I was on a time crunch so I only got through the tutorial, but this game appears to be massive. A lot of work clearly needs doing still, but from what I saw it seems to be a rather deep game. I'll have to give it another go in the future, especially if there will be more CDs.
I saw the VOD and was really happy that someone decided to play through the tutorial. The fact that everything went smoothly made me happy too. Except for the text quality. I will have to go through the game and fix all the typos and broken sentences at some point. And yes, there will be more CDs.
ahoy. I gave Sinathir a go, and it's been some time since my last playthrough. As always, I tried going in as if I was a brand new player and going off the information given to me. You'll be pleased to hear that this was the first version that really clicked with me, where I was able to play for hours without getting stuck due to lack of food or dangerously low morale. Things made sense, and I think that's due to your improved tutorial and the dialogue with John! I'll try to have my impressions here be chronological since I think that's what's most beneficial when trying to examine the early game.
Firstly, I think the sound volume is louder than before, which is fine since there's a sound menu. But, on the sound menu you lack a Master slider! I turned everything down a bit, but it would be nice if it was only one slider that I needed to tweak.
Moving on, I did the tutorial as always. It's slightly different than I remember, but things went smoothly. The game starts and John has some advice for me. I remember that from before, no issue there. I go to Billy (and he's home!!), and he has some unusual dialogue. Something about him being sorry I had to witness something? But as far as I can tell his sprite is just chilling in his living room. Either way, I learn some basic tasks from him and do some work. Next week, john tells me about planting seeds, and that I should go to Billy. Cool stuff, so I do, and now Billy isn't here. This is a much better way of doing things, since it's a HOOK. You had a routine with Billy at this point, and now he's not here! Sweet. I do some things before resting.
Next week, John again, asking me about the harvest and telling me I should cook the 'taters before eating. Only issue is, I didn't harvest since I didn't work for Billy that time (he wasn't home!). No matter. Off to Billy and I use his kitchen and crafting stone to get seeds + food, then back home. Eventually I cook what potatoes I harvest, and I feel like this is a much better food introduction. Now I have a steady and easy (although weak) supply of guaranteed food. Only issue is I'm a level 1 cook, so I can have 3 points! That's TINY for potatoes, so if you misused your time before this (like chopping wood without a tool, which I did) you can get in a pickle. Perhaps a quest (incentive?) to get a higher cooking skill to help with this, or at least more acknowledgement for this, so that the player is aware that he needs to figure something out and he will eventually become hungry.
Another thing about Quests/Logs is that, if you're listening to John for his tip - he eventually walks off. Forgot (or missed?) something he said? Too bad, he's gone now
Eventually I find the beer on the left of Billy's farm, and this time I drink (and become an alcoholic). Got the achievement for it, which has some text issues ("where are my ke2r" or something, instead of keys). Billy also doesn't wanna talk to me when drunk. I like it, it's funny. Kinda hardcore that I became addicted to alcohol after only having one beer, but I guess I am a 10yearold girl with no tolerance.
Next week, I meet the Kobold and do the quest for him, which pays a TON (30 silver compared to 5-6 I'd get from being bad at a job). I like this dynamic. My reward was also the Kobold follower who could 1 shot the mutant chickens, so him and I farmed some feathers around, and he would also give me free meat. Perhaps he's a bit too good?
Eventually I visit the town and the church a few times. I decide to become a member of the church and do the blood stone quest. A hint I get is to talk to Helena, but she doesn't have anything to say about the quest? Sometimes the hints don't really line up with reality, which might prove to be confusing for players. Another instance of this is in the Inn. The help bubble there tells you to get mood by talking to important NPCs, but there's nobody to talk to. Just one table with 2 guys, who I can't speak to. Thought it was perhaps bad luck and to try again later, but I never saw anyone there.
