itch.io

I skipped the opening scenes when I tried out the other dreams, so no, I didn't notice the story changed. That's cool

I suppose I understand the appeal of leaving surprises in the game and not wanting to be too hands-on in explaining every small detail, but my comment about learning basic things about the game 40+ turns in was definitely meant as a dig at the game haha. Maybe now that I've beaten the game I'm allowed some answers? :)

• What is 1-Handed vs 2-Handed? Is it just flavor?
• What were those weapons effective against? Class? Weapon type? Element? (While I'm on the subject I want to *strongly disagree* with the notion of not showing what a weapon's effective against. I mean why show Mt at that point, or anything about it at all? Just keep it a secret, players can figure it out if they pay attention! I don't understand the appeal of this idea at all)
• Is the map theme in Snake an original? I want a 1 hour loop of it lmao, it's fucking amazing
• Do you have a preference (or favorite) of the 5 dreams as a starting point?

Hey, sorry, I kinda had trouble following these replies since it was hard sometimes to tell which points you were responding to, but I'll address what I can. 

• The music does technically loop, but unnaturally. It doesn't have a clean loop point - it fades out and restarts. That's all I meant
• Re: walking speed - I didn't have a problem with the speed, but my plugin should have a run button if you wanted to use that one. That might help if you have concerns about the speed
• Re: the Rockanroll tome - it's goofy but in a good way. I think it suits an unserious character like Jean well. It's great
• A personal spear would need to have some kind of defensive utility to be good on Yua, like say a huge Avo boost vs certain weapon types or something. She doesn't need a weapon for killing things as she's already good at that - she needs the bulk or evasion to survive the big groups in this game, like what Julius has. This is an enemy phase game and she needs an enemy phase
• Staff savant would also not be super good on Moore either since it's the staves themselves that aren't useful. But a buff to the sleep staff is exciting. With enemy groups being that large, at least a durability boost would be welcome :)
• What problem(s) do the storage houses address?

Time management was a big factor of this whole game jam and even my game, much less ambitious than yours, took me until the last second to wrap up, and I had to cut some things too. It's pretty hard to judge how long things take to implement, but I hope if there's one lesson to take away from this jam, dreaming smaller is super important. The coolest part of your game is the team building, which takes maybe half an hour, and making another short, half-hour-ish level would have had the double benefit of a) making the game easier to make and b) making the game much easier for players to replay with a different team. A much smaller level, say a 25x25 tile cutout of the city, or a different area entirely, could have made your game more replayable and easier to make in the small time you had. I know, I know, hindsight is 20/20, but I hope this advice helps you for the next game jam :)

"Pharteus" 💀

Thanks so much for all the kind words man, I'm glad you enjoyed. Great work saving all the villagers! As you surmised, Elaine is meant to basically solve the rest of the game on her own if you went through the trouble to recruit her. I'm really, really thrilled that you found the attack stance and pivot mechanics to both be so significant! <3333

As for the story, I've had Partheus and its Cataclysms in my head for several years. I really hope I can get around to telling more stories in this world in the future. I wasn't super interested in this prompt until I realized it gave me a good excuse to finally tap into this time period of that world. Whenever I do get back to this world, hopefully in a more complete game, I hope I can impress you just as much. :)

Stream of consciousness thoughts (long, sorry):

