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Version 1.2 is up! Even more flavor than the 1.1 added, alongside new events, bugfixes and balancing changes.

The new version 1.1 is up! It is focused on making the experience a bit more memorable adding more details to some of the dungeons and fixing some previously known bugs.

I just checked all the folders on a new download to confirm and that seems to be the case! I forgot about it until now, but I think it was 2016 when YGOPRO went down for a similar reason, right?

The project seems promising so far! Is there any reason why the campaigns are locked inside a discord server? It may seem small, but it's quite an annoyance to go through, even if only one person need to enter and then redistribute it to their friends. It does make everyone less likely to give it a try.

Both those prints and  the ones from the last devlog are amazing! 

I hope you can manage both the time with your kid and the game, but don't forget to take care of yourself too!

I finished playing the demo and this is easily one of the best-looking RPG Maker games I ever seem! I didn't even suspect it was made on RM when I first saw it.  

It's very easy to get immersed in the world you created, I found myself admiring all the locations and the implications of the visuals very fast. It helps a bunch the cutscenes have a lot of effort put on them and the existing characters grows on you pretty quickly.  

The animations are amazing too! I love how on top of the backgrounds having a lot of personality, all the characters have multiple idle animations that helps you getting attached to them even with the low amount of talk we can actually do in the demo. The random bandit having a special battle animation made me giggle, good stuff.  

I have to say I love most of the charming alien ladies and I'm also a sucker for post-apocalyptic scenarios, so this game pretty much has me covered from every angle lol  

Being a solo dev is though and your project certainly seems like a huge commit, but I hope you can succeed on making Frozen Soil possible! I will follow the game for sure!

Good luck and  thank you for the great demo!

VX Ace!

Some small but important fixes done! If you already started playing the 1.0, you can continue your progress by copying your "Save01 (02, 03...).rvdata2" files to the new 1.0.1 folder.

Hey, thank you for playing my game today I really appreciate it! I saw the stream, but I couldn't really interact because it started when I was in the middle of work and when I tried to thank you on twitter after the fact I got my account blocked for "suspicious behavior" (already got it unblocked, btw) and the message completely wiped.

Not only this kind of thing helps the game getting to more people, but is also a great piece of feedback for me!

Yeah, I already have some ideas for future fixes with the new feedback I'm getting, but you can finish the game properly in both endings and do the entire post game content!

1.0 version (the fully completed game) finally added alongside with some edits in the game's page!

Thank you so much for taking the time to play the game and leave such detailed feedback!

The game is definitely longer than I thought it would be. I have no experience with dungeon crawlers, but the genre made sure going through the dungeon was not as fast as I initially thought. In my personal tests I can finish the entire main game in a bit over 9 hours, but without knowing exactly what to do I can see this time going over 12 hours very easily.

The first floor of the Catacombs is mainly so the player can reach level 2 before having to deal with enemy team composition and get used to the exploration/combat in the process, but the comment about money seems very sensible to me. I think at the very least, I should be able to give a 50% buff of money to most enemies without breaking to much of the money management part of the game (you are not supposed to have everything, but rather pick and choose what do you feel it is of more importance in the moment). More item crates also don't seem like a bad idea. It felt not so different from the rate I found items in the earlier SMT games, but I did not get much feedback outside of close friends, so a non-biased opinion in the matter feels very nice.

When you download the game, there was already a warning with a link to an official way of getting the RTP, but some of my friends also did not notice the warning, so it looks like a good idea to add a warning somewhere more visible.

The lack of the Diary functionalities before you defeat Princess Pygmy is a known bug, the latest release version still has it, but it’s one of the things I recently fixed.

One-way doors are either a way to separate bigger sections within a floor or a straight up hazard on later dungeons, but the first dungeon is the first dungeon, I did not have any experience drawing floors yet. Thank you for the opinion, I will go back to the first dungeons and change the more unnecessary/mean one-way doors.

Again, thank you so much for the comments! It’s going to help me a lot!

A new dungeon added to the game alongside more NPCs dedicated to the world's lore.

New update added! Tons of cool stuff to make a better experience overall and finally get rid of place holders.

Loved the demo, I found a previous version a bit janky playing only with the keyboard, but the new option to use the mouse makes this game 10x more confortable to play!

All the ratizens are super cute and the game is quite addictive once you learned the basics, I like how all the little fellas ask you to build important things if you forgot/don't know about it, it makes the learning exponentially easier when you are already thinking about a lot of stuff to keep everyone alive.

I didn't found any game breaking glitches, although sometimes the game freaked out while in the building menu to place blocks on the world. It didn't happen everywere, but it scared me the 2~3 times it happenend.

All in all, very excited for a full release, good luck with this project!

Just got around playing the demo and I liked this a lot, definitely going to follow the development when I can! Honestly, seeing everything in action it's weird how long we took until someone tackled this idea seriously.

