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Time To Seek's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fan Favorite | #80 | 2.333 | 2.333 |
Ranked from 12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Wanted to make sure I at least made a video for your game before the Jam ends, since you gave me such valuable feedback that'll help for my game's re-release!
Thanks for playing, I'll be making a lot of changes when I switch to Unity. I definitely skipped too much of the introduction period. As i mentioned in other comments, the intro period was supposed to be much longer. There was actually supposed to be a lot of other content like Nara building a farm, Tulu trying to copy Nol's potion generation ability and learning how to craft items instead, and Nol messing around in her shop before sealing the entrances.
Just as clarification, none of the Ultimates are actually random (once you figure out their activation requirement, you can reliably activate them). If you used the Ultimate, it secretly adds a tutorial to your inventory.
(Nara charges her ult by using her switch effect, which you can do out of battle, which is why you have to wait when she changes cubes in battle as otherwise the player could just ult without preparation in battle, Nol requires 44 of each attack item, Voyd requires using tentacle void skills as either Voyd or Nol, and Tulu requires autoreviving in battle (4 turns after she dies, which is long, but her ult kills anything in the game) (which is what concentrated antidote is for, it lets you kill her with two of them)). (A trick is to sacrifice Nara, switch Nol to the void side and have Nol craft items while Tulu charges her ult).
The game gives you little hints about their ults, though the biggest ones are after you use the ult at least once (it gives a major hint) and the long battle tutorial, which mentions that Tulu auto-revives, Nol is about preparation, Nara can switch between weapons, and Voyd is about tentacles.)
The return to field is a bug in the game engine because common events can only work in field view (auto/parallel/manual) or battle view. The only way to fix it is to use a plugin or use a script in a way like a plugin.
Looks like I messed up that event. Wonder why it didn't seem to trigger twice when I tested it.
You did make me realize a few issues. The ores, spices, etc. only show the quantity when you actually go to sell them. This was due to them being key items instead of common items (which I had reserved for craftables). I also didn't explain that every skill has some sort of use as I figured players would either go the lazy route of autoattacking (which makes Nara useless) or come up with their own playstyle. Again, part of this was due to cutting out the intro due to the the time limitation.
Basically, cutting down what is supposed to be a 20 (main story)-40+ (extra content) hour game into something doable in less than an hour meant cutting out and condensing a lot of content. I might have overdone it a bit. Definitely something I intend to fix later on.
Side note: The house is actually the version upgrader for if your save is from a previous version. Talking to the pile of wood will fix your game to be the same version as the game.
I'm still playing the game as of now. The sheer complexity of the battle mechanics blew my mind! You managed to make a lot of intricate things work. Some of the things you implemented already were things I was struggling to figure out. And yet it seems that you never used a single plugin! You have my highest praises.
Thanks for playing the game. If you have any questions, I covered some things on my streams, but anything that you might want to do, let me know. If it is simple, I can probably just type it up. If it is more complicated, while I am sick right now and taking a break as a result, I expect that I'll be streaming again in September, so I can go over more complicated stuff then.
Don't take the kid into battles if he's weak or I didn't get her point
Battles were a little too long for even when it was just Mush Mush ;)
Expensive prices, too darkness if it couldn't go with a little brighter
Thanks for playing.
Yeah, I should have made it clearer that you were supposed to use the Light Potion in the caves. I figured that the signs telling you to bring a light and the conversation about light stones and stones being long lasting potions would be enough for some players, but looks like nobody noticed. Also looks like nobody actually checked their inventory despite a sign telling people to do so. I might make it so that checking your inventory is mandatory in the future.
Prices are definitely a little on the expensive side, but the items you are supposed to buy at first are a bit cheaper. The shop is mainly meant to have you check your inventory for sellable items (also acts as a way for the player to see their inventory) or, in the case of salves, act as a comparison. I'm actually surprised at how many people sold items, but managed to miss the Light Potion and Enemy Repel Potion. I know I made them sellable, so players were expected to at least look at them.
