I remember watching a playthrough of the jam version and being super moved by it, was super excited when I found there was a full release! Bought a copy, excited to play! :D
Got a copy. I hope you and yours will be alright. I've kept my identity kinda secret around most folks I know, and I'm trying to get used to that maybe being the state of things forever.
Thanks for making art and putting it out into the world
This sounds really amazing! I really like your style :D
Just to clarify, are these buyable as assets for game projects, or is it like a standalone soundtrack just to listen to? Either way I think it's pretty cool ^^
I do really hope you get a bite. I ain't much of a writer or anything, but if I ever produce something with even half the teeth your work has, I think I could die happy. Some publisher out there's gotta recognize you go hard in the paint. Good fortune!
Thanks for putting out some free tracks for folks, especially with so many styles! I have a lot of your other packs in my library too, they're all pretty dang great ^^
I love how this game looks! The palette choice and little bevels and everything, it's so charming and like brain-candy-y. The gridsnap movement is nice too, lets you play really fast. The mechanics are clever too! Good stuff! ^^
Really cool to see you posting the stuff you've made / collabed on. I've largely only been aware of your higher-profile things and it's been amazing to see the rest of the err, oeuvre, if you don't mind a five dollar word :V
I hope to have a portfolio like this someday, though I've been really slow to actual start finishing things. That's neither here nor there though, thanks for putting your projects out here! ^^
Very excited to give this a spin! Big fan of Jimmy, super excited for Earless God, it's gonna be cool to experience this like, sapling of future ambitions!
Hey hey, just wanted to chime in and say I finished playing this today and thought it was pretty good! I played Soma Spirits as well, and I think there is a wonderful amount of development between the two. The combat makes good use of the role switching by dividing effects that are commonly desired in turn-based RPGs (group damage and stacking statuses) so that you generally have two characters working together to get that effect, and I thought the art and music really came together well! Some of the tracks kinda reminded me of Banjo Kazooie a bit, and that was rad.
No worries about clogging up the game comments, I'm too small-potatoes for that to matter at all and getting to engage on the stuff around game creation is kinda why I publish stuff anyway. Outside of the creativity and personal development and such of course XD
I think it's really cool to see games be made as well, and following the process in the middle of it or post-release as patch notes is pretty interesting! Just curious how nowadays even after a game is "shipped" that doesn't mean it's done being developed and that can be pretty neat :3
My next jam starts tomorrow and has a week-long window to make something, but I'm kind of floundering on getting the concept I'm chewing on to come together? I'm sure it'll sort itself out as I tinker though. Before this year I spent a very very long time just like fussing with small things but never finishing anything, so this was the year I really wanted to push myself to finally publish something? And I have! Which is very exciting! Which like, isn't super relevant, just like, if you want to go for it sometime, you should! You could record a dev diary if you felt so inclined for your channel? I know some folks document their stuff like that. Just have to be careful not to dox yourself if you record your desktop at all and such ^^;
I haven't gotten a chance to try it yet, but I am entranced by the screenshot graphics. The style is gorgeous! :O
Kind of reminds me of this like, niche subgenre of, I dunno, abstract/high concept/"new agey" aesthetic puzzle games from the tail end of the 2D era but before 3D graphics got super refined. I can't really put a finger on it, but it's super neat. I'd say like Tertris Effect, but that's kinda recent, or like Rez, but that was more like a shmup? But I swear there was games like that XD
Maybe Ecco the Dolphin? Or EVO: The Search for Eden? But those aren't puzzle games either I guess. Either way, awesome vibe ^^;
Thank you for giving it a spin! And for the bug report too, hrm. I'm not sure where to begin unpicking that since it seems like an interaction across multiple code sections and how it's interacting with running on the browser? I'll peck at it and see if I can reproduce and start sorting it out. Or at least, stop it from occurring in later projects (I don't always remember to test the options scene, so I'll make a note on it).
Taking a quick swing at it, I don't get an error opening and then canceling the options screen (it loops back to title as intended), but I'll have to try it from a clean cache. If it's some kind of storage issue it might not trigger if there's already like, successfully stored information (or at least, that being true rules out the storage issue). What browser did you get this issue with? It might not be pertinent, but it's the first thing I can think of.
Thanks! The art bit is the part I know how to do the best, and I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out even if it ate up the lion's share of the dev time. I scrounge up a lot of music and sound assets since I don't have any experience with it, so thanks for putting some assets out I could put in my library ^^
Oh tah, no worries! I haven't been brewing up too much other than a few small jam projects, but I've been deploying Selection 3 in a few of them, such as https://onamint.itch.io/dedicated-healer-onamintart.
