Not sure how useful this late review will be since I saw that you declared the game complete in the threads but I played up until I got softlocked after skipping a generic encounter with a raider. It just transitioned into an empty screen with a grey background. Hadn't reached a save point before then so I just lost all my progress :(
Combat doesn't end when your units are wiped out and they don't seem to respawn either so after I lost (and skipped) the second battle with Made and Masieu they became permanently unusable.
Zip it, don't pack it all into one .exe, or windows flags it as dangerous.
Main Menu music is calming, but I don't think it matches the look or quality of the background Image. I also don't understand why you're scrolling across it, or why you have the selections in a tiny corner up right.
Menues should pop up faster, if you're having a Sci-Fi-screen Feeling for them, they should connect to somewhere offscreen to feel like they're an actual Part of an Interface instead of laid above. I also don't particularly like the Soundeffect for opening/closing a menu.
That's a weird darkness slider for character/background. Is this Game aiming to move through dark Places and have Creatures pop out of Shadows? Then the regular "adjust until left symbol invisble, right visible" would work better, since the Character with a black Outline will always be clearly distinct from the background.
If you don't have something like that, the darkness doesn't matter enough to include such a slider I think.
Why is some Character in the Intro sitting on a Carpet on some Windows? This looks weird.
The Images changing extremely fast and extremely slow at different Times in the Intro threw me off.
Why do I have all that Battle Information on Screen when I'm in the middle of an Introductory Dialogue? You can fade it in after the Dialogues done.
Combat Tutorial is bad, could be done a lot better, I'm assuming Placeholder.
Why is the Combat Map so massive, it could easily fit on a single Screen without having to scroll, giving a lot more tactical Information at once. Also you can move the Camera offscreen however you want.
Accidentally quit to main Menu.
So I always have to place my Characters in their left to right order on the Battle?
Why can Enemies attack with negative Health but I can't?
Also Combat doesn't end when I die, and when I press combat done, it just continues as if I had one I think. So Combat is pointless.
Money apparently is pointless aswell, I stopped caring about the Dialogue, as it's not well enough written for what's basically a VN I think, so I just bought something from someone that I may or may not need with Money I may or may not have had.
Same with Checks in the Dungeon, if I can just skip them, then what's the Point?
Also is there no Way to heal Characters?
After skipping to much and moving through the Dungeon a bit, Screen went Grey and didn't go back.
I'll end it here. Combat could be interesting if done well, the System itself with pushing your Advantage to shift the Frontline is a neat Idea on the regular JRPG Combat, but the Interface needs to be clearer, and it needs to actually matter.
The overworld Travel is alright, but extremely simple. Nothing necessary wrong with that, altho I don't understand why you're putting every Sprite on a small Pedestal there.
I don't particularly like the Dialogue UI as it is at the Moment, and the Inventory, Shops and Stuff like that seems to be not really functional all that much.
Menu theme needs a different soundfont, current one sounds like ass. BG darkness should be something the designer decides, not the player at startup. The opening narration keeps switching between worldbuilding lore and personal character motivation, which makes it confusing. I don't even know who the protagonist is. You badly need an editor, sentences like "Not hearing Rim my ass anymore will be a breath of fresh air " are extremely confusing. Giving unique stand-out traits to generic NPCs (unless they are meant to be recurring characters?) is bad writing. The player should not be presented with unnecessary information. Going through the tutorial and parsing the text feels like work, complete anti-fun. It's better than it used to be, but the battle menu is still incomprehensible and takes far too much effort to decipher. No normal person would ever finish the tutorial. There is an immense amount of effort put into this game, which is a real shame, as it has no audience.
Bug: around half of the time, whenever I load a save (loading into the overworld), a blank gray screen with background sound is displayed, and I have to force-quit.
Minor issue: in the opening tutorial, if the player skips past the opening dialog, the box highlighting the frontline just floats in the middle of the screen until the scene pans down far enough for the frontline to appear. This issue also popped up during the overwatch tutorial, as the frontline had advanced, thus the highlight box was below the overwatch label instead of around it.
