itch.io

Okay, more nitpicks from an interested stranger who didn't actually know about this in time to back the Kickstarter:

*The dark-blue windows with light-blue trim look great. The light-blue with dark-blue trim, not so much. You probably have a much better idea of how to fix that than I do; gold borders feel insufficient.

--(Also y'all are almost certainly already familiar with the OKLCH color picker stuff, but if you aren't, possibly you'd find it interesting.)

*The zoomed-in menu icons for mech selection feel awkward. Probably the high-effort solution is a bunch of little icons, maybe possible to simplify to military-role/'rank weight and movement types' icons?

*The pointier mech cards in the combat UI feel less Obviously An Overlay. Presumably you'll be tinkering with this anyway.

Fall damage is negated when falling into water.

One way to deal with it, although walking an ultra off a skyscraper and being fine because you landed in a puddle is kinda funny.

If I bought the Kickstarter, is there a way to link it to this account?

So I finally made it through at least 1950 of the 1973 pictures in the Game UI Database's Dialogue page - it's being weird, so I don't know what 23 I'd be missing - but I haven't found the one I was most looking for, namely the snarking about a coffeeshop customer demanding satisfaction with a katana for not being allowed to have 10 espresso shots at once. Do you recall what that one's from?

Wish itch.io had a Hugs rating. Sympathy vibes.

My read is that "you're a team of edgy low-rent superheroes working for the MIB" is a fundamentally different proposition from "you're the serious urban fantasy equivalent of a PARANOIA troubleshooter team, i.e. entirely composed of the exact groups you're meant to be hunting, and very keen on not letting each other know about this". Not a minor aspect of the game at all.

Relatedly, I'm... pretty sure kaiju TRPGs exist, like ones where you play Godzilla and Mothra and so on, and I'm pretty sure Earth-based adventures for those would take some significant homebrew to make even vaguely compatible. If they don't, that just raises further questions!

Szkin made some now-canonized fanart? Cool. It looks pretty good, if a notably different style than the final dam photo. If you're still tinkering with this, it might be neat to add background photos to some or all of the Locations; that'd make the mixing more obvious I think.

What was the game that inspired this?

Hm. I don't think this framework of play actually 'wants' to be compatible with any published module set on an Earth from 1850 to the modern day?  For a not-even-obviously-adversarial example, OPERATION WEEPING MOUNTAIN is a module for CAIN, another urban fantasy investigative horror game, just one that frames the party as superheroes working for a shady secret organization.

Which doesn't seem compatible with a framework that presumes you'll be trying to hide which type of monster you are from the rest of the party.

Which is to say, it's a disconcerting boast.

Is BusterGal a third the filesize because of better music compression or something? Very impressive if so, but if not I'd prefer not to be missing out on content.

Can you add the manual links to the downloads page? Just because I don't think I can play this on my current computer, and if I go to redownload it it'd be nice to have a reminder that the manual exists.

I mean, presumably gaining license levels between story missions is an intended feature? Not sure if that's going to be easier once all the abilities are implemented or not.

EVA flight puts you just under the water surface OR 3 tiles above the floor, whichever is lower. 

Isn't there normally a water level below the floor? That makes this sounds like a digging effect instead of a flying one.

When targeting a tile with two units, it now asks you to choose between them instead of affecting both.

Presumably this is for single-target effects, but is there some kind of orbital artillery effect that should hit both?

Implemented Brace. In order to prevent prompt spam, it only triggers when it would save you from structuring or when you would take at least half of your maximum health.

I thought you talked about having done that earlier, and it's optional? Also, a rules-as-written variant that probably isn't worth implementing: give the players a toggle for full promptspam.

disable editing character sheet during module downtime

Meaning you can't change your name, face, and backstory between same-campaign missions? Fair enough I suppose, although a flag to allow dramatic name changes is a feature I would appreciate.

Oh, I think this one's my favorite. Been a while since I read the main draft, though.

Well, you should take comfort in the fact that you're helping bring games into the world anyway. And probably most of the submitters would have trouble in your circumstances too.

Hope things get better for you.

Even just annotating the diagram itself might work! Probably doubles the amount of work involved, though.

You realize that dropping a huge number of interesting screenshots without titles is a horrific nerdsnipe, right?

Interesting and fun! Wondering what Yasmin of the Wood is referencing. Also pretty sure Zenia is just Xena, and that Lilith the Nighthawk is some kind of Dragon Age reference, but I'm not sure and would like confirmation. Also, is Derrow of the Mountain a DERO reference?

*MAJOR SPOILERS*

Having fun so far, but one point of confusion leaps out: This apparently a town of 68 people, with no tourists. Why does the Mayor have any bodyguards whatsoever, let alone two? Why is either shop open after midnight?

Actually, I also want to know why the Mayor, if she's the monster's primary target, gets killed second instead of first or last. It's probably more satisfying if she can explain her motives, which is presumably why she isn't the backstory murder, but the monster choosing to kill her daughter first suggests a crueler axis of vengeance - murdering everyone she relies on, and leaving her to die alone.