I got stuck looking around for the stone, saw Billy talking to bandits, and decided to stop here after getting drunk again since I already have so much to write about. Having played for 2-3 hours uninterrupted, and only reaching my first roadblock here feels much better than getting stuck on low-food in the early game 5 minutes in. I guess all that's needed now is just polish, with a better introduction loredump/exposition and some character visuals or so. Overall John and Billy make the introduction much better, and I think it's easily understandable for newer players. I also managed to forget where Suong was and was unable to find that spot again - perhaps some location information could be useful (ie: Billy says he's at Suong's. Perhaps he can say "..To the East of XYZ location" or something)
Some minor issues I found dealt with confusion labels. Ie, putting food in your stash says "You have: 5. Will make: 6". So does that mean I'm adding 1 item of food? That's just a wording issue, and you get used to it seeing crafting done, but you can get cirumstances like this that're hard to understand for newbies. In my case, it was dealing with a new item type which I didn't try before, so I wanted to see how much food value it had.
Anyway that's a giant paragraph and I think that's enough for now. If I think of anything else I'll get in touch
Thanks for playing. I wanted to make the game easier to learn without forcing people to do so. It filters those who don't really pay attention to things and wouldn't enjoy the game anyway and makes learning for those who want to learn much easier. Didn't want to add mandatory tutorial or put tips everywhere by default, so I think this is a good solution.
Master volume slider is something I have been thinking about. It should be possible to add. I will look into it.
The "sorry" dialogue is an oversight. The game tracks when you kill something for the first time and the npcs will comment on that. The tutorial dummy counts as killing, that's why Billy says that.
The harvest part of the potato quest can be skipped simply by playing the tutorial (you get 10 potatoes from that) and harvesting the rest from around the map. I will adress that.
Cooking points are equal to your cooking skill, so learning cooking recipes doesn't increase them, working for Billy or training with Suong will. This should even be visualised in the status window. The number in the brackets are your crafting points, the number before them is your skill. However you can't really soft lock your self. You can buy some cooked food from the Riverstone Inn and it refreshes every week. And even if you run out completely, you can still rest in your tent and skip time forward that way.
Questlog should update every time you talk to John. The "tips" he gives you are pretty much what's writen in there, but I might add a simplified versions of those to the diary, which is pretty much useless right now. This might make it little more useful.
Achievements are something I'm not really sure about. Some people like them but I just don't think they really fit the game. I will probably remove them and replace them with some rival NPC giving you challenges.
Addiction works like this. You drink something and you get 1-5 addiction points, depending on the drink. Every week, you loose some mood and one addiction point so if you stop right away, you will stop being addicted in a week or two. If you continue, then stoping will become much harder. The drunk state is (I think) dependant on your strength an health. Once you get older, it will be much harder to get drunk.
Arf is pretty much the weakest follower in the game and he doesn't get any stronger. He can protect you from weaker overworld enemies, but becomes useless in dungeons or caves. He is there to make the early game easier for new players by protecting them from the weakest enemies and giving them a little bit of food. He has little to no use once you establish your self a bit.
It looks like I accidentaly removed the dialogue Helena has if you ask about the quest. I fixed it in a matter of seconds, but before I upload new version, you can go to the table in the library and put in number "355". If you decide to play some more that is.
As for forgeting certain locations, It can happen. I will be adding propper map you can pull out at any time that will show you locations you visited (No quest markers or your current position will be shown there. Only names of locations and positions of NPCs you are friends with). This should make traveling and questing much easier for new players.
The wording in most windows will have to be improved in some way. Some show little information and some show needlesly too much. I should get to it as soon as possible. "You have" is what you currently have. "Will make" is how much will be added, so if you have 5 and make 6, you will have 11.
Again, thank you for playing. Long posts touching on multiple things are very useful and help me greatly.
One thing that I forgot to mention and was reminded of while looking at another game:
When I finish a job or rest, there's a screen that shows up showing changes (food that I lost, mood change, money earned). There's also some animation, where some texts appears first and it takes some time for all the text to show. Since I don't wanna wait for the text to scroll, I instinctively press Enter, expecting it to speed up/finish the scrolling. Instead, it skips the screen entirely. So I guess a "1 enter press to end the animation, and another after that to end the screen" would be nice. There isn't really a lot of text to display, it's only a few stats, but I instinctively don't like waiting for textcrawl or whatever it's called.
