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(+1)

Hey this was a great job and I really enjoyed it. Pixel art was great of course, I enjoyed the music, and combat had some cool unique mechanics. I found the writing to be quite good as well, so I think you really checked all the boxes.

Game could have stood to have fewer battles, especially since grinding is so slow paced with only one attacker, and a frequent delay of a turn to use any skills. Simply replacing Reid's Attack with Defend would have made the UI navigation easier, as well as shaving off one or two skills that don't serve too much of a purpose that kind of makes choosing what to learn or do cumbersome. Also after getting a log, I was pretty much unstoppable with or without Reid, so balance felt a little worth checking.

Post game content was cool, but make sure you check your switches too. It's possible to retrigger stair dialog as if Reid were still there and even refight the last battle post game.

Keep making games! If you did this in a month including learning the engine, I anticipate some great stuff from you.

(3 edits) (+1)

Thanks a lot dude. Happy you enjoyed the music and writing, and I gotta give another huge shoutout to Violet for the graphics. While I did do some graphical touches like recoloring the NPCs and making a few custom sprites, it was Violet's spritework that made this game possible in the first place.

Encounter rates and grinding are the issues that pop up most commonly. I wish I could have made Reid have Defend instead of Attack for convenience, but I wasn't sure how to do that and there were so many higher priorities during dev time. There would have also been disparity between Reid having Defend in place of his Attack command and Harold learning Defend which ends up in his Special category. A friend of mine outside the RPG Maker community who tested Stuck In The Past also swept the whole thing with the log, although he also overleveled so I wasn't sure if it was the log or his level which was doing the work. The log actually has a +10 attack boost which is just asinine, and it'll definitely get some nerfs. As for the postgame stairs and events, that wasn't at the forefront of my mind since the postgame was essentially done in the last full day or two and I didn't anticipate the player to leave Appold after finishing the bonus challenge.

As I've mentioned before, I do plan to release a final version after the results come in which fixes some of these issues. Encounter rates will definitely be lower, I'll be sure to nerf the log, and I do plan on including a more comprehensive postgame since time limits won't be an issue after the jam. Developing the postgame also means fixing those pesky stairs, so that'll make the definitive version as well. I would absolutely love to make more games, especially now that I'm understanding RPGs a little more and I have a fresh new copy of MV to play around with.