It mentions at the start that Nol is dragging Nara along for training purposes and Nara mentions that she'll be fainting a lot. There is actually a bit of a trick to Nara where she is both the hardest to kill and does the most damage (short of Ults, but Ults are basically instant kills (2 bosses are immune to/resist most Ults)). There is a second trick where Nara can start each battle with an Ult (Nol can too, technically, but Nol's Ult isn't recommended except against the final boss as it is resource intensive and long).
Looks like you did kill the boss just before the buffs ran out, but didn't use the star in your inventory after.
I'm surprised you noticed the Tentacles skill, but didn't switch Nol over to the void side or use them more against the void enemies.
Wait, did you walk back to town instead of teleporting?
wow, there were a lot of things to notice.
Items are mostly used on characters or on events, like examining the crystal in the cave asking to use the light potion to light the area, not usable from everywhere. For being better to notice, maybe having an event of getting them and not just by having them in the inventory from the start. And for prices, I think for a short game it's better to make that every item would be purchasable before the game ends
There is an area that you might have missed that does allow you to easily farm for money. It is really close to the shopkeeper before the hydra, but it becomes temporarily unavailable once you kill the hydra. It reappears after you beat the star. It is kind of hidden, but is meant as a place to collect Tulu's skills if you missed them or as a way to quickly level or gain items to sell.
There was definitely a lot of things to notice and it did end up a bit harder because of the weird time limits (like I said elsewhere, if you speedrun the game and skip everything optional and ignore the story, you can potentially beat the game in maybe 15 minutes, but I also had the issue where if you took your time, it could take well over an hour, so I tweaked the game a bit. Unfortunately, that did also mean players had less reason to explore.
Originally, the plan was for the player to start off with Nara farming and setting up a way to use energy to farm, but having some trouble with the experiment because it was too inefficient for anyone other than Nol, then after a bit of farming, Tulu would show up and approach Nol. This would have made the player start with some crops already to sell. There were other things that were scrapped as well for the sake of the time limitation of 20~60 minutes.
While I still want the light potion to be used everywhere (it actually has another purpose), I do intend to make it a bit more obvious. Part of the problem was that I didn't want to use plugins or to use scripts in a manner like plugins. This will be fixed once I change to Unity/Godot so that even if the player doesn't use the light potion, there will be lights to guide the player towards their destination.
I like the cute show text busts. I think the music is good but there are times when one track is significantly louder than the last one. For example the opening music in the first scene going into the battle music is just like WHAM! Battle time. Good battle music, but super loud transition.
I like that you made an attempt at a slow time based event like the farm.
The battle system is a hot mess. Your basic attacks are AoEs and your skills are single target moves for the most part, but you get attacked by very large groups. The first time I was attacked by 7 Mushrooms. I think you should make the basic attacks more basic and add low cost skills to achieve what the basic attacks currently do.
They also use moves that inflict status ailments on the whole party, which is just rough for the first fight. I wouldn't make the status effect moves also hit the whole party.
The move that calls a weird show text animation thing and confuses the enemy is pretty cool, but it should be used in a storyline fight not a regular battle and it should do more than just add confuse to a single mush.
Some moves are broken. I tried to 'use a potion' which I thought would let me target a party member to use it on after selecting it, but it looks like it was a self use item that also had no effect and no animation. So it was just a waste of a turn completely. Make sure the description on your items matches their effect and when items are self-use only make sure that's evident in the description.
Poison persists through combat, so you have to go to the menu to remove it, but you also setup your items to close the menu after use. Every battle, if you survive, you have to open the menu several times to remove all the poisons and status effects. This is a very poor design. Make status elements leave upon ending battle.
There could be battle backgrounds, that doesn't take too much effort to put in.
Why is the basic attack so weird? The darkness based character's basic attack hits like 8 times but deals zero damage to everything. It's so slow and boring.