• very stylish title screen. I like the black translucent ui for each of the buttons
• config being a separate screen is neat, not many people change this
• typos in the first text box nooo
• cool noir theming in the opening scroll. is your twist on "shattered empires" a (magical) crime ring being dismantled? that's a cool angle
• man the vanilla "speech" sfx for narration messages is annoying lol. in my projects I always replace it with silence, but replacing it with the rtp dialogue speech sfx would work too. I despise the rtp narration one
• underrated detail - having the two talkers being on the top and bottom but using Erase Message in between. looks very good
• cool papery speech bubbles, but the triangle cursor is in a really weird spot. like right in the middle of the text
• "NEW TURN" nice lol. berwick turn order hell yea
• 1-Handed and 2-Handed are interesting things to list on a weapon. I was thinking it was the weapon type but no they're still swords/axes. wonder how the handedness factors in
• dang no description for League Armor? that was the item I was most curious about lol
• Accessory is misspelled. not gonna go over dialogue typos or I'll be here all day but might mention some in the UI
• Oh man. Foc? Vit? Sprt? Prof? and no descriptions for what they do :( guessing Mag, Def, Res, Wlv? Americo's fe5 wrath substitute using Vit*2% makes me doubt that assumption tho
• oh you've got that like, stat graph thing, I remember you making that. sick
• it's cool that Aguara's fe4 wrath tells you in the description how much crit it gives you, must've taken some effort to program that in, but why does it show the stats it doesn't boost also lol. it's so cluttered it circles around from helpful to annoying
• Charisma's description is misleading, says "all units" but it's only for allies within 3 spaces
• Killing Cut's info window makes me assume it's Lethality, but its description is "Grants a change to a Full HP Enemy" - wtf does this mean
• oh damn this map's huge. got some cool tiles here and there. looks like it's split into different biomes. why is a mountain range growing out of gravel in the middle though lol
• color coded commands? everyone (but Alfonzo) having access to the convoy/Bag? interest piqued
• damn... vanilla piss yellow enemy range, and can't mark individual enemies... sadge
• certain units can climb cliffs!! a man after my own heart
• waiiiiit why do my guys have 3 or 4 attacks lol. is this fibonacci pursuit or something?
• no realbattle I see. huge shame you don't have a detailed easybattle plugin then. I have one and so does cube on srpgworld. highly recommend. the custom dodge/hit effects are sick though, I remember em from your last entry
• no exp bar plugin either Q_Q
• small visual bug - the blinking white selection tile that appears when it's an enemy's turn will appear over the wrong tile when a summoner summons an enemy. looks like it puts the tile over the last enemy unit that moved
• smart placement of the house. "go for the sorcerers first" is important advice and you have units who can reach the house with their max movement so they'll have nothing else to do but that on turn 1. nice
• did some math, Vit is definitely Def. good to know all the stats are just analogues
• hit rates are mega shaky. getting so many attacks per attack is a good fit for this
• the "selection" tile (or whatever, you know, the tile that shows up when you're selecting a target to attack) being blinking white instead of flat white is cool. I want that plugin lol
• the dam axe is so much worse than the scissor axe, 1 mt is not worth everything other stat being miles worse. why would i ever use this
• WTF is with the walking sound on the boars lol. And why are they named Dank?
• holy shit the titan moves off his gate
• i got checkmated by the titan and 3 boars lol, had to either move Alisia the myrm back and sacrifice Ruben the archer or move Americo to kill one of the boars and lose Alisia. sacrificed Alisia, her damage was pretty bad 
• alfonzo is nuts. orko'd the titan
• oh sick music change
• WAIT WTF THIS IS A REMIX OF PLAYER PHASE 1 HOLY SHIT
• 10/10
• it only changed for player phase tho. not enemy phase. revising to 9/10
• i gave Americo earth blessing just cause. he seems crazy good, might as well make him busted
• uhhhhhh so I moved my axe guy to the south with my last action, into the city looking area, and it faded to black, faded back in and a bunch of units spawned, and then it ended turn in an endless loop, completely softlocking me. gg

hadn't saved since turn 1 so basically starting over now. Alisia kicked off by missing 7 consecutive attacks. Great start

