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Benny Makes Games3 years ago(+1)

Hi there, Emmanuel_Rosas!

I'm Cash, one of the judges for the RPG Maker MZ Jam, and I received your game to judge for Round 1. Here's a link to the VOD for when I played your game: 

Since Round 1 is finished, I am giving a review of each game without scores. The below is my review of your game without a score. :)

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REVIEW DISCLAIMER

Dear developer! Thank you for making this game :) Here's my disclaimer I'm placing before all my reviews - I appreciate all games, and I consider every creative work a gift from the artist to the audience. The very fact that you made something is worth celebrating! Being a judge of this game, as was stipulated in the rules, I had to play at least up to the first existing hour of every entry and judge the game on that alone - no more than that! If any gamebreaking bugs were found, the game would be disqualified, and I was to judge the game based on the submitted entry by the deadline - without any additional notes. Here is my overall impressions of the game. Again - thanks for creating it! I appreciate every entry, that you gave it your all, and I encourage you to do what you love - if that means making more games, then please do so! Don't let my (admittedly sometimes too brutal) feedback deter you from making future games - I really want you to succeed! Much love, Cash <3

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CASH REVIEWS: "Beyond the Star" by Emmanuel_Rosas

My first impression of this game was that I liked the pixel graphics. It evoked a style that reminded me of games of old. I entered as a protagonist whose goal was made clear from the start - to touch the star.

The quest system was very innovative, and I enjoyed the User Interface. Quite nice!

NOW IT IS TIME TO QUEST!

I often think that if a game is going to have a questing system, that it should be story-driven, rather than "go and kill 10 imps and I give you gold!" That can quickly turn into a grindfest. I have seen it done well, though, so we'll see how this game does it.

OOH, GAME LOOK PRETTY!

This game had a lot of nice visual polish! I did like how the pixel art looked, and the mapping was very nice, and the user interface was quite usable. Polished, with good animations. I don't have much to complain about here: the visual presentation of the game was quite great!

Except perhaps that whenever you gained items, the text was so small and it rushed by so fast that I was often unable to see it. I think it's better if you're going to do it such a way, to make it more obvious what the person is picking up.

DUNGEON DESIGN - ENCOUNTERS!

When it came to prowling the dungeons, I felt like the touch-to-battle encounters could all be dodged. I wasn't sure at first, and maybe even by the end, which encounters it was good to battle, because they seemed to drain my HP at a rate that I was unable to recover from in the long term.

It was nice to have a warning prompt whenever you were about to face someone strong - I think that was a good touch. However, I wasn't sure why, story-wise, every person that was on your way to the star was some kind of rival that you'd immediately fight. What is the context for the fighting? Why does our protagonist care so much about the star that he'd fight others on the way up?

These questions and more, when we get to...

...THE STORY STUFF!

Whenever I talked to NPCs in this town, they felt... just like that, NPCs. It's a shame, because the town looks quite nice! They say things like "I'm a shopkeeper and I sell goods!" Sure you do, everyone else in RPG land does that - I want to know something about this world I'm in other than "Hey, this is a JRPG world!"

There is a couple - Bob and Tom - who have opposing views on the star being false or true. But nothing more than that? I wanted to know more about where I am, what this world is like, what's going on in the area around me. No such luck.

Even the wizard simply says "to get to the star, you need to go up the Enchanted Tower". But what is the Enchanted Tower? Why is it there? I'm sure more would be revealed past the hour that I was required to judge this game within, but I would rather be gripped into the story from the start of the game, instead of going straight into grinding.

Everyone says "I want to reach the star", "My son went to reach the star", "I went blind trying to reach the star" but nothing more interesting other than that. So there was no real reason to care about more than that.

I don't think I found much of a reason to care about my mission, put quite simply.

This story would be forgivable if the battles and battle progression was more exciting. There were a lot of battles where the strategy just amounted to what seemed to be endless attacking. Enemy after enemy, and they were mostly acting the same. I would spam attack throughout. Perhaps there was a level of strategy that I was missing, but I couldn't find it, and I really did try. 

It also seemed that a lot of the battles relied on RNG, especially on the boss at the end of the first level, I found to be quite weird - a couple tries I did while using an entirety of potions, and it wouldn't work - I died each time. But then I tried to defeat it maybe a third time and then it was easily defeated using the same strategy, without a single potion. The only thing that changed was the RNG. At that point I felt like whatever I did in battles, it really didn't matter too much apart from when to attack and when to heal, and even then, I seemed at the mercy of RNG. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Then just as I was about to finish my hour of the game jam, I entered the second level and got oneshotted by a ghost. Not sure if this is a flaw in the gameplay balancing, but it certainly felt quite punishing! Again, I could be missing something, but if you watch the video provided, you could possibly give me more tips.

However, despite whether or not I used good strategy, this is the experience I had, and that is all I can judge it on.

OVERALL IMPRESSION

This was very nice looking, and it had nice presentation, however I felt that the battles were quite a grindfest for my particular build. I wished there was at least a bit of extra story to flavour the game, and to break up the monotony, which is a shame, because the game looks visually quite well presented! However, I found that it would have been better with more interesting decisions in battles.

Aside from all the above, thank you for making this game! Every game is a gift. I appreciate it greatly.

