Interesting story and characters (I think a pachy as a pet is really cool btw). Art is cool and consistent, and as someone who started playing videogames during the DOS era I dig this.
Really liked the combat reminiscent of the Medarot series. Still combat is somewhat slow with how MP charge works and it seems that a caster like Mosca doesn't really pull as much weight as the others because of this. Should give it another run to see if developing skills and stats make this better.
One thing that I found annoying was that it asked me to confirm if I wanted to skip a dialogue, which happened when I clicked for the same dialogue twice, I think the confimation should happen only when its a one time dialogue.
Fantastic world building and an interesting but still familiar take on turn based combat.
Everything was easy and clear to read and understand.
While slow paced battles are fine, maybe an option to speed things up, as well as an autobattle mode in the vain of others where it would copy your previous decisions in case of an easy encounter. A lot of time i spend repeating the same actions for multiple battles without much variation, this is fine for adding fodder battles but make them less tenuous.
While i love the character designs overall presentation the overly saturated DOS visual design isn't quite appealing to me personally but that's a minor gripe.
Text could be a bit faster and sound mixing a bit better but no problems, Looking forward to more.
It's possible to control game speed on the fly but nobody notices it because I only tell people about it in the optional text only tutorial, but I'm glad you didn't have issues understanding the game otherwise.
I also hope to implement more battle related events for the sake of variety and these comments have been really helpful for that.
I'm playing your game and here's some remarks : - I wish I could develop some of the texts faster. I have to wait each roll to be done instead of left clicking to have everything displayed. - the fighting music volume is a lot louder than the previous menu musics - cool and unique visual identity
I'm writing my thoughts as I play, so forgive the train of thoughts. Mosca is cute. Haydn is also cute. The story is intriguing and the writing is very good, in my opinion. Only a few minutes in and you've got me invested in the, so great job. The music is all very fitting. I like the way you show whose turn is coming up in battle, it's cute. This first battle feels a bit long, but the skills and spells available to your party are pretty interesting. You might consider adding an auto-target toggle, or have attacks automatically target the last remaining enemy to speed things up slightly. I didn't realize that waiting increased your SP rapidly until the second battle, but that's a nice feature and should speed battles up a little.
I'm starting to enjoy the slower pace of the battles, and I can see why you designed them this way, so you should probably disregard my earlier thoughts. I'm leaving them there since I imagine initial impressions are valuable regardless. It feels like the optimal strategy is to pretty much just keep Mosca alive so she can try to sustain everyone else so far.
Ermine is cute. I really like the art all around, it's cohesive, charming and very well-made. I'm still playing through, but I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Great art, music and story, fun gameplay, and very polished so far. If I run into any bugs or issues, or if I find anything to complain about, I'll update this post.
The early levels are pretty much just a tutorial so they are a bit slow but I'm sorta working on a way to make them more interesting. It's not like you have to play them again if I update the game because old saves will work on newer versions.
You can also toggle the game's speed up or down by pressing E and Q respectively. The functionality is there, I just haven't found a place to put it in the UI.
This game is really charming somehow, I quite like the characters.
The art of course, isn't great.
There's a bit in the how to at base that's unreadable due to a white background.
I like the way you show who's turn it is by moving characters back and forth, could turn that into more of a mechanic, more damage if enemy is closer, or if their back is turned or something like that.
Battles in the beginning feel too long and there's too many of them before you get to make proper tactical decisions, you know, in the "just press attack and use whatever skill is available" phase.
I'm actually really not into JRPG style games but I'm a little amazed at how palpable the genre becomes for someone like me when just controlled by mouseclicks instead of with a controller.
Thanks for trying out the game. I'm flattered that you spent time making fanart too.
Last couple DDs I mostly got bug reports and people confused about how to play but now I'm getting replies about the art and UI instead. I guess I should take that as a positive development.
The beginning is indeed a bit slow since it's basically a bunch of tutorials until level 5 and I made those levels back when I was learning how to make a game to begin with. The goons aren't threatening even with the reworked AI so they probably need some readjustments or more noticeable handicaps for the player inside the battles, not necessarily to make the player weaker but to at least offer some variety.
I do have a commitment to making the entire game playable only with the mouse, although everything has keyboard shortcuts too. The only exception is the game speed which can only be controlled with the Q-E buttons so far.
I love the atmosphere and lore and would play for that reason alone. Overall this could always benefit from a higher lore:gameplay ratio.
Clicking during combat should skip to the next action straight away.
I am stuck here. Not sure if this is a glitch or the end.
