So first of all, great music and atmosphere. I won't repeat what others have said here since I think you already know that you're good work in this direction.
1. The loading screen at the beginning is definitely too long. You have to find a way to cut it down or question using blocking preloading at all.
2. When you open the menu/save/etc it briefly flashes the default RPGM BACK button. Seems like a visual glitch. I also notice the TOUCH UI option is there but mouse/touch support seems to be disabled ingame. Might want to remove it.
3. Always Dash seems to be by default OFF. I did a poll once with my playerbase and 90% always turn it ON. I would recommend setting the default state to ON. (Not sure if you even need the option)
4. There are some strange collision glitches. Example:
Feels like you should be able to move right here.
5. There seems to be a battle speedup plugin in the game but I don't seem to be able to trigger it. I use CTRL with in the OPTIONS menu configurable skip speed in my game and it's probably one of the most impactful QoL features for many of my players.
6. I liked the flavor items revealing hidden abilities on the cards.
7. Level design wise I felt like I was supposed to figure out the Rope section before fighting the "powerful enemy" (I assume that was the boss fight with the paralysis enemy?), so I ran around quite a bit to try and solve that puzzle, thinking maybe the flesh hooks or something could be used. Going into the Hospital to get Rope seemed a bit weird to be, maybe the design here could be made clearer.
I played until that part. Again, great work on the music and atmosphere side.
I don't know whether my experience would've been different if you didn't hold my hand (a little bit) on stream, but thanks anyway!
I've played a lot of RPG Maker games and got heavy burn out from them, but surprisingly enough you managed to make this game engaging. I really dig the new coat of paint for pretty much everything. I could still decode what was HP/MP, what was reflect and paralyze and whatnot - but I guess that was enough to trick my brain into not associating this game with the RPGM Burnout.
I really love the surrealist pictures you're drawing. The scenes, the enemies, the cutscenes and the sprites - there so many tiny little details to notice, and your art really helps. And you made the "Deer aesthetic" look cool, which is quite surprising. Some of the enemies are absolutely gnarly, some cutscenes made me flinch a bit, and I appreciate it - love when the game makes me produce a visceral response.
You story helps with that too. I'm legit invested. Billy and Grandma speak with a very nice, "alabama american" quirk (at least it looks that way to me) and makes them feel more alive. Legit feel bad for Sarah, but I do want to know more, so I'll keep playing. I kinda don't care about James, but I think he's left as a "Blank Slate" on purpose, amnesia and everything. Generally I dislike the trope, but you don't focus on it, so I consider him more of a vehicle for the story, and it works. Though from the glimpses of his interactions with Velouri I get the feeling that he's not gonna stay the blank slate for the entirety of the game.
I'm really curios about how the story plays out, especially with the Love/Hate balance. I think I've noticed one of the story pivots, though I'm not sure, will have to do a couple of playthroughs to tell the difference.
I didn't mind the combat. Challenging enough and not grindy since the enemies do not respawn. I did die, but that was due to my own stupidity.
And of course the music ties it very well together, but I think I praised your game enough.
Oh yeah, and big kudos for the controller support, works well.
Now if you'll excuse me I'll go and play to comletion.
Thank you for the kind words, will continue to polish chapter one and work on it until everything is spiffy as fuck. I wont spoil the big story departures for you if you do not want to, but the big changes do come in act 3 and 4. When it comes to Winter, yes, he will have more space later. This is just chapter 1 ; )
A lot of your Webms are just moving Pictures, you could do those through Events saving a lot of your 1GB Footprint. They also are largely irrelevant I think.
Apparently its not run-able from within RPGM, by giving a Syntax Token "?" Error. Apparently because it's MZ not MV? Did still save my changes tho, just made James a bit stronger by maxing out everything, so I don't have to potentially grind for Combat. If I give Feedback on any kind of balancing, keep in mind James is dealing 100.000s of Damage on my End and is invincible.
Why do you have a loading Screen? Accidentally clicked away the first Choice after setting the Players Name. Oh well.
Made it to the Motel, didn't have the drive to continue, I'm just not invested in it.
If you're trying to do anything but a generic RPGM RPG in RPGM, it's going to end up rather troublesome I think, the Engine heavily is focused exclusivly on those kinds of Games, and trying to do anything different always ends up either feeling bad, or having you go through so many Adjustments you might've just aswell used a different Engine.