The descriptions on items don't match their effects in some cases.
The encounter rate feels super high and the battles feel very long because the enemies have too much HP.
When you get into the cave the game gets soo dark you can't even see what you're doing. Add some torches on the wall and a light radius around the player, you can add a lighting plugin and make the storyline make sense with relative ease. That way the gameplay won't suffer the way it does now.
Also the music completely stops and all you get is dark screen and a dripping water BGS. If you want a moment of silence you can add that with a parallel event wait x number of frames then change BGM then flip switch to turn itself off.
The numbers are soo far off balance and the game is almost unplayable. The cave enemies take 0 damage from almost every move in the game including the damaging consumable items, and you slowly wedel them down only to have them heal for 800 life. That is absolutely infuriating and no enemy should react this way, especially not a random encounter. So many zeros popup up during combat that I thought the game was trying to tell me something in binary.
Overall, there is just soo much wrong with this game that it's absolutely painful to play.
However, there was effort made and hopefully something can be learned from this whole experience going into the future. Thanks for participating in the game jam. I hope that you've obtained some more experience in this whole process and payed attention to what works and what doesn't. Good luck on the next one.
Some of that is a limitation of the RPG Maker system without plugins. The menu closing is due to the RPG Maker system and how it deals with common event calls.
I'll try to fix the battle system more later on. I definitely want to try to see if I can mess with things to make the potion generation smoother and more intuitive.
The insanity inflicting skill actually does more than just confuse. It actually adds some random effects to the battle. Originally, I was going to have insanity more contagious, but it is fairly broken already.
The poison wasn't supposed to work like that. Your party actually all resist poison to different degrees, but I haven't added in the system to make poison a gauge that fills. In the future, I'll remove their resistances and just have a gauge that needs to be filled.
I was considering battle backgrounds, but there were some issues with that because of one of the moves that I never had time to figure out (also a limitation of the base engine without plugins).
Voyd's basic attack is actually really strong, but it is designed to be used with a combo for maximum damage. Not sure which enemy you fought, but some enemies resist attacks from the wrong side. The game does mention this when the mechanic first applies, including in one of the skills' description.
Everyone has a different purpose with their skills and attacks (explained in the tutorial if not skipped):
Tulu: AoE basic, debuff, remove buff, add buff, aoe, boss killer, Ult: Anti all (the game gives a pretty direct hint on how to activate her Ult in the battle style tutorial). Can also learn debuff/boss killer, mob clearer, and finisher. (She is meant to kill bosses and set up the enemies for the party or kill enemies)
Nol: HP Depletion basic (random target- not entirely spammable), Item generation, AoE, Anti-Tank, Debuffer, Enemy/Boss Killer, buffer, protector, utility, healer, survivalist, Ult: Anti enemy / Anti final boss (The game gives a hint on how to activate this in the battle style tutorial). (She is meant to be all purpose)
Voyd: Anti target basic, item generation, AoE, debuffer, Ult: Anti enemy/boss (This should activate automatically with use of Voyd unless the player spams basic attacks). (He is meant as an ulter)
Nara: Mode based basic (Damage, Side based AoE, Healing, Buff, Void Side removal), Debuff, Survival, Mode change, Ult: Anti enemy (The game gives a small hint on how to activate this in the battle style tutorial, but it is meant to be discovered only by players trying to fiddle around with her). (She is sort of all purpose, but harder to use than Nol. Set up right, she is both anti-army and potentially anti-boss.)
There is an item you are supposed to use when you enter the caves. You should start with four of them, can make more, and two of the signs hint at it (one outside the cave, one in the cave) - they tell you to bring a light and there is an item/skill called Light Potion. One of the signs tells you to check your inventory. There is a secret that you can't obtain unless you use this item/skill in the cave. I'll be trying to fix that later on to be more clear.