I thought about doing that but never got around to it. Now you can press action button to quickly display everything. Pressing it again (or when all the text displayed naturaly) will leave the screen. If you can think of other small improvements like this, be sure to tell me. I know there are hundreds of things that need improving, but I want to know what are more important ones.
Mechanically quite deep. There's a ton of systems and they seem to slot together in a way that makes intuitive sense. I don't mind the slow burn, but a lot of people probably will. Particularly with such a weak hook. Deliver a letter so you can leave an RPG maker island is a bit weak and not a great motivation to overcome such a low power start. Even stuff like stardew has the immediate intrinsic hook of turning your shithole into a nice farm, which you don't have plans to abandon eventually unlike in this game. Though this might be mitigated later when the placeholder assets get replace and the island is more appealing to explore, or when the introduction section is more fleshed out.
You have a solid foundation. The presentation just needs some serious iterating on.
Yes, the story in the game right now is very unfinished. There is supposed to be an entire prologue section introducing the world and showing how you actualy got on the island. It will show that even though you can eventualy leave, there is not much to return to and it would be much better to just stay on the island.
Right now I just want to make sure most things are explained enough so most new people don't get confused or lost, which is what happened last time.
TL;DR list of main things that changed since last demo day. You can get the long version by reading last few blog posts on the main game page if you are interested.
No more font installing
Improved tutorial
Added optional hint system
Map exits are now marked
Added speed potions. Fully mutated characters got a speed boost
Added short quest chain teaching players basics of gameplay
All NPCs have static locations for a few weeks at the start of the game, making them easier to find
New outfits, weapons, quests, locations and other small additions
All of this should make the first half an hour of the game less confusing for new players. All tutorial and hint systems can be disabled, skipped or ignored so returning players have none of their time wasted. If you decide to play Sinathir, please tell me how did the first 20-30 minutes of the game felt and if everything was explained enough. Thank you.
Comments
Hey. I played your game as part of a Demo Day stream. If you didn't catch the stream live, here's a link to the video:
You can see my other demo day 46 streams as well on my channel.
I was on a time crunch so I only got through the tutorial, but this game appears to be massive. A lot of work clearly needs doing still, but from what I saw it seems to be a rather deep game. I'll have to give it another go in the future, especially if there will be more CDs.
Thanks for playing.
I saw the VOD and was really happy that someone decided to play through the tutorial. The fact that everything went smoothly made me happy too. Except for the text quality. I will have to go through the game and fix all the typos and broken sentences at some point. And yes, there will be more CDs.
ahoy. I gave Sinathir a go, and it's been some time since my last playthrough. As always, I tried going in as if I was a brand new player and going off the information given to me. You'll be pleased to hear that this was the first version that really clicked with me, where I was able to play for hours without getting stuck due to lack of food or dangerously low morale. Things made sense, and I think that's due to your improved tutorial and the dialogue with John! I'll try to have my impressions here be chronological since I think that's what's most beneficial when trying to examine the early game.
Firstly, I think the sound volume is louder than before, which is fine since there's a sound menu. But, on the sound menu you lack a Master slider! I turned everything down a bit, but it would be nice if it was only one slider that I needed to tweak.
Moving on, I did the tutorial as always. It's slightly different than I remember, but things went smoothly. The game starts and John has some advice for me. I remember that from before, no issue there. I go to Billy (and he's home!!), and he has some unusual dialogue. Something about him being sorry I had to witness something? But as far as I can tell his sprite is just chilling in his living room. Either way, I learn some basic tasks from him and do some work. Next week, john tells me about planting seeds, and that I should go to Billy. Cool stuff, so I do, and now Billy isn't here. This is a much better way of doing things, since it's a HOOK. You had a routine with Billy at this point, and now he's not here! Sweet. I do some things before resting.