A loooot of (or like, basically all?) of RPG Maker MV's default sounds are on the loud / piercing side, so it's been really nice to have softer stuff to sub in ^^
I'd happily natter on about the background stuff; it's honestly one of my favorite parts of game dev and I love collecting like, commentated art books for games and things. But I know I'm pretty prone to rambling, so I won't talk your ears off here XD
I'm very excited for the next jam I'm doing! I've been coming up with a few ideas and I'm not really sure what I'll go with yet...I can't start work on it until it opens in 5 days, but I've been doing some general tech stuff for other projects I'm hoping to use to give all my pixel horror stuff some extra oomph and I'm pretty hype for it :3
Oooo the revival jam looks super cool, I have half a mind to join but I'd be startin' behind the 8-ball and I still have midterms kickin' around, and the other jam starts in 7 days...point and clicks are super cool though, so I'll have to remember to stop by and check out your submission once it's served up ^^
Live a Live is so gorgeous! Even the SNES original is super pretty. I feel a little bad that the Wild West chapter is kind of a small one compared to some of the others, but it's still cool. The only other western RPGs I can think of are Boot Hill Heroes, UFO 50's Grimstone, and err, maybe Wild Arms? I don't know enough about wild arms to say so, but I know some of its music feels western-inspired, so I dunno. I'm excited to try the Live A Live remake sometime soon, it's uhh on the list XD
That horse sprite is an excellent selection too, I'm pretty sure if you had to animate a horse like that it could easily take a month all on its own! I've done like one quadruped walk cycle before and it takes forever even with plenty of reference, so definitely a better use of the time to do like the coding and implementation and stuff ^^
I'm more of an artist than a programmer; the most I can do is some clumsy JavaScript surgery to jury-rig my RPG Maker addons into performing the aesthetic stuff I want it to. But I'm also a pretty amateur artist as well, so, c'est la vie ^^;
I have horror stuff on the roster next; I'm hoping to put something out for SCREAMJAM and I'm pecking at another short RPG that just has kind of a grim vibe all around. After that though I'm hoping to make something cheery, maybe around the holidays if I am weirdly on-the-ball in my production schedule XD
I'll put a full playthrough into Karma when I have a moment, but I'd love to see whatever else you cook up too :3
I haven't had a great chance to sit down and play a lot of the jam stuff, but I pecked at this today and I like it quite a bit. Western RPGS are awesome and few and far between, so it's really cool to see one! There's some stuff I'm pretty impressed by already: The horse animation is really solid, I appreciate how the camera shifts to accommodate Karma at a gallop (a lot games kind of forget to do this), and I enjoy the experimentation with the progression system. A lot of RPGs don't go beyond like and exp-level system (not even the ones I've done so far :V), but it's something I've been thinking of messing with a lot in smaller RPGs. The system here probably most reminds of like, some of the SAGA games' spontaneous skill development and skill combos. Very cool to see ^^
Thank you for giving it a try! I definitely spent most of my dev time making the sprites and tiles and stuff, so it's nice to know they went over okay! I meant to do more Zeffir behaviors but I didn't have a lot of time around my studies ^^;
The master like color pool I used was the "Jehkoba 32 " palette via Lospec (https://lospec.com/palette-list/jehkoba32). They also have a 64 color version but I liked the restriction of just 32, from which I derived the 15 color palettes per sprite, and I think overall I had 4 of those out of the 8 or whatever the SNES apparently had a limit for? It's kinda neat just browsing palettes, I dunno XD
My next project or two in my queue are spooky, but I'd like to do a brighter-colored RPG like Dedicated Healer on a sorta bigger scope at some point. And while I'm not sure I'd make DH it's own full game I'd probably take the scenario of it, flesh the dungeon and village out more, and use it as part of the early game in said larger project.
Thanks! I'd like to do something like it on a fuller degree, but I'm not sure when I'll manage it or how. If I was going to keep the bookends and just flesh out the middle, I'd probably make it something like DQH Rocket Slime where you are intermittently rescuing Jellies as you advance through a larger dungeon, I think? Not sure. Either way I appreciate you giving it a look :3
Thank you for giving it a go! I've been doing a lot of pixel art lately and I've been really enjoying working in like 4 color palettes and stuff, I think it's really charming :3
I'm happy the jump scare worked out well too! I'm pretty sure it's the first one I've ever put together, and it's generally been pretty successful , so like, it's pretty pleasing to know the grande finale lands like it's supposed to. It took some finagling since RPG Maker's default chasing capabilities are kinda scuffed out of the box and I don't know if it played well with the pixel movement plugin I was toying with ^^;
I'm fixing to put something together for the main SCREAM JAM later in the month, which will probably take after The Rounds a little since the time limit is similar, but I also hope to do a full horror game at some point too as like an independent release? I dunno, working on spooky stuff is just surprisingly fun, and I'm happy you had a good time tooo :3
Thank you for giving it a go! I'm not sure I can continue Dedicated Healer necessarily, but I do really hope to make a fully fleshed Dragon Quest-like at some point in my tinkering! A lion's share of the time went into doing the pixel art, and I'm happy it ended up with a good vibe to it ^^
Probably the only things I needed to round the bases on were some more set dressing for the dungeon, face graphics for the characters, and some more tuning and balance. There was also some more independent behaviors I wanted to set up for Zeffir, like using a healing item after battle even though he has 80-90% of health, to kind of reflect some quirks old AI controlled part members did in RPGs that unfortunately fell to the time budget.
If I return to it, it will probably have to follow the "main" plot you're not actually involved in in Dedicated Healer, but I think the events of DH would still take place. I think it would be a good way to introduce the theme around power if that remained as a theme I wanted to involve in the "main" game.
Thank you for giving the game a go! It's sort of inspired by Dragon Quest 4, which I have a lot of fondness for. If it gave off that very retro vibe, than it's certainly functioning as intended!
RPG Maker MV is my darling, but it takes an awful lot of fussing with custom packages for it to get the aesthetic output I want. There's a lot of things I wanted to tweak with it to get the feeling more SNES-y, but my talents are more in art than coding :V
I'm swamped in the middle of midterms/finals, but once my schedule clears up I'm hoping to take a swing at the other submissions and will have to give y'all's Wars a go. I love mecha stuff a ton so I feel like I will appreciate it a lot ^^
Just wanted to chime in and say I finally got these busted out since I'm doing some higher res graphics for a game jam and they're really great! Takes the bite out of trying to do walk cycles, which are still, ya know, tough, but these templates are amazing ^^
Had a good time with this! I'm not sure I can add anything that hasn't been said already, but I do think it comes together well, and the minimalism of the graphics works well with the atmosphere of the sound. Thank you for submitting it so we can all give it a look :D
