I haven't had a great chance to sit down and play a lot of the jam stuff, but I pecked at this today and I like it quite a bit. Western RPGS are awesome and few and far between, so it's really cool to see one! There's some stuff I'm pretty impressed by already: The horse animation is really solid, I appreciate how the camera shifts to accommodate Karma at a gallop (a lot games kind of forget to do this), and I enjoy the experimentation with the progression system. A lot of RPGs don't go beyond like and exp-level system (not even the ones I've done so far :V), but it's something I've been thinking of messing with a lot in smaller RPGs. The system here probably most reminds of like, some of the SAGA games' spontaneous skill development and skill combos. Very cool to see ^^
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Thanks for taking the time to play the game :D! Yeah I've been wanting to play around with different takes on an RPG for a while, so glad to have given it a go. I was quite inspired by Live a Live for the setting as well so it's a bit of a game mash-up!
The horse animations are from this amazing asset pack 😊: https://onfe.itch.io/horse-sprite-with-rider-asset-pack
Live a Live is so gorgeous! Even the SNES original is super pretty. I feel a little bad that the Wild West chapter is kind of a small one compared to some of the others, but it's still cool. The only other western RPGs I can think of are Boot Hill Heroes, UFO 50's Grimstone, and err, maybe Wild Arms? I don't know enough about wild arms to say so, but I know some of its music feels western-inspired, so I dunno. I'm excited to try the Live A Live remake sometime soon, it's uhh on the list XD
That horse sprite is an excellent selection too, I'm pretty sure if you had to animate a horse like that it could easily take a month all on its own! I've done like one quadruped walk cycle before and it takes forever even with plenty of reference, so definitely a better use of the time to do like the coding and implementation and stuff ^^
Yeah, I’m not aware of many western style ones either – I think people mostly think of games like Read Dead rather than turn based rpgs 😆
The horse sprites definitely made it! I had originally wanted to add proper animations for all of the different abilities, then realised how much time that would take (not to mention, probably wouldn’t have turned out that great), but maybe one day I’ll give it a go!