Next week, John again, asking me about the harvest and telling me I should cook the 'taters before eating. Only issue is, I didn't harvest since I didn't work for Billy that time (he wasn't home!). No matter. Off to Billy and I use his kitchen and crafting stone to get seeds + food, then back home. Eventually I cook what potatoes I harvest, and I feel like this is a much better food introduction. Now I have a steady and easy (although weak) supply of guaranteed food. Only issue is I'm a level 1 cook, so I can have 3 points! That's TINY for potatoes, so if you misused your time before this (like chopping wood without a tool, which I did) you can get in a pickle. Perhaps a quest (incentive?) to get a higher cooking skill to help with this, or at least more acknowledgement for this, so that the player is aware that he needs to figure something out and he will eventually become hungry.
Another thing about Quests/Logs is that, if you're listening to John for his tip - he eventually walks off. Forgot (or missed?) something he said? Too bad, he's gone now
Eventually I find the beer on the left of Billy's farm, and this time I drink (and become an alcoholic). Got the achievement for it, which has some text issues ("where are my ke2r" or something, instead of keys). Billy also doesn't wanna talk to me when drunk. I like it, it's funny. Kinda hardcore that I became addicted to alcohol after only having one beer, but I guess I am a 10yearold girl with no tolerance.
Next week, I meet the Kobold and do the quest for him, which pays a TON (30 silver compared to 5-6 I'd get from being bad at a job). I like this dynamic. My reward was also the Kobold follower who could 1 shot the mutant chickens, so him and I farmed some feathers around, and he would also give me free meat. Perhaps he's a bit too good?
Eventually I visit the town and the church a few times. I decide to become a member of the church and do the blood stone quest. A hint I get is to talk to Helena, but she doesn't have anything to say about the quest? Sometimes the hints don't really line up with reality, which might prove to be confusing for players. Another instance of this is in the Inn. The help bubble there tells you to get mood by talking to important NPCs, but there's nobody to talk to. Just one table with 2 guys, who I can't speak to. Thought it was perhaps bad luck and to try again later, but I never saw anyone there.
I got stuck looking around for the stone, saw Billy talking to bandits, and decided to stop here after getting drunk again since I already have so much to write about. Having played for 2-3 hours uninterrupted, and only reaching my first roadblock here feels much better than getting stuck on low-food in the early game 5 minutes in. I guess all that's needed now is just polish, with a better introduction loredump/exposition and some character visuals or so. Overall John and Billy make the introduction much better, and I think it's easily understandable for newer players. I also managed to forget where Suong was and was unable to find that spot again - perhaps some location information could be useful (ie: Billy says he's at Suong's. Perhaps he can say "..To the East of XYZ location" or something)
Some minor issues I found dealt with confusion labels. Ie, putting food in your stash says "You have: 5. Will make: 6". So does that mean I'm adding 1 item of food? That's just a wording issue, and you get used to it seeing crafting done, but you can get cirumstances like this that're hard to understand for newbies. In my case, it was dealing with a new item type which I didn't try before, so I wanted to see how much food value it had.
Anyway that's a giant paragraph and I think that's enough for now. If I think of anything else I'll get in touch
Thanks for playing. I wanted to make the game easier to learn without forcing people to do so. It filters those who don't really pay attention to things and wouldn't enjoy the game anyway and makes learning for those who want to learn much easier. Didn't want to add mandatory tutorial or put tips everywhere by default, so I think this is a good solution.
Master volume slider is something I have been thinking about. It should be possible to add. I will look into it.
The "sorry" dialogue is an oversight. The game tracks when you kill something for the first time and the npcs will comment on that. The tutorial dummy counts as killing, that's why Billy says that.
The harvest part of the potato quest can be skipped simply by playing the tutorial (you get 10 potatoes from that) and harvesting the rest from around the map. I will adress that.
Cooking points are equal to your cooking skill, so learning cooking recipes doesn't increase them, working for Billy or training with Suong will. This should even be visualised in the status window. The number in the brackets are your crafting points, the number before them is your skill. However you can't really soft lock your self. You can buy some cooked food from the Riverstone Inn and it refreshes every week. And even if you run out completely, you can still rest in your tent and skip time forward that way.