Edit: Also, I might suggest that the highway going through Brandon's property was an attempt at rerouting after the original path proved non-viable. Dunno if that's more realistic? I definitely feel like a highway is a really expensive project for connecting a town of less than a hundred people, though. Maybe the population count was a typo?

Further edit: If the Mayor's office is right next to the sawmill, why did they have their argument in the sawmill? I'd presumed it was just, like, a halfway point, but unlike her office it probably doesn't have chairs and almost definitely doesn't have power. Was Brandon planning to murder her? A rusty old saw might kill someone if they fall on it, especially from a balcony or something, but probably wouldn't decapitate them fully.

Also, if Lana was cut in half from the crotch up, the Saw Hound's saw is both vertical (undefined in its description) and probably centered on its crotch or navel, which is, y'know, different symbolism from the center of the ribcage, which I think is the default for torso iconography.

Even further edit: I remembered a nitpick about the Pressure table - I do think that approximately every citizen in a rural American town would be clutching their guns as of the first gruesome murder, let alone the third.

...And I'm done! This was cool, overall; I enjoyed this peripheral look at an RPG I don't have the spare funds for at the moment.

Biggest thing I see about the face editor test is the lack of emotional vibes. Maybe half a dozen feral grins would help? That sort of thing does have the potential to square the number of necessary art assets, though...

Just looking at the preview material, I'm unsure if SABRE or Inner Furnace Meltdown ignore the stress overflow rules. Also kinda confused as to whether VOID's stronger settings include the weaker ones. (Wouldn't an implosion strong enough to pull in small objects also create a fairly deafening thunderclap, given that guns do and they have the benefit of a barrel to concentrate force? But the obvious read is that only the strongest is loud enough to bother espers.)

Yeah, and it was a little weird to have bought the demo in one of those megabundles. Tacky, even.

This is cool in principle but in practice very frustrating; what am I missing that is present in the download version besides a clock and functional saving?

Because four clicks and picking a place to store the downloaded game is a much higher barrier to entry than using the browser version.

Ah, a pity - that's one of the probably-about-three of his movies I've seen, and the only one I remember him for sure. Was he in Night of the Museum?

So I don't recognize any of the cover roles - is Sorcerer's Apprentice Nicholas Cage one of the options?

Virtual hugs if desired, sympathy either way.

I was mostly confused by the first level making it seem like Covemounty's algorithm was 'follow left-handed walls'. It was unclear to me until considerably later that there's actually one consistent algorithm,

What does enemy strength scaling actually mean here? Shifting from Morrowind paradigm to Skyrim paradigm, or what?

I was pretty sure the mage boss was elaborately failing to mention that the Enormous Mentor Bird was actually the Owl King, who wanted the battery for nefarious purposes. Which wouldn't make sense actually; the Owls are in charge of the whole facility until you kill them all. Maybe something else similarly nefarious.

This was a decent game. I think a 'skip cutscene' option, and maybe a run button, would have been big helps - the backtracking felt unreasonably padded, and the second bossfight was extremely frustrating because the death penalty was unusually large.

I'm trying to play the tutorial, but it freezes and won't respond to commands? Is the control scheme Z/X/Arrows/Enter, as normal?

I don't know what the long-term goal is. I thought it'd be unlocking the last shop item, but the tunnel nor the map did that.

What was the old one?

Also, saying how to save in the game itself would help. I missed that until I read the boss fight devlog, after I'd already beaten the game.

So I think I leveled twice, and the second time was from beating the boss, so I don't know for certain that seeing the boss board instead of my own when I visited the shop, which had stayed 5x5 after the first levelup, was a glitch. But it is a thing that happened.

The way I do it is by blocking (press the arrow away from your attacker) and then tapping the charge button to dash away.

You're making a Metroidvania for free, man. That usually takes experienced devs about a decade. Don't sweat it!

So after deliberately buffing the MercRat and inadvertently rendering it unable to Query (and thus me unable to learn it), then running out of non-attack options, I attacked him for one damage. He said "You've made a grave mistake!" and then the game crashed to the TIC console. I haven't managed to get screenshots or copy-paste working, so here's my best stab at a manual copy-over of what was on the console:

>[string "-- title:
ROWBYROW..."]:5745: attempt to index a
nil value (global 'cur_line')
stack traceback:
 [string "-- title:
ROWBYROW..."]:5745: in function 'TIC'
 [string "-- title:
ROWBYROW..."]:5773: in function 'TIC'
>

I was also trying to Query as many of the first dungeon enemies as I could, and I haven't managed Slime or Rival yet but I have managed Maneki.

Interesting game so far! Would be easier if you had an actual description of picross rules in the tutorial.

Very cool aesthetics, but I've found myself frustrated by the fact that holding Z builds charge if I'm not moving but costs charge if I am. It's unintuitive.

Edit: I got much better at this when I did local multiplayer; having an opponent who can die and isn't already broadly competent helps a lot. An update to the training mode might be nice there.

Hmm. Decent art and moveset, but I'd have preferred a more combat-focused game - I never died to enemies or timeout, only to the remarkably unfair jumping challenges.

What does it mean?