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Hi, I’m still playing the demo as part of some study for the Battle Action Fantasy VN jam. It’s got very interesting animations, plot elements to start things very quickly and lively characters!

Battle design

Battle is a bit brutal after the first fights but much easier when you understand how to defend, then attack at the right time. I like how defend can work at the last moment (and in general I think that in ATB all actions should be instant; but it’s the first time I see an interrupt like this!). I wanted to play expert and wait before the last second the hit lands to determine which character is gonna be targeted and defend that one: unfortunately it’s too hard to quick switch and defend (also you can’t cycle between commands so you cannot press Up to go from Attack to Defend in situations where your turn gauge is ready at the last moment to Defend). But when one character is alive, it’s useful to avoid Defending when opponent is doing a non-offensive move.

Having the boost gauge shared is interesting, but since Recover (esp. with Overtime) heals most HP, you generally don’t need to boost that. So I just boost the attacks of the fighter (Isaac).

Overtime seems to have a very high ceiling so you can stack it and it feels weird at some point (OT at 22? I might just spam skills with or without boost now)

UI & Issues

I found many bugs, or rather UI inconveniences that make interactions more difficult, esp. in battle. I seem to lose focus after pressing Escape (it took me a moment to find Shift button was used for cancel, as I reflexively used Escape). I don’t have too much time now to list all issues found, but I can do this after the jam maybe. If you got a list of known issues, you can send me the link or add it to the description so I know I only need to report the unknown ones.

Oh, there’s that one I can report now: a bug you can exploit to your advantage, boost gauge filling in menu even when pausing time in the options. You can fill boost to max level every time with that…

I hesitated leaving the game as I wasn’t sure how saving works, but since there was no prompt and I saw my current save updated, I assume it’s full auto-save.

I don’t know if you intend to do a special update for BAF VN Jam or if you just have the tag as a general thing, but I’ll be checking the game again!

Hello! Thank you for taking the time to play the game! 

I'm glad you found the Defend aspect useful. A feature I could possibly add in the completed game is a way to have all party members capable of performing an action Defend with a single button, since there's not enough time to cycle through everyone as-is. Boosting with recovery skills may be more useful as you get further in the game, but right now it's primarily an offensive mechanic. To be honest, it's been a while since I played my own game since I've been occupied with writing and art for so long, but I think as HP and enemy damage increases, healing doesn't scale proportionally and so using Boost with Recover becomes a bit more viable.

I think Overtime caps at 50 or 99 (I don't remember which, exactly). I'll have to see if I give it a lower cap or instead give enemies skills that change your OT cap to a lower number.

The game saves automatically every time you enter the Hub area (where you can speak with characters or access menu options). There should be a icon displaying so, but maybe a bug is stopping it from appearing. I'll need to examine it. Regardless, a "This game autosaves..." when you first start kind of message may be useful.

Thanks for reporting the Boost bug and sharing your difficulties with the UI!I don't have a list of known issues since the game. Really just adding things that I encounter on my own to a Trello since not that many people have played this, haha!

I wasn't planning on submitting it or a variant to BAF VN jam, since it's my primary project and been worked on well in advance of the jam announcement - though I did add the tag when Arimia created it and posted about it in DevTalk earlier this year. Again, thank you so much for not only playing the game, but giving me such great feedback and things to look into. If you return to the game, I hope you enjoy it. I'm hoping to finish this project this summer - or at least have all of the content done so that I can focus on bug-fixing, adding additional ingredients, improving UI/UX, etc..!

Good luck with your project for the BAF jam! I remember seeing your posting for Spirit Link and hope it all goes well!

(+1)

Thanks for the reply. About balancing, yes it may make sense over time. You could do like Octopath and reduce healing power to 30% so boost is always useful for it, but with the current enemy power it is easy to lose 70-80% of HP in one non-Defended attack. This means you often need an emergency heal and therefore being able to do what without boost is useful (but if you make enemies attack a little more often but with weaker moves, this issue may disappear).

Otherwise you can go the I Am Setsuna way, using boost to give a qualitative extra side effect, such as continuous regen or status healing. This way boost is useful for the impact is not quantitative on healing. Note that I Am Setsuna actually uses “Momentum”, which is what you call Overtime; so you could use Overtime for those extra qualitative effects instead. The main difference I noticed in that I Am Setsuna’s overtime is manually triggered).

Speaking of which, I Am Setsuna’s Momentum is limited to 3 full spheres, to prevent stacking and encourage player to regularly use them. Again, the difference is that your Overtime is auto-consumed, so a small number may be too limiting in case player consumes a little inadvertently.

I don’t have the detail for focus lost bug, but trying to play the entire game with keyboard only, or gamepad only, is a good way to verify that focus is stable. You can even click outside buttons and stuff to make sure you still don’t lose focus (btw a Unity setting can prevent focus lost on click outside, but I didn’t test that so maybe it was already enabled).

Wow, you remember my post on Spirit Link! Thanks, we’ll do our best!

Thanks again! I really like the I Am Setsuna way of handling side effects for healing moves you mentioned. I'll have to experiment with that. 

Since OT takes the place of MP/SP, and there is no item system to "replenish" resources, a cap is a little tricky. Right now, the strongest offensive skill requires 40 OT and the strongest defensive skill requires 35 OT. However, a cap to "natural" OT gain, but still allowing characters to use their OT-passing skills to bypass that cap could work. I'm not sure how far you've gotten, but Isaac and Jean have a way to share or distribute OT with others while Sparta transforms it into bonus damage. Other characters will be able to utilize it in a similar manner as well.

Also, do you mind letting me know which fight(s) you felt the game spiked in difficulty? I'm interested in knowing which encounters players found most difficult for balance purposes.