Not sure which potions are broken. I checked and none of them or the items seem to be broken? No item in the game has scope self, for one. Only a few skills have scope none (actually, some skills have scope self, but the descriptions shouldn't suggest being able to use it on someone else) and they all seem to be working as intended. I do have some scope all/random though. Unless you had a double input for some reason, though that I can't really help if that happened. Unless you were using a Stockpile skill, but the name of the skillset is Stockpile and the game mentions that you stored the item (and the battle tutorial mentions it if not skipped). I do intend to change stockpile and use gift completely later though.
The encounter rate is high on purpose because it is supposed to push you to use a skill/item, which triggers a hidden event that lets you somewhat choose when to have encounters. I think you start with some of that item to hint at the player using them.
I'll see about adding some music to the caves later if I can find some appropriate music. I wanted it to be a bit quieter in the cave, but I can see that adding music might be useful. I'll try to make the battle start sound a bit lower than it is now.
Ummm... Actually, which version of the game did you play? Unless you are playing the archived/backup version, which is not marked as windows version (and is marked as v0.0.0.0.a when the other files are marked as v0.0.0.1.c.r9), almost no skill should do 0 damage unless you are attacking from the wrong side or it is meant to do 0 damage because all skills have a minimum damage that they deal as long as the enemy isn't immune. The game explains the side mechanic when you first encounter enemies that this mechanic applies to assuming you haven't already figured it out by then. The tutorial text should be repeatable with a key item.
Well, either way, with all the problems that RPG Maker MZ has without plugins, I'll probably remake this in Unity or Godot since they are more reliable and easier to program for, especially for what I want to do.
I gotta admit, it was a little rough trying to play this one. The story wasn't exactly compelling and I had a lot of issues with the gameplay.
There's a lot of room for improvement and I hope you take the feedback everyone gave you and learn from it.
Thanks for playing. Some issues can be fixed and should be fixed in the future when I don't have to worry about a minimum/maximum time limit. Other issues, I'll have to decide if I want to add plugins or not since adding plugins kind of defeats the purpose of the game.
The shop dialogue is long for the first time, but there is actually a reason for the dialogue. After that initial dialogue, it is much shorter unless you encounter the reason for the long dialogue. Adding categories to the shop menu would require plugins or some pretty crazy script calls. I was trying to do this without plugins and I was trying to minimize the amount of crazier script calls. That said, I might reduce the categories to all, consumables, and gear.
Himesaur did my art. I think I mentioned her in the credits as the one that did the art for the game (including the "final boss"). It is actually available as free DLC for MV/MZ + additional assets I put on the rpgmaker forums.
It is breaking the fourth wall, but it also isn't. One of the endings partially explains it, but basically one of the world gods made them a world to play with and they are just treating the entire adventure as a video game and are just messing around. They are hinting that the world isn't real on purpose for a few reasons, including because they are trying to get the player to do something, but without outright saying it. You are supposed to just feel like something is off about the game up to the ending and then realize what is going on (the endings more or less give it away) if you haven't figured it out by then.
The ultimate moves are actually supposed to be secrets and are only mentioned so that the players know they exist as well as provide a clue to the player on how to ready at least one ultimate (some players can figure out all four methods with the clues provided without stumbling on them, but the ultimates are really way too OP). One ultimate in particular has multiple cutscenes and events tied to it. The Ultimates are more or less instant kills on non-bosses and some ultimates can one shot bosses. There is also a bit of story element to why they don't want the player using the ultimate. Same as the fourth wall issue. They don't actually want to use their Ultimates. Nara's Ultimates are really hard on her where one of them can kill her if she makes a mistake and the other requires a lot of concentration. Nara doesn't like unnecessary work. She's the only one in the party who legitimately doesn't want to be playing the game. The world gods don't want Tulu to use her Ultimate because it is too powerful. Her own party doesn't want her to use her Ultimate because it is indiscriminate (in an earlier version of the game, Tulu's ultimate had a chance to permanently kill your party members. That is where the 1/8th chance to survive comes from for her Ultimate.). Nol considers her ultimate a waste of resources. Voyd doesn't really care, which is why his Ultimate is the easiest to figure out. Also, them saying that there is no notification is actually sort of a lie for the same story reasons.