So far all throughout the stages the only thing that has mattered for an optimal strategy was to speed up Mosca so that I could spam wait + heal as fast as possible. Since battles cannot be rushed to one cycle and there's no resources to exhaust or infinitely scaling enemy buffs to worry about, stable cyclical survivability is the only avenue for victory. As such...
1. Damage-dealing in skills is borderline useless, as it does not shift this equilibrium. This is not valued as such in balancing. Mosca's and Haydn's damage skills are sometimes useful for their additional effects, but their other skills are so blatantly essential you'd be insane to allocate any perk points to what concerns the former. There are attempts to punish low damage output with bulbs or cacti and such, but they are not tuned anywhere near where they would need to be to even have an effect on the optimal choice for their turns, let alone the player's build.
2. Speed is ultimately the only stat that matters 100% of the time in all circumstances for all characters. Max health is only circumstantially good as is Int on Mosca for the same reason. Not being able to pile points onto speed after a certain point feels like an imperfect solution to imbalance. Speed scaling should be clarified in its formula somewhere if it isn't already, and I personally did not find it if it is.
This gameplay gets a tad repetitive fast, but I guess it's how these sorts of games tend to work and people do enjoy them still.
The overworld map and fields are too timid in what their mechanics actually change about the game, and that's a shame, because the battles could use more variability.
Just looking at the pictures coming by and moving during battle is mesmerizing. If you wanted to add some more fluff, creating multiple portrait variants (low HP? MP?) for the playable characters could be an efficient way of doing so.
If you want to have some broader appeal you should probably polish your art to look more professional at some point, but that's only smoothening out the form of an essence that's already perfect.
The inactive hierarchy links on the perks screen are barely visible against the dark background.
Why can't I go from perks to shop?
It would be convenient if it were possible to return to hallowed ground from the map if you're still on the same spot.
Thanks for playing, I think that's a bug. If restarting the game doesn't fix it then you can always resign to restart the level. I've never seen something like that either so thanks for showing me.
I think I already somewhat address some of your feedback in the later levels, but the first 5 specially are pretty much a tutorial. Every level introduces at least a new enemy to try and keep things varied and I consider this an important aspect of the game, only I haven't been able to strike a good balance between keeping players on their toes and not making them feel like they were just killed by something out of left field. I think the pariah is indeed the first enemy that can really kill the player in a single hit if left unattended, but there are more like that later.
I think adding new assets for characters and such is a good idea. Notably, I've been meaning to add different expressions for portraits for a while since I have so much dialog, but assets are incredibly time consuming, making game is my art training arc so to speak. This isn't the first time this DD that someone has told me the perk screen is confusing either.
I like the idea of going back to the rest area since there's always one before the boss anyways. The shop mechanic is honestly unfinished, it's only in the stats screen because I'm not sure where else to put it.
Thanks for playing again, the combat feedback is something I need to think about. Speed will probably remain broken because it's an ATB game. Perhaps traps that can hit characters multiple times per use would be a good counter.
I've done just that and now I've finished the rest of the available content.
The overworld gimmicks are nice at mixing up the round pacing, but they still don't do all that much for the variety of battles themselves. Almost nothing in this game forces you to change your strategy in any way. What does is the little alternate team sequence. However, that one drags on a bit and it's alienating to use different characters for so long when you've been leveling the same ones since the beginning.
I got a glitch at some point in combat where the combat text to the left turned "null". The game froze and then closed itself before I could screenshot it.
Overall I love this game for the lore and the aesthetics, but it does often feel like that's a carrot on a stick, with the battles getting in the way. I'm looking forward to playing the rest of it when it's done.
beaten the demo as usual. i really like the cutscenes and the story. so far, every demo introduced a new gimmick of sorts, but i think you can still get mileage out of it. something like the one-way portal was only used once - you can totally incorporate that again elsewhere in the next desert level. don't be afraid to pad things out a bit. otherwise, the combat was good and much harder than before. i needed to think quite a bit about my next move, i like that. some enemy compositions (2 dinos + 1 sloth) were much harder than others, though. restarting would also re-roll the enemy party composition, so i couldn't "redo" a bad battle and could instead just get luckily and play against a weaker party. perhaps you could determine the enemy party outcome at the start of the map, and keep it that way between saves. the multiple choices and discussions with non-friendly NPCs were enjoyable.
as always, it's a great game and i'm always hungry for more. unsure what the secret was, though?
here's some bugs i found:
>the angel feather item that resurrects a party member was used and did nothing. tea worked fine otherwise, it seems that only that item is wonky
>had a crash when Mosca was left alive against 2 dino enemies. one attacked, game crashed. reloading gave me a different party with no issues
>when reloading, your map icon is placed on top of where you saved, which looks weird if you have a fight there. you need to select your current position to continue, instead of being placed in the previous tile as normal.