Some of my thoughts on the game:

You nailed the mood, it feels gloomy enough to remind you of SMT, but don't strip away the more inherent charm of Touhou. This of course is made possible by great pixel art and music, the dungeon textures are by far my favorite part in the game's visual for what I've played, but I also love how accurately the classic SMT enemy style is replicated here.

Althought I said I like the music, I'm mixed towards some of it. All the dungeon themes are awesome, same for the enemies apearing on the screen before the action starting taking place, but I'm not a big fan of the battle themes. They grew on me after a while, but I do think they are way weaker comparing with all the other tracks in the game. That said, they all at the very least are a good mash of SMT and Touhou.

The battles are amazing, really. Like SMT or Etrian, the early enemies are powercrept fast, but you need to respect the sleepers every time a new one appears and I respect that. I always love when battles are less about enemies with big numbers who can't kill you, but take forever to die and more of the good old "kill fast, die fast". I did not expected Sumireko to be this customizable, I can see myself messing around with countless builds to better suit my selection of characters and already in the demo I had those moments of me forgetting to progress the game because I was too invested in finding a specific sleeper to make my team a tiny bit stronger.

That customization is not exclusive to her either, even though the fusion mechanic is yet to be seem, I squeezed a lot of fun transfering skills and affinities between sleepers. It's a nice layer of complexity that not only rewards the player making the good meta calls for the dungeons and bosses, but also allows you to keep characters you like for longer than you would ever hope in a SMT game.

The hijack mechanic is neat, I got scared because I'm terrible at the genre, but it's simple enough to a potato level player like me to not only be able to get every possible enemy, but also learn to do the paterns consistenly. Also, it's just me or VIT affect your HP in those segments? I noticed after a while I was able to take 3 hits instead of 2.

One thing I was never a fan of in the early SMT titles was how the demons were so capitalistic, a stingy guy like me rarely summoned demons except when I really needed, but I think the battery mechanic does improve a lot in  the idea. You still have the same strategic side  of the summons consuming your resources at every step, but this time they don't directly affect your money as you can always wake up to get yourself a nice free recharge (the recharging items are pitfull for how much they cost early on, though, but this never really became a problem to me)

And about the dungeons... the demo one felt more like a mid game dungeon than an early game one because of the amount of mechanics already thrown to the player at once (at least by SMT I or even Etrian standards). I don't mind it, the dungeon layout looks nice in the automap and it's easy to to find where you need to go as long as you respect new enemies insteady of reckleslly charging all the way to the top after starting a save file. The traps are fine I don't hate any of then, but they do their job to scare the player and make so you have to think at lest a bit to travel through a couple rooms.

...That said, I could do it without the teleport maze, I never actually met someone who liked this gimmick in any Atlus game. In the context of the demo it is on a more "side" part of the map, so I don't mind it there, but I can see myself losing interest if I got exposed to an obligatory Eridanus 2.

I can see how Sumireko may not exactly be the most exciting poster girl to the fandom, but playing the game I quickly realised how perfectly she fitted the job description for the playable character and that feeling just grew more as I played for longer. I appreciate when the choice of characters seems meaningful enought, although shoving in your favorites is always a welcome joy for making you own fan games.

A couple nitpicks and smaller feedbacks:

-SMT has a bad record or inconsistency between playable characters, so a way to let your player knows they are distribuiting points to essentially a blank slate they can quite literally teach any skill in the game is appreciate to drive off that fear off "I may be putting points on an useless stat". Maybe show the player Sumireko's starting skills so we can at least recognize she will be learning more can be a good start without straight up telling the player "Hey, do whatever you want, it really doesn't matter!"

-Old SMT games and EO are sometimes terrible at teaching you important stuff, I don't think copying this aspect of the games is a good idea. Someone who played both or at least on of them can make assumptions about how everything works, but the game has it's fair share of unique stuff that deserves better explaning. For instance, the buffs in the Special option are a god sent, but I only learned how to use them in the Remains of Blazing Hell.

-I saw a couple people disliking the punishment for taking a "game over", but I actually enjoy how it's done in the demo. Comparing with SMT, a game over essentially means you lost all the map you explored, all the itens, all the money, all the recruits and all experience you gathered before the game decided you would die because of a surprise attack. So in comparison, keeping everything, but getting a single level down doesn't seem this big of a deal as long as the game don't scale on you losing 3+ levels for death later in the experience.

-I don't understand why the dungeon entrance has a icon indicating it's an exit, but the gate connecting to the Remains of Blazing Hell don't have any map icon at all, you can guess where it is after finding it a couple times, but I don't understand why this isn't a thing when even SMT I already had indications for exits/area connections.

All in all, the positives outweigh the negatives really well and I can't wait to see the game getting further in development to completion! With a bit of polish in the clarity I can see this being a fantastic experience much like the games who inspired ADiA!