Longer play time!
So first, I brought back my saves on my main computer so I could benefit from a better frame-rate during battle. After having told Renpy twice that I trusted the creator of those saves (well, at least a little), I came back the bandits' camp.

The first thing I did was playing around with the menu that allows me to wander in the camp. I first went to my invite room to comb myself (having good looking hair is very important in the fairy society). Then I accessed the situation with blue mage. It seems the goal will be to get 5000 gold or collect 5 clues about the bandit leader so he will drop the price. I quickly get three of those clues by just gossiping. I decided next to do a bit of fights withunregulated gambling, so I could test my fresh new skill. It is actually pretty useful, it allows me to increase the money awarded at the end of the battle. An easy way to scam those low level folks and easily get the money needed to pay the toll. And so... hey, wait, we just lost? Despite having the broken skill of the red knight on my side, a couple of bad dice rolls obliterated my team. I tried to keep the apparence and pretended I was just increasing our odds for the next fights. Luckily, everyone believes me without question. I called the next fight, and this time luck was on the enemy side. Time for fight 3 and... wait a minute, who invited the bandit leader here? And more importantly, who invited his ridiculous +13 bonus there?! I prepare the best i could. His team wasn't well balanced, but my back line has no unit available that can deal effectively with him. He could also see with horror that he has a pretty good personal skill. His battle music theme is stellar, too.

In three round, my team was defeated. They asked me if it was also intentional, but I couldn't do anything but admit that he was just too strong. I hesitated a moment to complain at the Donjon master, but was happy I didn't when I got clue number 4. In order to beat that bandit leader, I needed a better unit than blue mage or green priest for the back line. I remembered there were a three adventurer that were looking for employment at the tavern, so I went back there, hoping to find something like an air mage. And there was... a 500 gold air mage, a 400 gold unit useless to me and an exclusive, on sale air mage at 300 gold. What a convenient choice. Only problem, and that's why I ignored them before, I only had 130 or so gold coins at the start of the day, and just lost a third of them in bad bets.

I invited some of my men for a quick talk, since I was told that it is a good idea to make my spells better. I then played a bit with the different menus and remarked two things that didn't catch my attention before: first some if not all music of this game have a noticeable loop end, that now that I remarked them I can no longer forget about them. Also, when you leave a submenu from any place, like "No, I don't want to craft, I don't have any material, baka!", there is a fade out and ... the music come back at the start? Why? That is such a weird choice.

I considered my options to buy that air mage who was the obvious solution to my bandit leader problem: come back in time and get more money from random guards encounters, ask a python program to run the fight until it is a win, hack the game to give myself an access to the renpy console... In the end, all those solutions seemed very tiring to me, so I went to my bed. Thanks to some bandits indiscretions, I get clue number 5 which unlocks me the access to the next dungeon, the forest. The bandit leader proposed to come in the dungeon with me, proposition i immediately accepted, too happy to have an easy way to get rid of him at the first "unfortunate lost battle".

The dungeon is very similar to the previous one, except that we are now the guards instead of the fugitives and that I now have my infinite money glitch to activate in battle that are an easy win. The objective is to collect 10 tolls from the random encounters, which is reasonably quickly done. I also find two new recruits who cover some of my weaknesses, but nothing that fix my back line problem. Unfortunately, I didn't got any loss, so mister bandit leader is still there sympathising with me at each crossroads. He even asked me if I was a human; I immediately denied it and said it was pretty rude from him. Other than this incident, he was actually a nice thief to talk to, and a pretty good party member. I reached level 4 around that time, and unlocked a skill that guarantee another skill for which making the maths would be pretty fun for anyone writing a guide, but currently I am happy with my cheaper alternative.

I continue exploring the dungeon to get my map completed and find some crafting material. Blue mage and the thief leader begin to ask me to go back home, but I refuse to comply; there are probably mad that they are out of dialogue. Technically, I can grind the dungeon as much as I want for money and relations, so I saw little reason to listen to them, especially given that I was on the opposite side to the entrance, so I needed a bunch of walk anyway. Before reaching the end, I encountered an enemy group that pulled off a triple 6, just to be completely annihilated by red knight in the counter-strike.

Back at the camp, it was urgent invasive monster problem. So we went bak into the forest to beat them up. A hard fight, but nothing my party couldn't handle. Beasts seems to behave like human enemies except an extra gimmick if you don't bring back their class counter. As a reward, the bandit's leader lowered the toll to 1000 gold. I really wish I had enough gold to just accept to pay on the spot. After the battle, no one wanted to grind the dungeon more, so we all went to the bed.