Combat issues:
It may be that I don't understand some vital part of the combat system (I mean, nobody else is mentioning it, so...), but the first mission beyond the tutorial is really hard. You get two units to the enemy's three, and both of your units are pathetically weak compared to the agents in the tutorial. Made can only attack (weakly) by retreating, and Masieu takes 2 AP to perform his basic attack, which does a whole 1 damage and never actually seems to apply bleeding, which means his second, theoretically more effective attack, is useless. I eventually won by ganging up on the two raiders on the right first (Made doing all of the damage), then moving Made into the empty left sector to kill the last raider.
Contrary to the tutorial's explanation, flanking from unopposed sectors doesn't seem to inflict stun, outside of the tutorial mission. Or I misunderstood what flanking does.
Getting wiped out doesn't end the combat encounter. (Yeah, I know combat can be skipped)
Are there supposed to be any combat encounters after reaching the nomads? All I got were maps with 3 empty sectors, and no opportunity to place units.
Combat suggestions:
When a unit is deployed, some skill should be selected by default, OR the player should have the option to deselect skills, if you want a unit doing nothing to be a valid option. This tripped me up first time playing the tutorial, as I didn't select a skill for the agent in the left sector, and subsequently got massacred.
Restricting movement between sectors by simultaneously limiting it to once per turn and stunning the moved unit feels far too restrictive. It means that if you end up with an empty/understrength sector opposing a significant threat, you're pretty much screwed. Maybe that's okay if you want to emphasize the importance of smart deployment, and/or if you give the player more units to place, but it also means you can't spring mid-combat surprises on the player without unjustly screwing them.
Something should happen when the players and enemy units are in mutually unopposed sectors. Having them mutually flank each-other is silly, nonsensical, and doesn't move the battle towards resolution.
The main problem is your ui has the same hue/saturation with map, blends in and ends up completely unreadable
The action options scale with the map and thats bad
Prebattle placement should be drag n drop I think
Also maybe you should add big ui sections on screens sides showing what is going on and summarising like This guy will use this action on this guys etc
Got random stutters while traveling the global map
The artwork that you've done for this game is extremely nice, each of the timelapses you posted to the AGDG threads also shows just how much effort you've poured into it. I must say some of it looks slightly off with the scaling/line thickness, for example the map terrain has really thick lines but your base vehicle has much thinner and refined lines, kind of making it look odd. The backgrounds in some of the scenes and some of the character sprites could also be slightly more differentiated I think, like you could lighten the outlines of backgrounds a bit and add more edge highlight to the characters to have them stand out more.
That said, I really like the characters you've got so far. I didn't have time to get to the end unfortunately, but I enjoy your writing style and the overall story and concept a lot.
Comments
Not sure how useful this late review will be since I saw that you declared the game complete in the threads but I played up until I got softlocked after skipping a generic encounter with a raider. It just transitioned into an empty screen with a grey background. Hadn't reached a save point before then so I just lost all my progress :(
Combat doesn't end when your units are wiped out and they don't seem to respawn either so after I lost (and skipped) the second battle with Made and Masieu they became permanently unusable.
Love the background art.
The game is complete, but will be upload for the the 57 DD.
Played for roughly 30m.
Zip it, don't pack it all into one .exe, or windows flags it as dangerous.
Main Menu music is calming, but I don't think it matches the look or quality of the background Image. I also don't understand why you're scrolling across it, or why you have the selections in a tiny corner up right.
Menues should pop up faster, if you're having a Sci-Fi-screen Feeling for them, they should connect to somewhere offscreen to feel like they're an actual Part of an Interface instead of laid above. I also don't particularly like the Soundeffect for opening/closing a menu.
That's a weird darkness slider for character/background. Is this Game aiming to move through dark Places and have Creatures pop out of Shadows? Then the regular "adjust until left symbol invisble, right visible" would work better, since the Character with a black Outline will always be clearly distinct from the background.
If you don't have something like that, the darkness doesn't matter enough to include such a slider I think.
Why is some Character in the Intro sitting on a Carpet on some Windows? This looks weird.