Combat Sprites at that Size would need more then 3 Frames, A lot of your UI in Combat, Buffs, Boss healthbars etc. move partly offscreen aswell. The Music is really nice tho, in the Tracks you didn't cover from existing ones.
I like the Idea of moods and intentions changing your Stats and/or Way to play, but it'd be better if you couldn't manually set them through a menu, but get them through Eventchoices etc. It feels weird to artificially set the Players mood.
I also don't quite know why you have the Player play as James when the entire Story is just about Sarah. You could just aswell play as her directly.
The Menu is just the basic RPGM one, and a lot of the Options are unecessary in there. Consider making a new One, properly designed.
I did not find a Plugin for non-tiled movement, and I was assuming you were just using rather small Tiles, which you apparently are, with the entire mapping being parallaxed. Bloats Gamesize needlessy, doesn't add anything major to the looks, and still feels like tiled Movement.
Would work better with proper pixelmovement and actually tilemapped maps I think.
From looking through the Maps, there's basically the origin Story of Sarah, letting you affect how she'll grow up, the Motel/City Part of her Life there, and then some Part of how she turns out in the End when returning home. So its just about Sarah growing up, she probably has some Connection to James, but I'm just not invested enough to find out, there's nothing really drawing me in.
Especially not enough to play through this multiple Times, only to change some minor Things to see how the Story changes in the End. I'm just assuming it actually does, depending on if I free the Rabbits, rescue the Fish, water Plants, what Dialogue Options I choose etc.
Gnome Enemy is cute. So is Joergen.
I think the best Part of this is the Music, at least some of the Tracks, by a rather big Margin. Graphics are alright as still Images, but don't work very well in Motion, or in RPGM due to its arbitrarily bad Framerate caps.
Writing really isn't my Thing in this. The Designs for some Enemies and Sceneries is alright tho.
Sorry that it wasn't all that useful, there wasn't really all that much for me to give Feedback about.
I didn't encounter any Bugs, or anything not working properly, I obviously can't comment on the balancing, but the Abilities and the bit I saw of the Combat itself seemed to be alright. Which is basically how it went for all of the Game, it felt alright, it worked and wasn't broken, I just don't think RPGM was necessarily the best Choice for this Game or rather the other Way around, the Game itself is fine, just not the right Choice of Game for RPGM.
Consider this less of a rant against your Game, and more against RPGM.
Played from the start a bit into the part where you play as Sarah. I wish there were more autosaves, annoying to save yourself all the time I think. A fast forward button in battles would be nice, sometimes you get slept with one party member for example. A slight grace period after skipping through dialogue before you can select an option would probably be good, I was skipping through a lot of dialogue in act 1 as I've seen it before and accidentally selected dialogue several times. Some battle animations are pretty slow, like curse. Checking someone's browsing history is indeed wrong... Would be cool if a battle song continued where it left of the next time it starts playing again in another battle. Hit-/interaction-boxes are really small and wonky sometimes, like rabbits and some enemies - although I guess I was sprinting the entire time.
There's a lot of stuff and I never play RPGM games so that you can keep my attention must be a good sign. Although I'm not sure if I'll play more until you've finished the game, don't think I have all that much constructive to say anyway.
Muzzleflashes are really off from the gun somtimes:
I somehow managed to dupe the ladder at the start, no idea how it happened unfortunately:
Yeah, I have so consistently made that spelling error I am thinking of just running with it... Thanks for pointing it out, I guess I will have to fix it...
Autosave triggers each time you enter an area, you can pick up essentially from where you left off. Thanks for pointing out the bug, it happens when you are forcefully moved into collision, I will fix it when I get home from work. It has happened with other enemies before.
I love the art and presentation in this game. It seems to be an /agdg/ tradition now that the best-looking games always turn out to be turn-based RPGs that my stimulant-addled brain struggles to grasp, so take anything I say with a grain of salt.
It is insane how much density of soul there is everywhere. Wherever I go, there's new animations and music. I normally mute game audio after a few minutes because it grows repetitive, but here it changes up so often that I stayed interested.
Holding the confirm button during dialogue accidentally made me skip a lot of conversation text, and I can't find any conversation log function.
Conversely, it would be nice if pressing confirm during the opponent's turn in combat skipped to the next action.
I can't stand the high-pitched UI sfx. There is an argument that it is soulful in just how bad of a fit it is, but after a while I was just sick of it.