Questlog should update every time you talk to John. The "tips" he gives you are pretty much what's writen in there, but I might add a simplified versions of those to the diary, which is pretty much useless right now. This might make it little more useful.
Achievements are something I'm not really sure about. Some people like them but I just don't think they really fit the game. I will probably remove them and replace them with some rival NPC giving you challenges.
Addiction works like this. You drink something and you get 1-5 addiction points, depending on the drink. Every week, you loose some mood and one addiction point so if you stop right away, you will stop being addicted in a week or two. If you continue, then stoping will become much harder. The drunk state is (I think) dependant on your strength an health. Once you get older, it will be much harder to get drunk.
Arf is pretty much the weakest follower in the game and he doesn't get any stronger. He can protect you from weaker overworld enemies, but becomes useless in dungeons or caves. He is there to make the early game easier for new players by protecting them from the weakest enemies and giving them a little bit of food. He has little to no use once you establish your self a bit.
It looks like I accidentaly removed the dialogue Helena has if you ask about the quest. I fixed it in a matter of seconds, but before I upload new version, you can go to the table in the library and put in number "355". If you decide to play some more that is.
As for forgeting certain locations, It can happen. I will be adding propper map you can pull out at any time that will show you locations you visited (No quest markers or your current position will be shown there. Only names of locations and positions of NPCs you are friends with). This should make traveling and questing much easier for new players.
The wording in most windows will have to be improved in some way. Some show little information and some show needlesly too much. I should get to it as soon as possible. "You have" is what you currently have. "Will make" is how much will be added, so if you have 5 and make 6, you will have 11.
Again, thank you for playing. Long posts touching on multiple things are very useful and help me greatly.
One thing that I forgot to mention and was reminded of while looking at another game:
When I finish a job or rest, there's a screen that shows up showing changes (food that I lost, mood change, money earned). There's also some animation, where some texts appears first and it takes some time for all the text to show. Since I don't wanna wait for the text to scroll, I instinctively press Enter, expecting it to speed up/finish the scrolling. Instead, it skips the screen entirely. So I guess a "1 enter press to end the animation, and another after that to end the screen" would be nice. There isn't really a lot of text to display, it's only a few stats, but I instinctively don't like waiting for textcrawl or whatever it's called.
I thought about doing that but never got around to it. Now you can press action button to quickly display everything. Pressing it again (or when all the text displayed naturaly) will leave the screen. If you can think of other small improvements like this, be sure to tell me. I know there are hundreds of things that need improving, but I want to know what are more important ones.
Mechanically quite deep. There's a ton of systems and they seem to slot together in a way that makes intuitive sense. I don't mind the slow burn, but a lot of people probably will. Particularly with such a weak hook. Deliver a letter so you can leave an RPG maker island is a bit weak and not a great motivation to overcome such a low power start. Even stuff like stardew has the immediate intrinsic hook of turning your shithole into a nice farm, which you don't have plans to abandon eventually unlike in this game. Though this might be mitigated later when the placeholder assets get replace and the island is more appealing to explore, or when the introduction section is more fleshed out.
You have a solid foundation. The presentation just needs some serious iterating on.
Thanks for playing.
Yes, the story in the game right now is very unfinished. There is supposed to be an entire prologue section introducing the world and showing how you actualy got on the island. It will show that even though you can eventualy leave, there is not much to return to and it would be much better to just stay on the island.
Right now I just want to make sure most things are explained enough so most new people don't get confused or lost, which is what happened last time.
TL;DR list of main things that changed since last demo day. You can get the long version by reading last few blog posts on the main game page if you are interested.
All of this should make the first half an hour of the game less confusing for new players. All tutorial and hint systems can be disabled, skipped or ignored so returning players have none of their time wasted. If you decide to play Sinathir, please tell me how did the first 20-30 minutes of the game felt and if everything was explained enough. Thank you.