After waking up, I counted my gold coins. There were 500+ of them, so I had enough to buy that discounted air mage; only problem, he was no longer at the tavern; Luckily, I remembered there was a weird glitch that made that the people available to hire for each day are rolled when you enter the tavern. So I quickly loaded a save file and got this time an air mage available to hire. Not seen, not caught... I also invited more member of my party to talk with me, including red knight who was way more nice-looking without his armour. I also talked for the second time with blue mage, asking him if he didn't have any thing he was hiding from me. He denied without much conviction. I told him there is someone called Lor with an Anime effect portrait (yes, I made my research) that looks very much like him on the game's page, but he refused to say more.

Time for a revenge against the bandit leader. Now that I had an air mage in my party, the odds are way more in my favour. For some reason the bandit leader's bonus has been reduced to 6, which meant an easy victory for me. I got 70 gold back from my 300 investment. Not a good balance sheet, but totally worth it in ego terms.

Since I have beaten the boss of the level (yes, he is a boss; he even has a boss music; don't discuss that!), I decided to close the game here, as I must still play more of that murder visual novel.

Some extra notes:
-Since it seems impossible to use the page up and down commands to go back and forth in the text (which given the rpg side of the game, makes complete sense), I would suggest removing those from the help section.
-Crafting is pretty confusing to me with all those crafting materials with similar name. I think adding the corresponding icons for those items in the inventory would help a lot. Not that it mattered for me until now, given how much is needed to craft anything. I only got three raw material in total by the way.

I'm not sold on the narrative choice to make the protagonist's past life uninteresting. Between that and the abruptness of being pulled away it feels kind of rushed versus the rest of the intro.

I wish the "enter name" boxes would have more obvious prompts than just the input cursor, and not allow the player to accidentally skip them. I don't know if the engine supports checking for an empty text string before progressing to the next event, or perhaps just a confirmation prompt of the entered name would work. I decided to roll with the main character being a nameless entity from another realm or something, but if I feel like most players would just restart the game at that point (hence, it's an unnecessary point of friction).

First battle, I got down to 1 HP after selecting an Air Knight, a Fire Rogue, and the Water Mage. I was decently sure my party comp should have been favorable against the enemy group, but the intro text only provides a very vague idea as to what beats what, rather than specifics. So maybe my comp was bad - or maybe it was good, and my RNG was unfavorable - I honestly have no clue. And that's a pretty big problem. The first fight was, other than making some profoundly uninformed decisions, completely non-interactive. I felt like I should have lost but barely pulled out a victory due to a lucky roll about 14 skirmishes in. But more importantly I felt like the victory, as well as the defeat which probably should have taken place instead, were entirely un-earned.

Despite the lack of mechanical satisfaction, there was some tension and excitement and the battle music did its job. I'm just already pretty skeptical of the core mechanics, or at least how the player is onboarded to them.

I'm digging the exploration system so far.

I tried reading the Basics and Tactics pages for info I missed, and honestly it's overwhelming. I feel like there's got to be a better way of guiding the player through this information.

Second random encounter, I completely murdered them. But my elemental bonus was a net negative per the info at the top of the combat screen! Hypothesis: the game system favors offense (larger dice over larger HP pools), making Knights bad. I will test this further as I go.

The self-deprecating nature of the companion(s) is kind of grating but I wonder if it's meant to be, as a way of highlighting the political / societal issues in play. I can see there's been a lot of effort that's gone into world building, although having that come in via a slow trickle of incidental dialog is interesting in contrast to just kind of being dumped into combat.

Battle 3, seemed very easy once again despite having a negative elemental modifier. I'm back to thinking it's more RNG than anything, with the Morale skill being basically essential to player survivability. That creates another issue, since there's no reason (yet) NOT to spam Morale every turn it's available. Battle 4 was the same findings.

I had a massive element and faction bonus going into the boss battle, and used Morale every turn. Seemed like the boss would spam its special at every opportunity as well, dealing 1/2 of the incoming damage back to my party. Which was nearly the only threat it posed, but that threat alone was enough to get me down to 1 HP at the end of the battle.

Got to the first major story milestone and am calling it good here.

Conclusion

The art is fantastic and the animations add a lot to a format I am usually skeptical towards (visual novels). Dialog is generally solid, and while there's more world building than storytelling so far, it's competently done, and I am admittedly quite early in so I assume it will get more engaging once we meet this important NPC they keep talking about. I am genuinely interested to see how the plot begins to unfold. The Renpy GUI is fine enough, but it sometimes feels janky where menus are concerned. Small voice over snippets don't do much for me, but the rest of the sound design is very solid.