• it's a real shame you can't save anytime except if nobody has acted yet. very easy to forget. for a short jam project like this I tend to prefer unlimited saving
• why can't i counterattack the boars
• just realized there was 1 bandit guy I left alive and after I killed the titan again the bandit lost all of his mov. or rather his AI changed to Wait. weird
• saved at the start of the next turn after killing the titan and then cautiously moved a unit south again; enemies spawned and I didn't get softlocked when it auto-ended the turn. fascinating. loaded my save bc i hadn't killed everything yet but happy i did it for the science
• not having a healer is rough. wish the vulns healed for 20 instead of 10
• may I please direct you to my terrain details plugin? it hides Avo 0 for terrain that does nothing, and it tells you how much the terrain heals/damages for :) pretty please
• also 5hp healing for forts/temples is pitiful with hp stats this big. like 10 or so would've been better and would've saved me a lot of turns
• just realized the music changed back. :(
• wait a sec when I entered the second zone and it automatically ended turn it gave back Americo's action (he's the one I moved into range). Last time it didn't do that: the turn ended and he was still waiting. Is it because I used a vulnerary when I moved him in range?
• oh a shop nice. will be back for that angel robe
• wait so, potions are 50% more effective than vulns but 66% more expensive? wait a minute it has WEIGHT somehow?? and 1 range instead of self-use?? what is going on with this item lmfao, please give it a description
• nobody's doing shit for damage to any of these armors except alfonzo and kind of americo. alfonzo is so busted
• whoops left ruben in front of the ballista. died. unlucky
• alisia lethality'd two of the armors by the ballista. I take back my harsh words nobody else could kill em that fast (jk she still sucks)
• gave the earth blessing to Aguara this time, no particular reason. prolly shoulda just given it to alfonzo tho
• killed the ballista. got a black arrow nobody can use then a bunch of monsters spawned. ok kinda seeing the pattern here. will check back in when I've got anything new to say
• OH visiting the sanctuary left by the boss gives a revival item. thanks, ruben needs it (wish it had an animation tho)
• new map theme in the swampy area yay
• not allowed to take the Black Arrow or Stream Bow out of the convoy for some reason
• "stavesmith" doesn't sell staves? edit: oh nvm it's a repair shop. what's this good for? vulneraries? weapons can't break
• oh the house explains it. "repair your staves" ok. don't have any staff users. is this a roguelike type thing where your whole party is randomized at the start? in that case guess I was remiss to say earlier, my team is: Americo the drifter, Ruben the archer, Alisia the swordfighter, Aguara the warrior, and Alfonzo the sage. Learning so much about how this game works on turn 40+ lol. could've used a readme
• june's excalibur is EFFECTIVE against Aguara for some reason?? there's no mention of it having any effective damage in its info box. 30+ crit is crazy and only alfonzo can safely take her on, good thing I have him ig
• there's a tile error with the eastmost jewel, opposite the area with the bear boss. the jewel itself is missing and there's just a grass tile there
• dude the map theme for the desert area is a B A N G E R holy fuck
• the limited move in sand is a nonfactor for all my units except aguara who is completely crippled by it lol. lucky team comp or is aguara uniquely terrible in this area?
• again drake sword is effective against alfonzo for some reason. how weird. is it like an elemental thing or something? alfonzo has the metal blessing and aguara had the earth blessing, is that it? (why wouldn't it say so in the weapon info tho?)
• with the drake sword Alisia finally has a real weapon (strictly better than the scimitar in every way by far except 3 less crt; her bld already offsets the higher wt) just in time for it to not matter since the final boss has insane p.def lol
• final boss is 1 rng locked so easy cleanup by alfonzo
• oh nvm 2 more enemies. ez$! ruben oneshot the magic one, nice to finally see some real use from his bow, and aguara made up for being useless in the last 2 zones by soloing Gough
• finished in 57 turns, took just over an hour
• eioneous says his "for the time being / i'll follow you closely but unseen" line twice, also wtf is going on here? is this guy an angel? the rough english is giving me some trouble following
• I started again to check a hunch and realized I'd completely forgotten there was a quiz in the first second of a new game, asking you where you want to start. I must've picked Boar the first time. Tried Snake this time. But yeah the random party thing was right, got Fausto the paladin and Penelope the bard instead of Alisia and Ruben, and the other 3 are the same - I assume just the 2 are randomized then, which means ALFONZO SWEEP. 
• Tried all the other ones a few times and saw the units you get are determined by the dream you pick.
• (Rat) Started here again and got Diego with a Needle Spear (kaga saga my beloved) and Harry the high priest who looks busted, plus his infinite range rescue staff looks like it would've been fun. Facing longbows immediately seems painful
• (Frog) Samara the priestess who gets halved damage immediately (instead of needing an item) is neat and her Dream staff could be fun though 60% is rough. Vanessa the ranger might be okay. High mov stat vs Ruben's chance to move again could be an interesting comparison. This spawn point has annoying chokepoints
• (Cat) Gisel the dragonrider seems really plain and probably has annoying bow weaknesses I'd have to worry about and Romina gets nice 1-2 range and has nothing else interesting. This spawn point seems pretty decent, though the terrain is pretty restrictive on turn 1, and the excalibur boss was the scariest one so I'd hate to fight her first
• I'm not gonna lie I definitely lucked out picking Boar first. That is by far the most fun starting position. Imagine picking Snake and having to trudge through sand first (plus that's the spawn that gives you a horse guy), Rat and having to deal with longbows first, Frog and having those annoying bridge chokepoints, or... well there's nothing really wrong with the Cat spawn, that one's prolly also a good enough starting point. Facing the 30 crit tome first is pretty nightmarish I guess. But those other three man. Also none of them had any gimmicks nearly as interesting as the summoners in Boar
• oh yeah and I never got even close to 10k gold to buy the angelic robe. do I have to sell the boss drops or something?