I'll mess with slingshot settings later to make it faster. It is hard to stop the animation without plugins, but I'll try to see if I can at least fine tune the slingshot's animations a bit.
Battles are definitely easier in this version. That was more because of the issue where if you rushed my game, you could beat it in maybe 15 minutes and if you took your time, it could take over an hour. So I rebalanced some things for the jam to try to keep it so players would end up between 20-50 minutes.
Yeah, the encounter rate is very high. You are actually supposed to get tired of fighting, and look to see if you have any items that can get rid of encounters and realize there are a bunch of skills for stuff (since there is no real way to increase encounters without plugins). I do intend to lower the encounter rate and have visible enemies though.
Nara is actually already OP and even more so if you can figure out how to combo her with Nol. There is a reason why switching takes a turn and why Nol has her skills and Nara has hers (Nara's skills are Nol's skills because her weapons are all made by Nol using Nol's potions). Nara can potentially do the highest damage of the entire party and can be very hard to kill if you set her up as a tank. You do need to really mess with her though to make her viable. She isn't viable unless you start doing combos with the other characters.
Don't buy the salve. You are supposed to look at it and go: worthless. It is there more as a comparison item to show off how much better Nol's potions are. There was supposed to be a joke sub-ending revolving around getting 99 salves, but I didn't add that to the jam version of the game.
You can't directly run away from that fight in the current version, but if you lose, you initiate a run event. I do intend to allow you to directly run in a later version though since originally, the running thing was supposed to be a way to return home. (The reason why you can't escape normally is the 'if it is too hard'. Your characters should be pretty OP by the time they fight it to the point where Nara can kill it easily with combos, Nol/Voyd could probably solo it. Tulu can just kill it piece by piece or use her boss killers (she should have at least one of them by the time you fight Hydra Liks. It is more of a 'if you manage to lose' thing)
I do love the character art and the idea of having 2 super powerful characters right from the beginning. The crafting mechanic in battle is super cool too! Although I do wonder where Nol gets her materials from.
I've played your game for only 1 hour, but I did get very confused about what to do and where to go exactly. I get that the caves are where we had to go, but it was dark, and I'm not sure what item I would need to light the caves. I definitely missed something, so I'm gonna have to replay it to get a better understanding of the story. Gameplay-wise, everything played out super nice, and I noticed there are quite a lot of mechanics involved in the battle. It was kind of overwhelming.
If anything, I think if you have some kind of cutscene at the beginning to develop the background of who these characters are, and how they relate to each other, I feel like most people would be able to empathize with the characters a little bit more.
Yeah, I shortened it quite a bit due to time constraints.
And it was definitely more overwhelming than originally intended. You were intended to start off around level 5/15/1 and have a much smaller pool of skills, but for the sake of time, I bumped up all of their levels, so Nol just starts with a large number of her skills already unlocked.
I think it says somewhere the Nol makes the potions by converting her energy into potions, which she can do because she is the clone of a goddess, but that later part isn't explicitly stated. I'll see later if I need to make the item for the caves a bit more clear or if increasing the exposure to skills/items will make it more clear. The caves were more or less meant to prod the player into learning more about what the characters can do. (It is possible to get through the caves without using any items, it will just be much harder).
Loved the character designs! I could tell you worked hard on making the characters unique both in personality wise and battle wise. Very interesting concept here! I wish I had more to notate for feedback but I genuinely couldn’t find anything negative so congrats on that!
:D
A bit late reply, but thanks. I hope you had fun at least. And yes, I wanted players to have a good amount of options of how they want to play the game. A huge theme of my games are choices and here I wanted players to have their choice in terms of how they went about the battles. I wanted players to be able to fight with a different style each battle if they wanted, find a preferred style, or even just sort of brute force things. I also wanted to show off the various things that the native engine (without plugins) was able to do so that developers could really see what potentials games/systems that they can make without plugins.
