Post by Tomodev in Ruins of Elliwar [work in progress] jam comments

AGDG DEMO DAY 45 » Entries » Ruins of Elliwar [work in progress]

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Why do you keep a Photoshop folder with all your Gimp backups of various pieces with the Game?

Also why keep the Intro movie 3 Times in your folder, totalling 300mb when you could just keep the 40mb one alone.

I'm just gonna assume the Mapshots folder is for Parallaxing or something along those lines, especially the Gimp files. Thats another GB you could save on the shipped project. (Or at least parts of it if you actually need some of those files ingame, I'm sure you don't need the Gimp ones)

You also seem to be including all the default ressources RPGMaker comes with, like 20+ Title screens.

You have a bunch of full sized Tilesets that just have one or two tiles different, or just be the same Tileset but dark to be used at night. Since it looks like you're parallax mapping anyway, you shouldn't need Tilesets at all. If you do actually need them, you can just tint the Screen at night, to cut out half of your Tilesets, and if its only 1 or 2 tiles different, just use character graphics for those.

What I'm trying to get at here, is that this Game should not be 3.7GB in Size.

Very nice Title music and background Image.

If all your Options fit into one Screen, I don't think theres a need for an Option submenu, but maybe you plan on expanding those in the Future. You don't need the Icons on the single Options, a header with the Icon once would be enough.

RGB should go from 0-255 not -255 - 255. Also if you're doing that, an alpha value would be nice, especially to let me test out the Colors.

You're already using an actual intro movie, not some moving pictures, so no need to only zoom and rotate those, you could have a proper descend onto the planet, instead of zooming in on a low res image of it.

Don't describe what the People are doing, show it on screen. I.e. during the intro when the man is pulling a gowing stone etc., have a small animation of him putting his pants in his pockets, then add a glowing circle. If its just some chanting magical thing, just close eyes, aim head down, and move hands to the lips.

When he stops in surprise, a classic jump in the Air with exclamation mark or something can work, or something less exagerrated.

You have nice Dialogue portraits, any reason the Bloodied man isn't a bloodied man but a fully armored ready to fight knight? Also don't put the Talking name in the middle, I'd much prefer it being next to the image, so you can have both dialogue partners on screen, one per side. Also Edricks portrait doesn't match his sprite aswell, especially the missing Arm cloth.

Tutorial battlesprites are black. Why? But nice voice lines (did you do those yourself). Post battle shows 0CM next to level. Are your characters litteraly growing when they level up? The shield break idea is nice, good Job. Same with the Weapon cycling. Relics not so much. In total it feels a bit overloaded tho, with Shieldbreaks, weaknesses, Relics, Weapon cycling, and obviously status effects and general Skills. I don't think you need all that much to make a Fun battle.

Your menu displays increased size images for the selected item, but that gets pixelated heavily, since you use the same small image as for the actual list icon. Also has a right side list of the same items or something that seems to do nothing and is unselecteable. Why?

Why do I have a equip skill option if I have basically no limit on how many skills can be equipped at once? Its turn based, so putting skills earlier for faster access isn't needed.

Ranger has no Skills, and it seems to cost nothing to just learn every skill on everyone, including the ? Skill second in the Paladin list. Same as with the battle, skill learn, skill equip, class selection, attribute points are all nice systems, but all together? A bit much I think.

Your collisions don't work everywhere. I could easily accidentally walk off the cliff in the Intro onto the puddles below. And since your maps seem to be gridlocked in design anyway, any reason you're not just sticking with the RPGMaker default collision?

The zoom in battles is unneeded, and I'd wish there were proper backdrops and nonblack partysprites.

The dialogue continue prompt on the bottom looks weird. Why no arrow?

Theres no need for a big red Battle text at the beginning of it. I already knew its a battle from it being on the battlescreen.

Your sword curser is really weird and unfitting.

I can literally use empty skill Slots. Why?

Cure says it cures all, but only heals a single Target, celestial singletarget healed all allies tho.

The cursor to select enemies is below the healthbar and barely visible.

Why are some of the floating glowing orbs items to pick up but others aren't?

Skills that only affect the User should not have me have to select the user.

Forced loosing battle is boring.

Are some of your overworld sprites upscaled? They seem suspiciously blurry.

Larks overworld Sprite also doesn't match the dialogue one.

Your overworld map is well drawn, but clashes with the character Sprite. Also why is the movement so abysmally slow there?

Cat in town slides across the floor during its animation.

Menu doesn't wrap over when pressing left on the leftmost selection.

Moving Guard has no collision.

Shopkeeper sells 2 different version of Vial of Sanity which seem to be the exact same Item.

I can't see how much Money I have in the Menu.

Theres lag when entering a new Map, causing me to having to wait a bit before being able to move.

Your parallax clips into itself when moving in the Blacksmith.