Sadly, I don't see this maintaining my interest mechanically. It's just too random and at the same time too repetitive to hold up any longer than the five or six battles it took me to escape the newbie area. I feel like combat needs a complete re-work, but if that's infeasible at this stage I could see a larger early game skill variety (and in general, more actual gameplay E.G. interactivity) going a long ways as well.

I hope these notes are useful and wish you continued success on your project. My tastes aside, it's very well done!

Average round 3 experience.

I loved the animated portraits, I think it adds a lot compared to "standard" VNs. The turn-based combat was also interesting: something I haven't come across in RenPy games. The combat required a bunch more clicks that I would like though, and there wasn't too much for me to do other than click through many rounds of combat. Once I got the ability to boost morale for 2 mana, I used it whenever I could, and didn't see any reason not to? Maybe if there were 2 skills for 2 and 3 mana, I'd have a choice between doing the 2 mana skill or the 3 mana skill.

The combat animations felt a little jerky, maybe more frames there would be great.

I wandered around the labyrinth and fought the warden twice and lost both times :( 

Overall, the art is fantastic, and I love that there were audio bits for characters and such. 

As others have mentioned already, turn based combat in RenPy is pretty cool. This also comes with the added bonus of being interesting to people other than developers because the average VN player is probably aware of the genre's usual limitations due to the ubiquity of the aforementioned engine. 

The one suggestion I can offer is that the action buttons could pop up a little bit faster, that would about halve the amount of clicks required to complete a battle. It seems like a minor thing but it adds up over the course of a playthrough. 

I haven't gotten very far due to the child disraction, but as a fellow renpy dev, applause for how far you have come in using what Renpy can and can't do using it to make turn based RPG instead of just a visual novel. I enjoy the beginning so far. 

A Turn-BASED battles implemented in RenPy? How could anyone imagine this?! 

With a hugely expanded version of Paper-Rock-SciZZors as a main combat mechanic.

This is absolutely a Should-Play! 

I like this very much. Well done! The graphics is nice. The battle system is a good compromise between luck and control. All the technical aspects are also very well done: Menu navigation, quick save, save, options, access to the rules - all very accessable.

There are a few things that could be improved (from my point of view):

- When assigning positions for battle: Show a hover info what the resulting element/faction bonus would be. I can calculate it on my own, but it is a bit cumbersome.

- Maybe shorten the forrest maze a bit. Collecting 10 wages took me rather long...

Hello! I just got done testing this out, I played for only about an hour but may continue later on! I've also prepared a Google Doc for you to see the live playtest notes!

So, all in all, this is really cool! I think the opening is very effective at drawing you in, and writing is quite good, the art and voice acting add a lot of personality, and the RPG gimmick is pretty enjoyable. My biggest complaint is that combat feels very luck dependent, but it is possible I don’t fully understand how to organize my party to make the most out of defeating enemies yet. I also found the “random encounters” did get a bit tiring at points. Nevertheless, it was a pretty interesting and engaging mix of visual novel and turn based RPG presentation, and definitely a quality title overall.

Overall Fun: 4 / 5 - I liked it a lot! It’s not “fun” in the strict gameplay sense, the battles themselves aren’t extremely compelling, but it’s generally a victory in the enjoyability department. I like the story, I think fighting enemies is fun enough, and it’s a pretty interesting presentation using an engine that I wouldn’t expect a game like this to be possible in!

Art/Graphics: 5 / 5 - I can’t really complain at all in this department. The Warden’s fire wall animation was a bit choppy but still a pleasant surprise to see, and the faces and background CGs are all very well made.

Controls/UI: 3 / 5 - It’s functional enough! The Visual Novel approach does grind up against the gameplay at times, it’s clear that functions like a main party menu aren’t exactly what Renpy is designed to do, but it’s functional enough that it didn’t hurt the experience substantially for me.

Sound/Music: 4 / 5 - It’s pretty good! I think the battle theme is pretty good, and the voice clips are all well done. Nothing stands out as especially bad here, but it’s a bit shy of exceptional in the sound department. Great work overall, I really liked this! (P.S. We once again wanted to thank you for your feedback from before, and your cooperation with us!)

