quick pieces of advice:
- Reduce the frequency of random encounters greatly or use events that move around that you touch to fight instead, its like playing a game with a flashbang going off every 3 seconds after walking in some areas
- During the opening scene with the 2 crowned fellas, the lack of animation and sound made the scene of the woman falling into a rift kinda funny, which im not sure was the intention. Its very hard to make an emotional/dramatic scene, especially in rpg maker, but the most important things that was missing was Audio (sound effect of falling), Visuals (animation of the rift appearing and falling in), and Timing - without these things, it just kinda happens.
- Add autosaving or reminders to save before tough fights, died first time to the mechanical guy in the crystal place and i never saved so had to get to that point again, i was lucky to think to save before the "My Precious" orc, which i did no damage to with anything i had, and escaping was disabled so i either had to wait a few minutes to let it kill me or restart the game
- Minor thing that doesnt matter but something i like seeing: use a different icon set to the default one. this is personal preference but MV's icon set removes identity to the items and equipment i get, i recommend looking at Avy's Icons, which includes upscaled version of the older icon set from VX Ace, still its your choice (https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?threads/open-avys-icon-workshop.21623/)
- A lot of new RPG Makers create oversized maps with little content to fill the area, this has some of those, like the crystal place being big and empty while only having a single chest (that i found) in it. I recommend condensing those kinds of maps.
- The Elder guy sure had a lot to say, I had the dev notes enabled so i know of the message saying "the following is very important lore please pay attention", but i dont think that'll convince an average player to read through all that info even if the important text was highlighted. It's very easy to get excited explaining lore and trying to get it all out as soon as possible, but I recommend spreading out the info more, only have the Elder say the basics of whats needed to be said and the rest can be pieced together throughout the game. There's also the challenge of getting players interested enough in the story to be willing to learn more about it themselves, which can be very hard to do.
- I stopped at the guard to the city who had 2000 health and healed and also restored to full once getting low enough, after he healed to full i assumed it was a scripted loss and let him kill me, turns out it wasnt and i didnt feel like doing that again. Enemies healing themselves often feels like its prolonging a fight rather than adding challenge to it, unless by healing it enters a different phase with different abilities. Also, when i began the fight I experimented by not attacking and guarding a few turns just to see if you thought to include an interaction to win by showing the guard we didnt want to fight him, so if it fits it'd be cool to add that kinda interaction, can do it with Troop Events and a switch that turns ON if the guard is below 100% HP etc.
"quick" pieces of advice done, some might even say the "quickest" pieces of advice... 🐈💨