Closing thoughts:

The most interesting parts of this game are the mechanics, especially the berwick turn order and the strange pursuit mechanics that I never quite figured out. The dream choice at the start is also very interesting - it changes not just which of the challenges you face first, but also swaps out 2 of your 5 party members. Very interesting and probably leads to interesting replay value. I do wish there were an End Turn button like what Berwick Saga has - several times I had nothing to do with half my units while someone else was playing catchup or healing on a fort tile (5hp at a time...), and then sometimes Ruben would proc his skill and I'd have to tell him to wait AGAIN... minor annoyance but still an annoyance

The most fun part of the game is in the first few turns, which was pretty good at getting me to use everyone. As it goes on though, my party came to totally outclass the enemies outside of a couple of bosses and I was able to pretty much just hold forward. And boy is there a lot of holding forward. This is another entry with an enormous map and a huge amount of dead turns spent walking. I respect the times the game automatically repositioned my army after an event in order to either a) prevent an unfair ambush spawn situation, b) get my units to where they needed to be faster, or c) set up a more challenging position to face the new group of enemies - that was a good design decision I was always happy about whenever it happened.

At a certain point I was wishing I'd been given a bigger party to tackle multiple challenges at once, but towards the end I started to think that might not have been better. I'd end up walking, say, 10 units per turn across the map instead of just 5 while repositioning between zones. But at least I'd have been able to tackle multiple zones simultaneously, which might've saved time, maybe. In any case, my gut feeling was, this should've been shorter. I think the optimal experience for me would've been: start Boar, finish Rat, and then stop. After that the game was pretty much just walking. Would've missed out on the banger song in Snake though. Having different music for each zone was a great idea.

There was almost no story outside of the start and the (surreal) ending; it didn't get expanded on much, but I liked that the twist on the jam prompt was a mafia "empire" instead of an actual government. Points for creativity for sure. The spelling and grammar were very rough throughout this game, but it was mostly understandable.

This was a pretty interesting entry with a neat hook. Overall, solid! The units, skills and weapons could be cool in a full game, since they're all pretty distinct. Thanks for making this, and for hosting the jam!

My tier list of the units I used, ordered within tiers:

• S: Alfonzo
• A: Americo
• B: Ruben
• C: Aguara, Alisia

The gaps in competence were pretty vast except for the worst 2 units. Aguara was more useful for the first few zones and the ending, but was completely useless in Snake and Cat while Alisia performed well in those. Alisia only performed well in Snake, Cat and Frog, and was pretty much a liability in the others. Americo was good at everything except killing extremely high p.def units - and countering at 2 range I guess, but his bulk was so good it usually wasn't a big deal to take a hit and kill on the next player phase. Ruben was almost always tripling enemies safely from 2 range and proc'd his movement star skill at several useful times, but he also often didn't kill things even with tripling so he's between Americo and bottom tier. I don't think I need to expand on why Alfonzo is busted as hell. He oneshots enemies early on and twoshots them later. Even the bulkiest bosses are 3-4hko'd. He's relatively frail I suppose, but only relatively. I'm sure he could solo the game without too much trouble.

Also, how about that softlock!

Thanks for playing, and I'm glad you enjoyed! The talk conversations were a stretch goal that I wasn't sure I'd find time to include, but I'm glad I took the time for them. I hope I get to explore this world and these game mechanics more in the future :)

I've never played a Lex Talionis game before! This was really cool. Honestly I tinkered around in the settings for several minutes before starting.

Three board games colliding is a really fun twist on the "shattered empires" prompt. The dialogue and gameplay were very cute. I'm not sure what the pattern is behind the Go pieces appearing, but they always seemed to be in the most inconvenient spot (in a good way, requiring me to think). There's something clever going on here I'm sure.

I wasn't sure what to do with the Shuai piece and it ended up dying pretty quickly - it could only move side to side, never forward. I haven't played that game so I'm not sure if that was expected. I was surprised its full-column attack only took 5 hp from the targets, not kill them outright. I thought it'd be a kind of emergency "clear the way" button, but 5 damage doesn't do much of anything compared to the rook's instakill. I was surprised it got doubled. As in, I was surprised this game has doubling.

Also I used the laurel horse's attack once and never again. No reason to attack instead of move.