The UI in general comes off as stock RPGmaker and clashes a bit with the otherwise very bespoke artstyle. IMO refurbishing that is the single most obvious improvement I see that could be made to this game.
The constant choices and the way the game seems to react to them is overwhelming and disorienting in a good way.
There is quite a bit of content here. Does this have an Afterlife Gladiator-like system for importing data into future versions? I want to see where this goes, but not if my progress gets deleted in the next update.
Thanks for playing and for the things you pointed out! I love the weird sfx so that stays but I will think about the combat and menu stuff.
This will be a big game, all content here is essentially part of Chapter 1 which is now pretty much "completed". There are three big acts and a fourth ending act, act 3 changes between a hate/love version depending on your choices. Act 4 consists of three different endings, each with a runtime of about 40 min.
All in all there is about 12 hours of content in there. I am now working on polishing it all up and fixing stuff, correcting bugs and so on, but storywise you can finish this chapter. Two of the endings cannot be reached natively for now though, or at least I do not think they can. Testing this shit takes forever. There is a cheating room you can access with skip ahead options. Once chapter 1 is completely done you will be able to skip ahead to chapter 2 directly as well.
Continuing on the same save does unfortunately not work yet.
Cheating room is accessed by not taking the tutorial, going to the first tree, waiting for the deer to pass and then essentially going "backwards".
Now that some more testing will be needed I will probably just add a "skip to cheatingroom" at the beginning when you start a new game.
I've got blocked by Euthanasia this time around, paralyzing and heal self is extremely effective. Cards are well designed but there should be away to equip more than one, probably after earning it in some sort of a boss fight.
It's a very unique game and a rare case of game exploring trauma without turning into cringeworthy wankfest.
Fishpeople music is great, hope I'll get further next time around.
Added another tutorial message, thanks for the idea. Euthanasia is very simple as long as you equip the card you get right before facing her. Tutorialguy now tells you this too.
Comments
So first of all, great music and atmosphere. I won't repeat what others have said here since I think you already know that you're good work in this direction.
1. The loading screen at the beginning is definitely too long. You have to find a way to cut it down or question using blocking preloading at all.
2. When you open the menu/save/etc it briefly flashes the default RPGM BACK button. Seems like a visual glitch. I also notice the TOUCH UI option is there but mouse/touch support seems to be disabled ingame. Might want to remove it.
3. Always Dash seems to be by default OFF. I did a poll once with my playerbase and 90% always turn it ON. I would recommend setting the default state to ON. (Not sure if you even need the option)
4. There are some strange collision glitches. Example:
Feels like you should be able to move right here.
5. There seems to be a battle speedup plugin in the game but I don't seem to be able to trigger it. I use CTRL with in the OPTIONS menu configurable skip speed in my game and it's probably one of the most impactful QoL features for many of my players.
6. I liked the flavor items revealing hidden abilities on the cards.
7. Level design wise I felt like I was supposed to figure out the Rope section before fighting the "powerful enemy" (I assume that was the boss fight with the paralysis enemy?), so I ran around quite a bit to try and solve that puzzle, thinking maybe the flesh hooks or something could be used. Going into the Hospital to get Rope seemed a bit weird to be, maybe the design here could be made clearer.
I played until that part. Again, great work on the music and atmosphere side.
I don't know whether my experience would've been different if you didn't hold my hand (a little bit) on stream, but thanks anyway!
I've played a lot of RPG Maker games and got heavy burn out from them, but surprisingly enough you managed to make this game engaging. I really dig the new coat of paint for pretty much everything. I could still decode what was HP/MP, what was reflect and paralyze and whatnot - but I guess that was enough to trick my brain into not associating this game with the RPGM Burnout.
I really love the surrealist pictures you're drawing. The scenes, the enemies, the cutscenes and the sprites - there so many tiny little details to notice, and your art really helps. And you made the "Deer aesthetic" look cool, which is quite surprising. Some of the enemies are absolutely gnarly, some cutscenes made me flinch a bit, and I appreciate it - love when the game makes me produce a visceral response.
You story helps with that too. I'm legit invested. Billy and Grandma speak with a very nice, "alabama american" quirk (at least it looks that way to me) and makes them feel more alive. Legit feel bad for Sarah, but I do want to know more, so I'll keep playing. I kinda don't care about James, but I think he's left as a "Blank Slate" on purpose, amnesia and everything. Generally I dislike the trope, but you don't focus on it, so I consider him more of a vehicle for the story, and it works. Though from the glimpses of his interactions with Velouri I get the feeling that he's not gonna stay the blank slate for the entirety of the game.