>when your save is "fixed", your perks/stats aren't chosen. perhaps remind the player to do that?
Thanks for playing, your feedback is always useful.
I do plan on using the teleporters more later, but I prefer to keep things varied if possible. Enemy parties in the later levels didn't quite get as much attention as I would have liked. They are random, but there's a method in place to prevent certain combinations of enemies. The fact that you encountered a party with a high HP enemy plus 2 dinos means I forgot to do something.
There are 2 secrets really, the first one was the advanced classes of which I've only implemented 1 so far. The other is just an Easter egg with a low chance of occurring.
The feather bug is news to me, the item seemed to work fine during testing so thanks for telling me. It's the exact same method as characters that spawn a new enemy when defeated and such only you spawn a defeated player instead. I think I know how to fix the other bugs actually.
The perks resetting is not a bug, I give everyone a free respec because I haven't implemented that feature yet and I don't want players to be caught off-guard if I do a balance change. Now the real question is why I haven't done it when I clearly have a method for it? Honestly I have no idea, just forgot about it.
Really liking some of the changes.
I’m glad to be able to skip dialogue.
I’m glad that perks and stat increase points are indicated more clearly.
I’m glad that I can now (sorta) see the perk pathways.
New animations? Looking good. Keep it up bro.
Comments
Interesting story and characters (I think a pachy as a pet is really cool btw). Art is cool and consistent, and as someone who started playing videogames during the DOS era I dig this.
Really liked the combat reminiscent of the Medarot series. Still combat is somewhat slow with how MP charge works and it seems that a caster like Mosca doesn't really pull as much weight as the others because of this. Should give it another run to see if developing skills and stats make this better.
One thing that I found annoying was that it asked me to confirm if I wanted to skip a dialogue, which happened when I clicked for the same dialogue twice, I think the confimation should happen only when its a one time dialogue.
Thank you for the feedback. Small details like that are hard to catch.
Fantastic world building and an interesting but still familiar take on turn based combat.
Everything was easy and clear to read and understand.
While slow paced battles are fine, maybe an option to speed things up, as well as an autobattle mode in the vain of others where it would copy your previous decisions in case of an easy encounter. A lot of time i spend repeating the same actions for multiple battles without much variation, this is fine for adding fodder battles but make them less tenuous.
While i love the character designs overall presentation the overly saturated DOS visual design isn't quite appealing to me personally but that's a minor gripe.
Text could be a bit faster and sound mixing a bit better but no problems, Looking forward to more.
Thank you for trying out the game.
It's possible to control game speed on the fly but nobody notices it because I only tell people about it in the optional text only tutorial, but I'm glad you didn't have issues understanding the game otherwise.
I also hope to implement more battle related events for the sake of variety and these comments have been really helpful for that.
I'm playing your game and here's some remarks :
- I wish I could develop some of the texts faster. I have to wait each roll to be done instead of left clicking to have everything displayed.
- the fighting music volume is a lot louder than the previous menu musics
- cool and unique visual identity
I think I really need a settings menu by now.
I recorded playing games with commentary, and your game is one of them.
Here's the link to the whole DD50 folder:
https://mega.nz/folder/GclCXISL#gwE9S1kRTbe6amYLH2RiYA
With the ongoing story I always look forward to, this game feels like an early access, not just a demo. Keep up the good work.
You really dedicated a lot of time to playing the game, thank you.
I thank you too
I'm writing my thoughts as I play, so forgive the train of thoughts. Mosca is cute. Haydn is also cute. The story is intriguing and the writing is very good, in my opinion. Only a few minutes in and you've got me invested in the, so great job. The music is all very fitting. I like the way you show whose turn is coming up in battle, it's cute. This first battle feels a bit long, but the skills and spells available to your party are pretty interesting. You might consider adding an auto-target toggle, or have attacks automatically target the last remaining enemy to speed things up slightly. I didn't realize that waiting increased your SP rapidly until the second battle, but that's a nice feature and should speed battles up a little.
I'm starting to enjoy the slower pace of the battles, and I can see why you designed them this way, so you should probably disregard my earlier thoughts. I'm leaving them there since I imagine initial impressions are valuable regardless. It feels like the optimal strategy is to pretty much just keep Mosca alive so she can try to sustain everyone else so far.