Among the submissions of FB6 that caught my attention, there was that nice looking fantasy visual novel. It seemed to have more gameplay than a traditional visual novel and I love visual novels with more gameplay than just choices.

While I was downloading the game, I took a little nap. When I woke up, I was surprised to find myself in a throne room with a queen, a seer, a mage and a bodyguard. I was expecting to be playing a fantasy werewolves game, but the seer says I am a kind of legendary hero or something. Wait, me a hero? That's nonsense! I'm just a regular luck fairy, I'm good at anything other than pranking innocent people! The queen seems to agree with me, but for some reason she decides to put me in prison. How fairyphobic from her! With her bodyguard holding my whole body inside his fist, I have no way to fly to escape.

After a forced nap, I wake up in a prison cell with the mage from the throne room, who tries to convince me I am really the hero they are looking for. I don’t try to contradict him too much, since I don’t want him to close the door after me if I don’t go along with him. He asks me if he must call me ‘My lord’, ‘My lady’ or ‘Whatever’. I don’t even answer, he realises quickly there aren't many non-female fairies with “Fortuna” as a surname. Then he asks for a name for his party of colour-swapped DnD characters. I gave him the word that passed through my mind, so our group will be called “The cabal”.

We leave the prison room and we come across a guard patrol. Hopefully, we are four plus a fairy versus three, so it should be easy. However, the mage insists that we fight three vs three for ‘balance reasons’ I guess. After being explained the combat rules of this world, I finally got why the seer had so much hope in me: those battles are exclusively resolved by rolling dice and seeing who has the bigger number. It is my chance, as if there is one thing I can do -besides pranking people- it is to get good dice rolls. There is a little subtlety in the fact that it is an auto-battler where you pick up units that exploit the weaknesses of the enemy team by selecting the right counters, giving you a flat -3 to +3 bonus to your die total, meaning I need to do some basic maths when selecting who will fight.

After this first battle, I realise something horrific: my good luck powers don’t work in this world, my dice aren’t any better than the enemy team. My allies still are impressed by my supposed “skills” so I play around with them. Since I can not get good dice results with my natural obscenely high luck stat, I decide to do what every sensible person would do: cheating. Every two turns or so I add an extra die to the mix, and if an enemy catches me, I pretend it is a “leadership extra roll”. Hopefully it will be enough to keep every battle under control without my allies noticing I have no value as lucky charm…

This prison is actually quite big, and there are a lot of guards out there. Too many guards, actually. Fighting them becomes quickly repetitive, as there isn’t any input from my part beside selecting the good units at the start and pressing the dialogues boxes. I would heavily suggest cutting the number of encounters in the prison by half or even two thirds while increasing the relation/gold rewards to compensate. There are also quite a bunch of nice mini-dialogue scenes and something a bit of gold and oh! Nevermind, just more guards encounters. I unlock later the ability to reroll in case we lost a round, but I don't feel like calculating with proper maths if it is really worth it to use this ability over the cheaper leadership die, so I didn't use it.

What should happen eventually does happen, I meet a regular enemy group who after a couple of lucky rolls defeats my team despite my team having a +1 advantage and an extra half-die. I was about to use my “protagonist’s plot armour” skill to reload a save before realising than losing a fight has no impact in this world, so I invent a “heroic aura” excuse to explain why we are still standing and say to my team that this defeat was absolutely 100% intended and was actually a test of their faith in me.

A few moments later we come to an impasse with an event that isn’t about finding gold or defeating guards, with the mage proposing to look at some prison cells. I say no just to mess up with him, but to my surprise he says it is wise on my part and that we should continue. We finally reach the exit, which is guarded by an elite soldier that was teased a bit earlier (he is also definitely going to join my team later, as shown on the itch page). His team is quite unbalanced, but he has a flat +8 bonus and an ability who allows him to deal damage to our team based ~60% of those his team suffered (unless his team is dealt 1 damage, in which case his skill will still activate and inflict no damage). Needless to say that I narrowly lost, and for some reason the dungeon master teleported me close to the impasse from earlier. Since there should be some logic behind that apparent madness, I go back to the cell and find a Water knight whose element is conveniently the weakness of the elite soldier. I go back to the boss, lost another encounter against a team of priests of the double six, and then defeat the boss who thought giving himself a +6 bonus would allow him to beat my team.