I'm really curios about how the story plays out, especially with the Love/Hate balance. I think I've noticed one of the story pivots, though I'm not sure, will have to do a couple of playthroughs to tell the difference.
I didn't mind the combat. Challenging enough and not grindy since the enemies do not respawn. I did die, but that was due to my own stupidity.
And of course the music ties it very well together, but I think I praised your game enough.
Oh yeah, and big kudos for the controller support, works well.
Now if you'll excuse me I'll go and play to comletion.
Thank you for the kind words, will continue to polish chapter one and work on it until everything is spiffy as fuck. I wont spoil the big story departures for you if you do not want to, but the big changes do come in act 3 and 4. When it comes to Winter, yes, he will have more space later. This is just chapter 1 ; )
If this is Project2, what happened to Project1?
Played for roughly 1h.
A lot of your Webms are just moving Pictures, you could do those through Events saving a lot of your 1GB Footprint. They also are largely irrelevant I think.
Apparently its not run-able from within RPGM, by giving a Syntax Token "?" Error. Apparently because it's MZ not MV? Did still save my changes tho, just made James a bit stronger by maxing out everything, so I don't have to potentially grind for Combat. If I give Feedback on any kind of balancing, keep in mind James is dealing 100.000s of Damage on my End and is invincible.
Why do you have a loading Screen? Accidentally clicked away the first Choice after setting the Players Name. Oh well.
Made it to the Motel, didn't have the drive to continue, I'm just not invested in it.
If you're trying to do anything but a generic RPGM RPG in RPGM, it's going to end up rather troublesome I think, the Engine heavily is focused exclusivly on those kinds of Games, and trying to do anything different always ends up either feeling bad, or having you go through so many Adjustments you might've just aswell used a different Engine.
Combat Sprites at that Size would need more then 3 Frames, A lot of your UI in Combat, Buffs, Boss healthbars etc. move partly offscreen aswell. The Music is really nice tho, in the Tracks you didn't cover from existing ones.
I like the Idea of moods and intentions changing your Stats and/or Way to play, but it'd be better if you couldn't manually set them through a menu, but get them through Eventchoices etc. It feels weird to artificially set the Players mood.
I also don't quite know why you have the Player play as James when the entire Story is just about Sarah. You could just aswell play as her directly.
The Menu is just the basic RPGM one, and a lot of the Options are unecessary in there. Consider making a new One, properly designed.
I did not find a Plugin for non-tiled movement, and I was assuming you were just using rather small Tiles, which you apparently are, with the entire mapping being parallaxed. Bloats Gamesize needlessy, doesn't add anything major to the looks, and still feels like tiled Movement.
Would work better with proper pixelmovement and actually tilemapped maps I think.
From looking through the Maps, there's basically the origin Story of Sarah, letting you affect how she'll grow up, the Motel/City Part of her Life there, and then some Part of how she turns out in the End when returning home. So its just about Sarah growing up, she probably has some Connection to James, but I'm just not invested enough to find out, there's nothing really drawing me in.
Especially not enough to play through this multiple Times, only to change some minor Things to see how the Story changes in the End. I'm just assuming it actually does, depending on if I free the Rabbits, rescue the Fish, water Plants, what Dialogue Options I choose etc.
Gnome Enemy is cute. So is Joergen.
I think the best Part of this is the Music, at least some of the Tracks, by a rather big Margin. Graphics are alright as still Images, but don't work very well in Motion, or in RPGM due to its arbitrarily bad Framerate caps.
Writing really isn't my Thing in this. The Designs for some Enemies and Sceneries is alright tho.
Not my Kind of Game I think.
Thanks for trying it out, not a lot of usefulness in the feedback but I am glad you got to rant a bit.
Sorry that it wasn't all that useful, there wasn't really all that much for me to give Feedback about.
I didn't encounter any Bugs, or anything not working properly, I obviously can't comment on the balancing, but the Abilities and the bit I saw of the Combat itself seemed to be alright. Which is basically how it went for all of the Game, it felt alright, it worked and wasn't broken, I just don't think RPGM was necessarily the best Choice for this Game or rather the other Way around, the Game itself is fine, just not the right Choice of Game for RPGM.
Consider this less of a rant against your Game, and more against RPGM.