The Images changing extremely fast and extremely slow at different Times in the Intro threw me off.
Why do I have all that Battle Information on Screen when I'm in the middle of an Introductory Dialogue? You can fade it in after the Dialogues done.
Combat Tutorial is bad, could be done a lot better, I'm assuming Placeholder.
Why is the Combat Map so massive, it could easily fit on a single Screen without having to scroll, giving a lot more tactical Information at once. Also you can move the Camera offscreen however you want.
Accidentally quit to main Menu.
So I always have to place my Characters in their left to right order on the Battle?
Why can Enemies attack with negative Health but I can't?
Also Combat doesn't end when I die, and when I press combat done, it just continues as if I had one I think. So Combat is pointless.
Money apparently is pointless aswell, I stopped caring about the Dialogue, as it's not well enough written for what's basically a VN I think, so I just bought something from someone that I may or may not need with Money I may or may not have had.
Same with Checks in the Dungeon, if I can just skip them, then what's the Point?
Also is there no Way to heal Characters?
After skipping to much and moving through the Dungeon a bit, Screen went Grey and didn't go back.
I'll end it here. Combat could be interesting if done well, the System itself with pushing your Advantage to shift the Frontline is a neat Idea on the regular JRPG Combat, but the Interface needs to be clearer, and it needs to actually matter.
The overworld Travel is alright, but extremely simple. Nothing necessary wrong with that, altho I don't understand why you're putting every Sprite on a small Pedestal there.
I don't particularly like the Dialogue UI as it is at the Moment, and the Inventory, Shops and Stuff like that seems to be not really functional all that much.
Menu theme needs a different soundfont, current one sounds like ass. BG darkness should be something the designer decides, not the player at startup. The opening narration keeps switching between worldbuilding lore and personal character motivation, which makes it confusing. I don't even know who the protagonist is. You badly need an editor, sentences like "Not hearing Rim my ass anymore will be a breath of fresh air " are extremely confusing. Giving unique stand-out traits to generic NPCs (unless they are meant to be recurring characters?) is bad writing. The player should not be presented with unnecessary information. Going through the tutorial and parsing the text feels like work, complete anti-fun. It's better than it used to be, but the battle menu is still incomprehensible and takes far too much effort to decipher. No normal person would ever finish the tutorial. There is an immense amount of effort put into this game, which is a real shame, as it has no audience.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2137383418
Bug: around half of the time, whenever I load a save (loading into the overworld), a blank gray screen with background sound is displayed, and I have to force-quit.
Minor issue: in the opening tutorial, if the player skips past the opening dialog, the box highlighting the frontline just floats in the middle of the screen until the scene pans down far enough for the frontline to appear. This issue also popped up during the overwatch tutorial, as the frontline had advanced, thus the highlight box was below the overwatch label instead of around it.
Combat issues:
Combat suggestions:
Thank for the bug report, time to work I guess
I like the combat idea overall
The main problem is your ui has the same hue/saturation with map, blends in and ends up completely unreadable
The action options scale with the map and thats bad
Prebattle placement should be drag n drop I think
Also maybe you should add big ui sections on screens sides showing what is going on and summarising like This guy will use this action on this guys etc
Got random stutters while traveling the global map
Liked the dungeon section
you have made great progress. the game is starting to come together
the tutorial is much more understandable than it used to be
the combat ost is a bit monotonous imho
you REALLY need a proofreader to check your dialogue man.
The artwork that you've done for this game is extremely nice, each of the timelapses you posted to the AGDG threads also shows just how much effort you've poured into it. I must say some of it looks slightly off with the scaling/line thickness, for example the map terrain has really thick lines but your base vehicle has much thinner and refined lines, kind of making it look odd. The backgrounds in some of the scenes and some of the character sprites could also be slightly more differentiated I think, like you could lighten the outlines of backgrounds a bit and add more edge highlight to the characters to have them stand out more.
That said, I really like the characters you've got so far. I didn't have time to get to the end unfortunately, but I enjoy your writing style and the overall story and concept a lot.