Hm I see, Jean was definitely always on the edge of OT (well, generally not, I admit it happened after Isaac died). OT sharing would be helpful. And the cap is high to allow other skills to use it. But I admit, considering OT charge speed, max OT requirement would be 10-15. Unless OT charges faster with level? Just be careful with scaling over factors of 10 between skills: it will make the first skills work with super cheap OT, and player won’t be able to compare skill values reasonably in advanced game, possibly leading to useless skills (in RPG it mostly happens with items, such as Potion healing 50HP in end game where you have 9999HP) or OP skills. But I’d need to see the whole system and skills to be sure. You can have a non-spoiler playtesting with people by having them play advanced battles without story context (the difficulty is that they need to learn all the systems and skills to be able to test properly).

The difficulty spikes were the first mini-boss where you learned Rage (maybe it’s a good thing? you have to Defend properly both normal attack and Rage to go on) and the boss after that (although that’s to be expected).

My biggest issue was the battles getting longer and longer: if Jean dies, you will die soon unless boss has little HP left, but if Isaac dies, you can survive by using Jean to heal herself, Defend, repeat in a survival way, and doing little damage. So it’s not very interesting and I gave up and allow my character to die. This is because there is no way to revive an ally, which is also true in early game of many JRPG but those have items to revive instead: this gives you a few chances to revive other characters, and once you consumed all revive items, this time you generally die pretty fast even with a healer left.

Even if you did things properly, battles were quite lengthy. After 3 loops I get the system, it’s all about repeating the same things without losing my concentration. Since the enemy HP is not displayed I don’t know how much it will last and so the battle gets more tiring until I accidentally do some mistake and lose a character. So I’d rather have short battles that ensure you win if you understood the enemy patterns correctly and did the right thing 3-4 times. Of course, with a deeper system, more characters and skills, and more boss phases you can justify a longer battle, so maybe later in game.

I do see in the Tactical Guide that there are boss phases, but to be honest I didn’t grab the subtleties of them. Real-time battle makes it harder to pause and think of course, but I do remember that even Chrono Trigger had very clear boss phases. This may require more budget with dedicated boss sprites, but I think it’s also design and UI/text indications that made them recognizable (counter-attack was very clear although not super interesting, Juggler switching between physical and magical stance was done via text but graphics could help too, Magus switching elemental barrier via an actual skill use + text).

If there are only meant to make the boss a little stronger and not meant for the player to react in a particular way, then I suppose subtle “mini-phase” changes are fine, though.

Thanks for the detailed response! OT charge remains the same, though skills increase in power every 10 levels. The majority of skills cost under 10 OT, with those exceeding it being really powerful skills that you are encouraged to be using the distribution/manipulation skills for in order to use.

I'll have to experiment with giving Isaac a Revive skill - maybe changing the 'Survival Skills' skill to have an alternate effect if the ally is KO'd since Jean doesn't get her Revive skill until 10 - though that doesn't solve situations where he's KO'd. Maybe Jean's Restore can revive an ally if they're KO'd as an additional effect. Perhaps I can change Jean's Bio Seeker effect to make an enemy's HP permanently visible if the OT gate is met (with it not affecting damage otherwise), rather than have it only display in a message after using the skill.

There's definitely a lot of things I haven't considered as I'm sure I play the game "optimally" and so don't really know how others play or struggle with it aside from 1-2 playthroughs with the modern system I've seen. I'll have to look into setting up some kind of non-spoiler battle playtest build. Right now my priority is just putting everything together and then balancing it.

Regarding battle length, I'm concern that if battles are too short, I defeat the purpose of having them, since each encounter is fixed rather than something that occurs randomly multiple times in the field. The game's biggest inspirations are Yggdra Union and Etrian Odyssey, which are both pretty challenging, though because they're turned-based it's easier to take a breather and assess the situation, rather than using the 'Pause' overlay, which may feel like an inorganic method of accomplishing that.

The "phases" are mostly weakness shuffling/Guard Point changes. There are some "phases" like bosses gaining additional actions or changing their timer after being Dizzy'd a certain number of times. Maybe I can modify part of the UI to make these changes more visible. Since the game is so fast, sometimes those messages aren't retained because the player is busy choosing actions.

Oh, I didn’t manage to make Bio Seeker work, or at least I had the impression nothing changed on screen. Was the health bar supposed to show for a few seconds? Showing it longer would help indeed!

I’m not sure about the conditions to make an opponent Dizzy. I think it was explained in the tutorial but I missed a few tuto steps and couldn’t show them back. I checked the tactical guide but it only had bosses there. A page to sum up mechanics could be helpful! (inside game or in the guide)

For Bio Seeker, a message pops up in the top left after "Jean used Bio Seeker" for a few seconds. But I'll consider having it do that every time the skill is used, and then have some kind of health bar physically appear (either permanently or for a period of time) if the OT gate is met. Like I said before, I think it can be easy to miss the messages if you aren't expecting them.

Inflicting Dizzy is how you deal the most damage to enemies (kind of like Stagger in  modern Final Fantasy or Break in Octopath Traveler if you've played those). Each enemy has 'Vulnerabilities' to certain elements (the attack element icons in boxes under their timer meter) and an amount of 'Guard Points' (the number in the shield). Hitting an enemy with an element they're vulnerable to decreases it by one (though it can be decreased by more if other conditions are met). When that number is reduced to zero, the enemy becomes 'Dizzy' for a period of time, where they receive significantly more damage, skips their next turn, and pauses Rage buildup.

Making the tutorials/mechanics visible in-game is definitely something I'd like to do at some point. It can easy to forget things or accidentally miss them.

Oh, I know Octopath’s Break system, but missed the guard number, I’ll check it next time!

Btw we released some version of Spirit Link! Still needs a lot of fixes but you can test it!