I love the art style and the quirky dialogue! It's really cute and silly! I really like that you put real thought into making each character unique in battle. It took me a second to get used to it, but once I got the hang of things, battles were easy. Except for the clown... Definitely didn't like the clown...
I'm glad you liked the art and dialogue. I designed the skills so that players could either go with the one man carry method, the two man carry method, or have a bunch of other options if they wanted to experiment. There are a bunch of hidden little combos. For example:
So yeah, I wanted players to have a lot of options depending on how far they were willing to look and experiment and I wanted each playstyle to feel somewhat unique.
Yeah, the Jester is supposed to be sort of annoying of a fight. I think I even mentioned it in the dialogue. It is designed to show you how Tulu learns skills if you haven't already learned skills for her. There is actually a way to skip that because there are three ways to kill the Jest of All Time.
I found Nara to be quite easy to use once I equipped her with the Kodama. She easily outpaces the other characters in level, and her quick strike (Not sure if I am remembering that name right) is plenty strong enough after Tulu has used her "normal punch" thingy. All those 200 damage strikes add up.
Oh wow, someone actually used Tulu's Light Punch for the original purpose of buffing Nara's Rapid Strikes XD . I actually even forgot about it because I changed Rapid Strikes after to have more uses.
Did you figure out Nol's most important combo with Nara? Because that can further boost the damage. (Hint: her relationship with Nol, which is mentioned fairly early on).
I'm not sure. Usually I used Nol for "Exp(Lotion)" attack because it hits ridiculously hard, particularly once defense had been debuffed on the enemies. Of course, once they were down to one or two enemies left, the basic attack hits so many times it becomes the far better choice.
I'm curious, if you are saying only one was carrying, was that Tulu or Nol?
Actually, all four can carry, but only Nol, Voyd, and Nara can support (Tulu only has one support skill and it is both an attack and support, well, two if you count one of her learned skills, but that skill is hard to learn). It does require some experimentation to figure out the combos needed for Nara though and Voyd carries in a very specific way (fast charging Ult). Nara is actually the best carry in the game except for against bosses if you can figure out how to use her (She does work for bosses as well, but bosses can resist/counter her ultimates, so it is risky). Nol and Voyd are close seconds. Tulu is actually the worst carry, but she looks like the best if you unlock some of her skills because her learned skills are all high damage and fast charging.
I mean, it is a completely valid playstyle to just use Tulu for everything, but that is definitely one of the more boring approaches. I designed them so that there were many valid playstyles to use. I mean, there is even the sac method, the auto method, and other options.
Like, one totally valid way to play is give Tulu the auto necklace and use the concentrated antidote or antidote bomb to kill both Nol and Nara at the start of each fight. Another strange, but valid way to fight is to use Tulu's insanity on all the enemies, then kill both Tulu and Nol while Nara spams her avoid skill (this doesn't work on bosses). You could even go a bit crazy and have Nol just spam pops against smaller groups (We are pop stars now! Once you pop, you just...).
There was no wrong approach, really and I made some of the more broken non-ult playstyles a bit harder to figure out. Really, I wanted the players to be able to have their own unique experiences with the exception of the Jest enemy.
I'm honored that you thought so highly of my game XD . Honestly, you can do most things in post-game except for revisit the story cutscenes. You might lose the divine buff though if you take too long. I highly doubt that anyone has figured out how to fight the secret boss yet. There is a clue, but most people will miss it. I did make a slight mistake with that fight, so it is way harder than it is supposed to be. Or way easier if you have the divine buff. (You lose the hidden divine buff after an hour of playtime).
If you want a minor bonus line, fight the secret boss with impossible mode on. Just don't expect to beat the boss in impossible mode.