Ermine is cute. I really like the art all around, it's cohesive, charming and very well-made. I'm still playing through, but I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Great art, music and story, fun gameplay, and very polished so far. If I run into any bugs or issues, or if I find anything to complain about, I'll update this post.
Thanks for trying out the game.
The early levels are pretty much just a tutorial so they are a bit slow but I'm sorta working on a way to make them more interesting. It's not like you have to play them again if I update the game because old saves will work on newer versions.
You can also toggle the game's speed up or down by pressing E and Q respectively. The functionality is there, I just haven't found a place to put it in the UI.
fun game. charming.
Well, thank you. You are too kind.
This game is really charming somehow, I quite like the characters.
The art of course, isn't great.
There's a bit in the how to at base that's unreadable due to a white background.
I like the way you show who's turn it is by moving characters back and forth, could turn that into more of a mechanic, more damage if enemy is closer, or if their back is turned or something like that.
Battles in the beginning feel too long and there's too many of them before you get to make proper tactical decisions, you know, in the "just press attack and use whatever skill is available" phase.
I'm actually really not into JRPG style games but I'm a little amazed at how palpable the genre becomes for someone like me when just controlled by mouseclicks instead of with a controller.
Mosca is cute.
Thanks for trying out the game. I'm flattered that you spent time making fanart too.
Last couple DDs I mostly got bug reports and people confused about how to play but now I'm getting replies about the art and UI instead. I guess I should take that as a positive development.
The beginning is indeed a bit slow since it's basically a bunch of tutorials until level 5 and I made those levels back when I was learning how to make a game to begin with. The goons aren't threatening even with the reworked AI so they probably need some readjustments or more noticeable handicaps for the player inside the battles, not necessarily to make the player weaker but to at least offer some variety.
I do have a commitment to making the entire game playable only with the mouse, although everything has keyboard shortcuts too. The only exception is the game speed which can only be controlled with the Q-E buttons so far.
It's really an excuse for me to practice digital art which I'm new to but I'm glad people enjoy them.
The most soulful game on /agdg/.
I love the atmosphere and lore and would play for that reason alone. Overall this could always benefit from a higher lore:gameplay ratio.
Clicking during combat should skip to the next action straight away.
I am stuck here. Not sure if this is a glitch or the end.
So far all throughout the stages the only thing that has mattered for an optimal strategy was to speed up Mosca so that I could spam wait + heal as fast as possible. Since battles cannot be rushed to one cycle and there's no resources to exhaust or infinitely scaling enemy buffs to worry about, stable cyclical survivability is the only avenue for victory. As such...
1. Damage-dealing in skills is borderline useless, as it does not shift this equilibrium. This is not valued as such in balancing. Mosca's and Haydn's damage skills are sometimes useful for their additional effects, but their other skills are so blatantly essential you'd be insane to allocate any perk points to what concerns the former. There are attempts to punish low damage output with bulbs or cacti and such, but they are not tuned anywhere near where they would need to be to even have an effect on the optimal choice for their turns, let alone the player's build.
2. Speed is ultimately the only stat that matters 100% of the time in all circumstances for all characters. Max health is only circumstantially good as is Int on Mosca for the same reason. Not being able to pile points onto speed after a certain point feels like an imperfect solution to imbalance. Speed scaling should be clarified in its formula somewhere if it isn't already, and I personally did not find it if it is.
This gameplay gets a tad repetitive fast, but I guess it's how these sorts of games tend to work and people do enjoy them still.
The overworld map and fields are too timid in what their mechanics actually change about the game, and that's a shame, because the battles could use more variability.
Just looking at the pictures coming by and moving during battle is mesmerizing. If you wanted to add some more fluff, creating multiple portrait variants (low HP? MP?) for the playable characters could be an efficient way of doing so.
If you want to have some broader appeal you should probably polish your art to look more professional at some point, but that's only smoothening out the form of an essence that's already perfect.
The inactive hierarchy links on the perks screen are barely visible against the dark background.
Why can't I go from perks to shop?
It would be convenient if it were possible to return to hallowed ground from the map if you're still on the same spot.
Thanks for playing, I think that's a bug. If restarting the game doesn't fix it then you can always resign to restart the level. I've never seen something like that either so thanks for showing me.