You don't need to show the weapontypes I can't equip anyway, just show the ones I am able to equip, seems to be only 2 per class anyway.

Most NPCs in Town just stand there doing nothing, being uninteractable and nothing.

Played for roughly 1 Hour before reaching the conclave and the End of the Demo. obviously blown up a bit by writing the review during playing.

Main Menu had no exit button so had to alt+f4.

Despite the probably harsh sounding review, I had fun playing it, but to me it seems you're way overloaded on Systems in general, just slapped every plugin you could find on it, in order to make it seem less like an RPGMaker Game, while still keeping the core elements of it, like the classical battle system, 4 man party, classic overworld sprites, NPC movement, dialogue setup etc.

Sorry for a probably rude sounding review.

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VoidMoon Studio2 years ago(+1)

Wew lad this is a long one, lets see if I can get through this.

I kept all the folders and stuff because I was exporting without using any of the unused items and stuff from my cluttered regular folder, but the game kept crashing for some reason on this build. There is some file in there that is getting referenced that is important and it's gonna take time to figure it out, so to get it up in time I had to keep everything in there just to make sure it actually loaded.

All the intro stuff is just a mismash of open source pictures and stuff I found and edited together in premiere. So that's why it looks like that. Just a placeholder until I have funds for an artist to animate something nice. Considering how much that's going to cost, It's gonna be a while so I needed to have something in the meantime.

Actually showing things on screen takes different sprites for every animation, so rather than do that, I opted for a narrator. I know it's not for everyone, but it will be very dialogue heavy, and more like a fantasy novel than a game in that one regard.

Bloodied man isn't bloody yet because I'm still commissioning artwork, so it'll be a while before I can afford everything.

All the sprites for the characters are just close approximations I could make with the generator until I can get those commissioned as well.

I didn't do the voice lines, had people volunteer for that. They are placeholders until I rework the entire voice lines system and hire actual voice actors.

CM = class mastery points. They are used to buy abilities.

As for the battle system, it's basically a direct ripoff of octopath traveler. so although it feels overloaded, it's basically just the mechanics from that game, with just all different spells and abilities and such.

Yeah, the menus are pixelated atm, going to work on upscaling the sprites instead of using nearest neighbor.

As for the equip skill option. In the future you will only be able to equip 4 skills to start with, so the skills you unlock on other classes can be placed there. However, in the demo atm, all skills made are open, and you have basically infinite equip slots. Everything in that regard is a work in progress.

The collisions messing up in a few of the starting map is due to being in the middle of switching from grind based collision to collision maps. All but the very few beginning maps have that, and are being changed right now. I've gotten around to everything except those beginning forests and cave parts.

Dang I liked the sword cursor

Yes, a few of the sprites when you enter meriwynne were upscaled using the wrong algorythm so they are blurry, I've gotten around to upscaling around 75% of all the sprites correctly now, and am working on it atm.

The guard and man in merriwynne have no collision, neither do the children. This is intentional.

Yeah, still writing dialogue for npcs, but also holding off on a lot of them because I want to do quest things with them, so going to finish the first part before giving them dialogue.

As for being overloaded with systems, it's really jsut a shield break system with a boost for combat. And unlocking skills with class mastery points gained from combat. It may seem overwhelming at first, but it's really not. Maybe the way it's presented atm seems crazy because everything is unlocked for testing, but the next build for DD I'll have all the locks in place. The programming of how the skills being unlocked is REALLY fucky so I have to have every single skill done in the game and its id exactly to play on every other skill to get an exponentially increasing iteration of CM cost, so I needed to make every skill (which other than ranger is basically done) before I could add all that stuff.

Maybe I can figure out a way to introduce the system in a more lore friendly way rather than just dump it all in a tutorial. Maybe tutorial as you go or something.

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Tomodev2 years ago

I never played octopath, so no Idea that it had a similar battle system.

The sword cursor itself is nice, it just doesn't fit with the rest of the graphics I think.

Moving NPCs should definetly have collision, it looks super weird floating over them.

For the Dialogue, I understand wanting to save time/energy on doing a bunch of dialogue sprites, but it really disrupts the flow and feel of it, when theres just some bracketed text describing what is happening while theres actually nothing happening. It doesn't even have to be a unique animation per action, if you include a handful of generic ones, like reaching into a pocket, pointing somewhere/handing something out, holding hands over the face etc, especially on those low resolution sprites, it can already look convincing enough.

For the overloaded systems, it seems to be a lot more then just a shield break and a boost. You still have your weakness exploits combined with weapon swapping on top, aswell as generic spells like buffs/taunts/status effects etc.

If you're limiting the number of skills you can equip at once, the unlock/equip skill section makes a lot more Sense, but the whole relic/boost section just feels useless. I mean, of course its usefull to boost your attack to increase damage and such, but I don't think thats needed at all. You might just aswell have a proper setup for the weapon swapping to exploit weaknesses and break shields with it, instead of tacking a boost system on top. But then the same thing is with the shield break itself, of course it helps that every few attacks the enemy gets stunned/weakened, but you might aswell just have them be weak to certain elements/types directly.

