could be more interesting. That said, I did ultimately win with a bunch of goblins tearing through the boss.
- Boss feels a bit difficult to interact with directly. You can react and whiff punish one of his attacks, but the other comes out too fast to react to and requires you to either tank the hit or not interact and rely on your goblins/cannons. If that is the intent that is fine, but I feel like you could increase the windup and change some of the hitboxes to keep up the movement of the player character while allowing them to react to the boss.
Overall, I thought it was a pretty cool take on an incremental with a great balance of active and passive play. I think overall after the first hump (which was kind of a slog), the progression worked out nicely and I felt satisfied with the length of the demo. Do you have any specific length/amount of content you are aiming for at present? I play these sorts of games typically on a cleanroom computer during down time at my hospital, but this is one of the first that I will be wishlisting for play at home.
Wow thanks for the in depth and very helpful feedback! We pushed a new patch: Small Patch 2 - The Cauldron Eats First by filthymajesty
Thanks for the wishlist also, we don't have any specific length/amount yet planned as we want to get in more feedback like this to make the current content base game a much better experience. The full game will have more content, bigger world, skill tree and features etc.
If you want to follow the development closer we've set up a Discord :)
so uhh not sure if just an issue for me but the pixelation in menus makes it super hard to read text the first skill for example i can read the cost but hard to tell what the change in time is
First of all, thanks for playing! Are you able to paste a screenshot here in comments of how it looks like on your side?
seem to be unable to reply with a screenshot but while numbers seem easier to read can still be a little hard
Have you tried to go to settings and change ui scale? See if that helps
doesnt seem to help
whats your screen resolution if I may ask?
Cool looking game! I like the vibe. A few things things:
1) On my machine, it's loading pretty slowly. I almost closed the window because I thought it silently failed on the Unity loading screen.
2) Aiming is hard. It's frustrating when, after 4 swings, I'm suddenly not able to damage a tree, then time runs out.
3) Swing animations are very slow. Is there an upgrade for swing speed?
4) I did not know that I needed to bring wood to the fire in the beginning. I spent a few rounds unsure why I wasn't collecting wood after chopping down trees.
I understand the upgrading -> Start slow then be stronger, but it needs to get faster even faster even if the costs are higher, you are slow most of the time, especially on the beggining wich is where retention matter.
Thanks, so you'd advice the beginning to pick up faster? Any other feedback on the pacing, balance and the combat part? Every feedback much appreciated!
I would suggest having more speed / attack speed / damage upgrade easier and you could make that if a tree gives more logs it also is more resistant to have the same pacing while keeping the same level of advancement, at the end it’s the same but numbers and feeling feels better
it has potential,
its a little hard to aim. it feels like the everything is super slow. the rounds are a little short.
if the charecter could have double move and hit speed it would feel much better.
Thanks for playing, can you explain further, how do you mean super slow exactly? The way I see it is you want to start slow and weak and the more resources you gather th faster you move and attack and the more skills and workers and soldiers you can get. So you feel the difference between noob and pro, no?
Base move speed feels very slow. It either needs to be boosted, or a move speed upgrade needs to be made available earlier. The first couple upgrades feel veery slow. After we get cleave damage, it starts getting more fun. Animations are satisfactory. Having no cleave /AOE with guts’ massive dragon slayer just feels wrong lol. Maybe give him a smaller sword in the begining?
It’s pretty fun and has a lot of potential. I’ll be following!
Much appreciated! Any other feedback on the further mid to end game balance and the combat/waves/boss? also any suggestions what would you love to see in the full game etc?
(The idea about starting with small sword and going into big one is dope, how didnt we thought about it haha)
ok, theres racing games and bullet hell's where you need sharp reflexes. this feels like any action you take, running to a tree, swinging a sword, takes 2-3 times longer then it should. no reflexes are needed, when you swing. you wait, you hit, then you wait again to be able to move.
then you have the progression. you have just enough time to chop 2 trees, then if you save up you have just enough time to chop 3 trees. it takes about half an hour to get to the fun section where you're battling enemies.
the slowness makes the enemies less stressful and less exciting. you know where you attack, you know they cant sneak up and hit you. you also know you cant race to the other side of the cauldron in time if you dont pay attention.
if we could get to the fun bit faster and have the charecter more responsive to the controls the game would be better.
and also being specific. it kinda sucks that the firebolt cant take down a single tree when you buy it.
Edit:
now that i've played a little more, it looks like its lagging. the wood dosent go into the fire smoothly and the speed changes slightly as you play. try playing online. that seems to be the disconnect between you and us.
Thx for the feedback we'll look into all of those what we can move around and edit to make the character faster and have combat much sooner. We just don't want the default character to be already powerful and fast, we want you to build him out into the OP guy through the skill tree if that makes sense
and one more thing, ive maxed out the tree (with the exception of two) its hard to damage the final boss. the horde of minions is inpenatrable. and even 1v1 i dont make much progress.
and the battleground feels cluttered which goes against the tense battle youre going for when im constantly getting stuck.
Try a refresh. We've updated the balance so there's little bit less skeletons, the boss's personal summon guard has been nerfed and there's more upgrades to buy on the skill tree that are connected with the time booster branch.
Game feel like slow mo all the time
Thanks for playing, but how do you mean? feedback would be more than welcome :)