One recruitment later, we are outside the prison. One night later, we are about to traverse a forest full of brigands, and we find out there are quite a lot of brigands encircling us. I could have tried to fly away, but those kinds of brigands usually have proficiency with bows, so I prefer the diplomatic approach. They don’t seem to like the queen either, it seems. We are forced to go to their village where we will hopefully find an arrangement before they hand us over to the queen. It seems like the gameplay is now to organise my days to reach that goal. Now time to gossip (I’m very good at that!), shop (hum, where can I see my inventory or how much gold I currently have?), bet on fight (someone said unregulated gambling? I’m really made for this world) and flirt with my al… wait, it is that late already? I need to go to the fairy office tomorrow!

I hope you had as much fun reading as I had while writing this. I will definitely play more of this when I have the occasion (I have other games from the jam I want to give a try in the meantime). I need to see if the combat gameplay improves/complexifies itself later into the game.

In addition to what I already said about the number of encounters and the lack of UI inventory at the village, I also need to point out that the game seemed to run pretty slowly during battle. Characters’ idle animation seemed to have only a couple of fps and there was a big delay before getting the option to roll the dice. I played on a random 2019 laptop, for info.

What can I also say? The live2d models and simple backgrounds are serviceable and fit the game pretty well. Music is pretty nice, too bad new players will mostly experience the dungeon and combat music. The fire emblem voice acting is also a nice touch.

In conclusion, I give this game the note of “the moment you hear “triple bonus” but it is just a triple of 1”/10.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 6! My name's Hythrain, and I'm one of the hosts and streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live on my stream.

So admittedly, I didn't get outside of the first area before I stopped playing to write this. This was primarily because, in terms of gameplay, I had a good idea of what was going on and felt I could comment on it. The story is already interesting despite having very little to go off, I like the artwork and the use of voice was certainly interesting. Anything that I can comment on lies in the gameplay, which is what I think needs to be adjusted.

Now before I get into anything, I know Renpy is typically used for visual novels. Trying to do anything outside of that scope can be a challenge. However, with how far you're already going trying to make it be more than a visual novel I would argue you should just go a bit further and make the luck more controlled.

I found the dice rolling system to be very infuriating for a number of reasons. The first was just how often I would see the computer get doubles. There was one "battle" where, no joke, the computer got doubles 7 rounds in a row. Trying to do something about it to reduce the number of times doubles and triples happen, particularly for the computer, would go a long way.

The second issue was how little morale could mean in a LOT of rolls. I had a lot of "morale is only added one, but the rest of the roll is super low so I'm really screwed" rounds. I think a better idea for morale is that using it raises the stage of dice for each of your units. Maybe it doubles it? So someone with a 4 sided is now 8 sided, 6 sided is 12 sided, and 8 sided is 16 sided. If this seems like the same thing, it's not. Currently, using Morale is two luck rolls: the morale value itself and then the value of the actual roll by each unit. If you move it onto the other model, however, you remove the first luck based option and you expand the second one to have a chance for even higher rolls. This sort of thing in the system could turn what was going to be a 1 into something like a 9 or 10, simply because the conditions for the roll were different. Of course, this could always work in reverse but at least it's only a single roll.

The third issue I had was just how often I got into fights. I hadn't even been playing the game for an hour as I tried to navigate the maze, yet I encountered at least 20 fights while trying to find the exit. For a tutorial area to get used to the game, fighting so many fights and having each one take so much time just sucks it out of you to keep going. Then when you find the exit, it has this super boss who just breaks the rules of the game and has special skills like you? The luck was already against me, that just put me off.

The last thing I felt was bad with the dice rolling was rerolling. No joke, rerolling ended up getting me hurt more about half the time because it allows the enemy to reroll as well. This is just very bad design. The idea of a reroll should be if you lost, only you reroll for a chance to win. The computer shouldn't also get to reroll and potentially get an even higher roll. This is especially true if reroll isn't going to guarantee a higher roll than what you got before. No joke, at least three times I would use reroll then immediately lose the first roll, reroll into a SMALLER number while the computer rolled an even higher number. So in short, it resulted in me taking MORE damage. That should not be the case at all. I can suggest a few different ways for Reroll to work:

1. It will always roll higher than your previous roll. You can do this simply by making each roll's minimum be the number they already rolled.

2. It will always use the higher of your two rolls, so that if your second roll is weaker then it you won't take more damage for it.

3. If the reroll is overall less than before, it gets added onto the previous roll. That way, you always retain the previous roll as a minimum. If it's more, then it doesn't add onto it. In this option, you could also make it where adding a lower roll onto the previous roll can only result in a tie, so it'll cap at whatever the computer rolled.

Those are all the things I can think of. I do hope to see it improved more. :)