To me personally at least, it feels like I'm always jumping through multiple unneeded hoops when I could just aswell attack a demon with holy i.e. to get boosted damage, instead of having to attack it with holy to break its shield to increase damage, then pump in relics to also increase damage. The core of what I have to do is the same, attack the demon with holy, but instead of getting a direct feedback of increased damage, I have to wittle down the shields with it, and then pump my relic points into it.

Now, if shield break didn't affect damage/stun the enemy, but do something interesting once it happens, but requiring specific shield breaking skills to do it, or if relics could only be gained by relic gaining skills instead of at the end of a turn, and be used for proper effect alterations, like relic-ing a poison spell to turn from singletarget into multitarget, or otherwise changing spells in a more interesting way then numbers going up, that'd be nice.

This might have been in the Demo, I didn't play around with too many skills, since every combat quickly boiled down to looking what weakness they have under their healtbar, and spamming the related skill to get their armor off, then just using three relics on the same skill to finish them off.

If you intend to keep all the systems, a simple way is to introduce weapon swapping once a second weapon drops/gets found early on, before any trader. On first levelup you can explain the leveling system, instead of in the intro directly. Class swapping/spell learning could be moved over to NPCs/Camp, so you can't do that everywhere, and then be explained once you reach the proper storypoint. Be it the first city, first camp or whatever. If not every enemy gets a shield to break, but only stuff like the big beetles i.e., you can have a forced encounter with a shielded enemy to explain shieldbreaks once it becomes important. Same for relics, if I'm assuming those are connected to the stone thing the main character is wearing, you can i.e. explain and unlock that whole thing when the witch joins for the wolf battle. Instead of having it autoloose and then have an overpowered witch come and finish it all, have the witch unlock/explain the relic thing, and have the wolves only be beatable by properly using the relic powers. For more then just damage/number of attack boosts of course. I.e. a normal sword slash does just damage, but a relic'd one breaks shields equal to number of relics into it.

Just throwing some Ideas around here on how to maybe make the system more interesting/interact with each other more. Haven't made a JRPG tho, apart from a bunch of old and terrible prototypes using stock RPGMaker combat, so keep that in mind please.

I'll be sure to give this another go a few months/DDs from now, to see what you come up with, it isn't necessarily a bad Game after all, just kind of early in development I think.

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VoidMoon Studio2 years ago(+1)

Thanks for the input, and when you're breaking it down like that, it does seem like a lot is going on. And thinking even harder, it does get pretty complicated, especially with the amount of skills there are. Later on, you need to have really well designed classes to take on enemies.
The boost is there for really your big damage after you break the shields of an enemy. But I suppose it's all the same in the end, it just adds some variability. But there are so really cool things I think too, like for example: Sorry for wall of text:

Having a rogue in your group, you can use an ability that when used on an enemy, the overkill damage is stored for the next attack. So in theory, you can use it to kill an enemy and store that damage. Then the next turn you have an ability that grants your next attack an automatic crit. So on that turn you timed it to break the big enemies shield before you rogue's turn, then your rogue uses their relic power to triple their damage, which now consists of the overkill damage as well as being an automatic crit, then you have the bard cast their ultimate spell on the rogue which replicates their next attack. So this huge combo does a metric fuckton of damage.

But thinking about doing stuff that complicated, maybe it would get hard to balance, because then I'd have to balance for those really big attacks?

As for downsizing, which would you think would be a better way to go about it? Losing the relic damage boost system, or losing the shield break system? (The weapon swap needs to stay because of stats for hybrid characters, and some abilities require certain weapons. When you can choose any classes' abilities, being able to equip 2 weapons gives you more of a wide variety of abilities you could use at least.)

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Tomodev2 years ago (1 edit)

I definetly think the weapon swap should stay aswell, I haven't used it in the Demo a lot, but its a very uncomplicated system that can easily change combat up a bit and it feels fairly unique for a JRPG.

I think your best bet would probably be to see which you can make more interesting. using relics to properly alter/improve your skills instead of just numbers going up, or more uniqueness in the shieldbreak system? Not every enemy having it, skills giving/taking shield points, only particular weapons affecting it (this ones already in if I recall correctly). If you get both to synergize well with each other, instead of feeling so much like 2 different systems you could potentially keep both aswell.

Personally I'd probably go with the shield break. If you expand that as mentioned above, it can work quite well also with the weapon swapping, since you can only break shields with certain weapons/weaponskills, maybe forcing you into your secondary weapon if you want to break that specific shield to be able to use a spell which would otherwise just be ignored or something.

*Edit: Be sure to play and test around with your current setup first tho. It'd be a shame if my stupid Ideas ruined your Combat.

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