Reply
Emmanuel Rosas3 years ago

Hello my friend, thanks for playing my game, I agree with you on some things, for example, that the text when obtaining objects is not very noticeable, that the NPCs do not have much information to contribute, or even the great loss of gold like consequence of losing a battle.

But with all due respect my friend, it seemed that you weren't paying attention to what you were doing while playing (both in and out of the game), that you were doing it out of obligation and not out of love of art. I understand that you have to play a lot of games and that it can feel monotonous, but also remember that you are a judge, and you have that position for something, so please when you play make sure to pay attention to exploit all the mechanics of the game, this includes paying attention to the dialogues (not just reading them), and that partly because of this, you felt a bit frustrated playing the game as you didn't have enough versatility in combat or enough gold to buy items.

Based on the above, let me tell you that you did not access three menu options at any time, so you missed the class system (you could be a bit stronger and have more skill versatility by assigning yourself the Mage class as second class) , the skills learning system (with which you could learn various skills for each class), and the quest system (with which you could obtain more information about the lore of the game, rewards that would facilitate the progress of the game, and more classes with new skills to optimize to your liking and thus have even more strategies in combat).

As you can see, there were several aspects that you were looking for when playing, a little more history, more strategic battles and less monotony in the gameplay in general. Yes, I know, even with that the game could include more story and fewer battles for your liking, something that I will take into account for a future version, although it is not only about liking you, not all players are like you, and I focused this game a little more towards the mystery, in discovering little by little as the game progresses, and even with unfinished information at the end of the game, free to the interpretation of the player ...

Anyway, your intention is appreciated because you do it with the desire to help, and if there is still a little interest in you to play the game, please wait for a more polished version to be published at the end of the Game Jam evaluation phase.

Reply
Benny Makes Games3 years ago(+1)

Hi Emmanuel_Rosas! Thanks for your response. I’ll do my best to reply to each of your concerns in turn.

Firstly, I will say that while my attention span might be quite flighty - I have been diagnosed as having ADHD and have a diagnosis as such - I still take the game with complete seriousness and have a great passion for game design. Rather than doing this out of obligation, I appreciate each and every game as a creative gift, and treated your game with the same amount of seriousness that I would treat any game. I enjoy the art of reviewing and giving critical feedback.

I will say that playing through many of the games, I found a lot of them not so monotonous! They paced their games quite well and they provided interesting conflicts, varied amount of different skills being tested.

If I did not access three menu options, it was because I felt that the game didn’t introduce them to me. I enjoy complex systems in games that allow introductions of levels of complexity, and if I had have known, I would have explored them gleefully! But I simply didn’t recognise that those existed, and whether or not it’s because of the user interface or because of the way I played the game, I think it’s important to realise that there’s a reasonable chance that a large portion of players would ignore these tabs tucked away. They weren’t explicitly introduced, and because I usually assume that RPGs have the same standard tabs tucked away in their menus, if they aren’t introduced to me explicitly, then my mind doesn’t usually get gravitated towards them. I feel like if there were more hints in the game design or even a tutorial placed that introduced these levels of complexity, then I would have been able to explore these levels of complexity and have fun with them. But as it stands, it’s entirely possible for a person to play through the game and never notice them at all. Whether you see that as the fault of the player or the fault of the game’s design is up to you. But it did affect my overall experience.

If I had known I could assign myself the Mage class as a “second class”, I would have given it a go. I think it says something that even up until the point you told me, I was unaware that such a thing existed. Perhaps if I had played up until past the first hour of the game, I would have realised these things existed, but I am required by the rules to only judge the game based on my first hour of gameplay, and I spent so much time within battles that no NPC pointed out these mechanics to me, to my understanding. If they did, I suppose that is my fault, but I didn’t wilfully ignore these tabs.

Judging from your description of the quest log, it’s my personal opinion that it’s usually better to progress the story organically rather than through a quest log, but that’s a general assumption and it might not be too correct. If I play the game again, I could find the quest log quite compelling, and it actually makes me interested in knowing what might have happened had I found it.

I honestly think that I did pay attention to the dialogues, but they didn’t have much information in them.

So actually, I think you are right in that if I had found these tabs, I would have discovered a whole new dimension of the game that would have increased my enjoyment of the experience as a whole. However, I didn’t find them, and I felt like I had no reason to find them.

Also, I don’t necessarily want more story and less battles. I really love battles, if they have a bunch of interesting decisions in them. I think you could have introduced the story subtly with the same number of words. It was nothing offensive, the writing, but in my playthrough I didn’t discover it. Perhaps if I did open the quest log I might have found some interesting lore that gave background to the area around me, but sadly, I didn’t find it.

I also very much like mystery in games! Very many of my favourite games are set in incredibly mysterious environments, but as I played, the mystery wasn’t gripping me.

It is important also to realise that all players do not play the game like me, I agree. But I can only judge based on my experience of the game.

Based on this feedback, I think that the improvement I would suggest would be to force the player to recognise the tabs in the menu that, without them, it makes the game quite a frustrating experience. It comes down to the feeling, “If only I could have known”. But it just wasn’t made obvious to me.

Either way, there is no objective evaluation of a game or piece of art, only descriptions of our experiences, so this one I had to trust what had been given to me.

Thank you for making this game, I see that a lot of heart went into it, and I appreciate that you gave us the gift of this game. Every game is a gift.

Cheers!

Cash :)

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