I think I already somewhat address some of your feedback in the later levels, but the first 5 specially are pretty much a tutorial. Every level introduces at least a new enemy to try and keep things varied and I consider this an important aspect of the game, only I haven't been able to strike a good balance between keeping players on their toes and not making them feel like they were just killed by something out of left field. I think the pariah is indeed the first enemy that can really kill the player in a single hit if left unattended, but there are more like that later.
I think adding new assets for characters and such is a good idea. Notably, I've been meaning to add different expressions for portraits for a while since I have so much dialog, but assets are incredibly time consuming, making game is my art training arc so to speak. This isn't the first time this DD that someone has told me the perk screen is confusing either.
I like the idea of going back to the rest area since there's always one before the boss anyways. The shop mechanic is honestly unfinished, it's only in the stats screen because I'm not sure where else to put it.
Thanks for playing again, the combat feedback is something I need to think about. Speed will probably remain broken because it's an ATB game. Perhaps traps that can hit characters multiple times per use would be a good counter.
I've done just that and now I've finished the rest of the available content.
The overworld gimmicks are nice at mixing up the round pacing, but they still don't do all that much for the variety of battles themselves. Almost nothing in this game forces you to change your strategy in any way. What does is the little alternate team sequence. However, that one drags on a bit and it's alienating to use different characters for so long when you've been leveling the same ones since the beginning.
I got a glitch at some point in combat where the combat text to the left turned "null". The game froze and then closed itself before I could screenshot it.
Overall I love this game for the lore and the aesthetics, but it does often feel like that's a carrot on a stick, with the battles getting in the way. I'm looking forward to playing the rest of it when it's done.
I basically agree with Illusionist.
Solid game! I like the way the ATB is visualised by the sprites running back and forth.
beaten the demo as usual.
i really like the cutscenes and the story. so far, every demo introduced a new gimmick of sorts, but i think you can still get mileage out of it. something like the one-way portal was only used once - you can totally incorporate that again elsewhere in the next desert level. don't be afraid to pad things out a bit. otherwise, the combat was good and much harder than before. i needed to think quite a bit about my next move, i like that. some enemy compositions (2 dinos + 1 sloth) were much harder than others, though. restarting would also re-roll the enemy party composition, so i couldn't "redo" a bad battle and could instead just get luckily and play against a weaker party. perhaps you could determine the enemy party outcome at the start of the map, and keep it that way between saves. the multiple choices and discussions with non-friendly NPCs were enjoyable.
as always, it's a great game and i'm always hungry for more. unsure what the secret was, though?
here's some bugs i found:
>the angel feather item that resurrects a party member was used and did nothing. tea worked fine otherwise, it seems that only that item is wonky
>had a crash when Mosca was left alive against 2 dino enemies. one attacked, game crashed. reloading gave me a different party with no issues
>when reloading, your map icon is placed on top of where you saved, which looks weird if you have a fight there. you need to select your current position to continue, instead of being placed in the previous tile as normal.
>when your save is "fixed", your perks/stats aren't chosen. perhaps remind the player to do that?
keep up the excellent work!
Thanks for playing, your feedback is always useful.
I do plan on using the teleporters more later, but I prefer to keep things varied if possible. Enemy parties in the later levels didn't quite get as much attention as I would have liked. They are random, but there's a method in place to prevent certain combinations of enemies. The fact that you encountered a party with a high HP enemy plus 2 dinos means I forgot to do something.
There are 2 secrets really, the first one was the advanced classes of which I've only implemented 1 so far. The other is just an Easter egg with a low chance of occurring.
The feather bug is news to me, the item seemed to work fine during testing so thanks for telling me. It's the exact same method as characters that spawn a new enemy when defeated and such only you spawn a defeated player instead. I think I know how to fix the other bugs actually.
The perks resetting is not a bug, I give everyone a free respec because I haven't implemented that feature yet and I don't want players to be caught off-guard if I do a balance change. Now the real question is why I haven't done it when I clearly have a method for it? Honestly I have no idea, just forgot about it.
Thanks for playing!
Really liking some of the changes. I’m glad to be able to skip dialogue. I’m glad that perks and stat increase points are indicated more clearly. I’m glad that I can now (sorta) see the perk pathways. New animations? Looking good. Keep it up bro.
Thank you. A lot of time has gone into making the game easier to understand.
What's new since last Demo Day:
- Item system and shop
- Reworked enemy AI
- Reworked dialogue sequences
- 3 new levels bringing the total to 12
- New enemies, bosses and lots of balance changes
- Redesigned perk and stats screen
- Squashed some bugs.
- The final one is a secret, but it's really cool. Trust me.