Its still fucking cool.
Played from the start a bit into the part where you play as Sarah. I wish there were more autosaves, annoying to save yourself all the time I think. A fast forward button in battles would be nice, sometimes you get slept with one party member for example. A slight grace period after skipping through dialogue before you can select an option would probably be good, I was skipping through a lot of dialogue in act 1 as I've seen it before and accidentally selected dialogue several times. Some battle animations are pretty slow, like curse. Checking someone's browsing history is indeed wrong... Would be cool if a battle song continued where it left of the next time it starts playing again in another battle. Hit-/interaction-boxes are really small and wonky sometimes, like rabbits and some enemies - although I guess I was sprinting the entire time.
There's a lot of stuff and I never play RPGM games so that you can keep my attention must be a good sign. Although I'm not sure if I'll play more until you've finished the game, don't think I have all that much constructive to say anyway.
Muzzleflashes are really off from the gun somtimes:
I somehow managed to dupe the ladder at the start, no idea how it happened unfortunately:
cool. act 1 re-emergance is normally spelled re-emergence
Yeah, I have so consistently made that spelling error I am thinking of just running with it... Thanks for pointing it out, I guess I will have to fix it...
first of all, i tested it on my steam deck.
while inputting the name of the character, part of the buttons were out of view, so i had to blindly grasp where the "confirm" button was to progress.
later on i got in a fight with the bonepicker, and after running away from it i wasn't able to move from there anymore, effectively softlocking me.
i fucking loved the new cosmic call ost btw.
Autosave triggers each time you enter an area, you can pick up essentially from where you left off. Thanks for pointing out the bug, it happens when you are forcefully moved into collision, I will fix it when I get home from work. It has happened with other enemies before.
I love the art and presentation in this game. It seems to be an /agdg/ tradition now that the best-looking games always turn out to be turn-based RPGs that my stimulant-addled brain struggles to grasp, so take anything I say with a grain of salt.
It is insane how much density of soul there is everywhere. Wherever I go, there's new animations and music. I normally mute game audio after a few minutes because it grows repetitive, but here it changes up so often that I stayed interested.
Holding the confirm button during dialogue accidentally made me skip a lot of conversation text, and I can't find any conversation log function.
Conversely, it would be nice if pressing confirm during the opponent's turn in combat skipped to the next action.
I can't stand the high-pitched UI sfx. There is an argument that it is soulful in just how bad of a fit it is, but after a while I was just sick of it.
The UI in general comes off as stock RPGmaker and clashes a bit with the otherwise very bespoke artstyle. IMO refurbishing that is the single most obvious improvement I see that could be made to this game.
The constant choices and the way the game seems to react to them is overwhelming and disorienting in a good way.
There is quite a bit of content here. Does this have an Afterlife Gladiator-like system for importing data into future versions? I want to see where this goes, but not if my progress gets deleted in the next update.
Thanks for playing and for the things you pointed out! I love the weird sfx so that stays but I will think about the combat and menu stuff.
This will be a big game, all content here is essentially part of Chapter 1 which is now pretty much "completed". There are three big acts and a fourth ending act, act 3 changes between a hate/love version depending on your choices. Act 4 consists of three different endings, each with a runtime of about 40 min.
All in all there is about 12 hours of content in there. I am now working on polishing it all up and fixing stuff, correcting bugs and so on, but storywise you can finish this chapter. Two of the endings cannot be reached natively for now though, or at least I do not think they can. Testing this shit takes forever. There is a cheating room you can access with skip ahead options. Once chapter 1 is completely done you will be able to skip ahead to chapter 2 directly as well.
Continuing on the same save does unfortunately not work yet.
Cheating room is accessed by not taking the tutorial, going to the first tree, waiting for the deer to pass and then essentially going "backwards".
Now that some more testing will be needed I will probably just add a "skip to cheatingroom" at the beginning when you start a new game.
I've got blocked by Euthanasia this time around, paralyzing and heal self is extremely effective. Cards are well designed but there should be away to equip more than one, probably after earning it in some sort of a boss fight.
It's a very unique game and a rare case of game exploring trauma without turning into cringeworthy wankfest.
Fishpeople music is great, hope I'll get further next time around.
Added another tutorial message, thanks for the idea. Euthanasia is very simple as long as you equip the card you get right before facing her. Tutorialguy now tells you this too.
Still no linux.
Someone, please make a linux build ;_;