I got to the end, softlocked as mentioned in the known issues. I'm assuming this was just a time problem, no worries. My playtime was about 6 minutes. Very cool submission!

stream of consciousness thoughts:

• immediately enjoying the title screen. high quality
• playing on normal mode
• lots of spelling/grammar mistakes here. "An assesination attemp? ... This is unaceptable!"
• The note the assassin had on him is hilarious. "Kill the governor. Cause chaos. Run away." Like it's a grocery list lol
• Trevor Simons? Is this an isekai?
• Weird issue, but something's going on with the conversation backlog. It runs at double speed for some reason. 2 things are rendering it it seems
• music doesn't loop :(
• walk maps! with recruitment choices! very cool
• aoe stuff!! :D Sick healing staff
• the map command menu is super cool
• found the hidden gold in the cave
• sucks that once you pick your 8th unit the map immediately ends without you getting to see their items/shop for them
• went with Julius (general) Moore (bishop) Sierra (wyvern) Agnim (necromancer) Jean (mage knt) Albert (serpent knt) and Yua (free knt). spent a good half hour exploring the town. pretty neat
• takes several turns just to get to the combat... do not like this
• draw back+canto is pretty buggy
• rocknroll's animation is cool
• the silver lance sprite is HILARIOUS it's amazing to see Yua running across the screen carrying that giant thing
• agnim doesn't count as a spellcaster so the mage-effective bow isn't good against him, strange
• I am so grateful you have my player-only-battle plugin, it's so nice :) plus my warning markers plugin!
• jean is pretty much soloing the north side with staff help from trevor
• yua and moore are dead weight. should've brought better units. moore's supposed "support role" is nonexistent and yua's stats are bad. 
• moore gets a big aoe healing staff (never need to heal that many units at once) and a sleep staff with fixed 46% accuracy. It missed almost every single time, but even if it didn't, it still wouldn't have been that good. sure the sleep is permanent but it only lasts for 1 attack, so it's not even great for whaling on the final boss. Maybe if it was a giant aoe SLEEP staff instead of healing it'd be alright
• yua's pretty decent one on one but enemies only come in huge clumps with overlapping ranges and a variety of weapons so she can't contribute at all without dying
• is there a fucking amogus made by the forest in the northwest
• supposedly sierra is a basic class but she can't use the Class Badge? who can I use this on
• the change in map music after defeating amos is welcome
• the victory conditions didn't update after beating amos
• whoolllllle lotta walking once the monsters are in the picture
• vampire lord sprite is pretty sweet
• why did you bother making weapons like, "effective armor" and "effective machine" if those enemy types never appear
• attacking the final boss gave me an error, "unable to allocate enough memory to play audio". It didn't crash but might wanna look into that
• I had trevor on the wrong side of the map with the light sword but eventually I was able to shove/swap/draw back him south to the boss, where he 2 shot him.
• rip to yua and julius, didn't reset for em
• having speeches from each unit you picked is a nice touch
• a ton of bad guys spawned pretty much right on top of trevor tho. not a nice touch
• mainly i'm just pretty bummed this is still going. REALLY wanted it to be over after the dark mage guy, this is sooo long
• the nuclear staff is garbage wtf? mag+1 healing to units within 7 tiles? THIS is a boss drop?
• the memory error is popping up all the time now, like on phase change, on any attack, etc. thinking I'm going to drop this soon.
• yeah shockingly one of the many enemies that spawned on top of trevor got to kill him and I game overed. I'm gonna call it here. Final playtime just over an hour and a half

Closing thoughts:

The noncombat concepts of this game are pretty sweet. First you go around the city, learning about goings-on and its people, and select your small team from a diverse selection of units. The selection you have of weapons and items is pretty awesome. Most affect your stats and many have special effectiveness. I love when an srpg has a diverse arsenal and this game delivers. There's also a dense amount of detail on each unit, since all of them have several skills and several weapon types. The exploration phase at the start of the game where you build your team is the best part.

The actual gameplay is not as good. Frankly, I did not like anything about it. Huge clumps of enemies charge headfirst at you, starting dozens of tiles away from yours and leading to several turns of downtime. Your bulkiest units are able to tank and kill them all despite their weapon types not being homogenized; an effective weapon or two might make you play a little slower, but for the most part someone like Julius or Jean can take on entire squads by themselves with a shield and a strong weapon. And thank god they can, because the alternative would be a fighting retreat where you pick off 1-2 enemies at a time and take five times as long. Not to say the juggernauting strat is FAST - the pacing is excruciating.

By the time I killed Amos I was ready for the map to please end, only for another, monster-focused phase to start. Again they start really far away, and you have to kill another boss. This boss is extremely annoying, with nosferatu, a chance-based skill to negate counters, and insane bulk. If there weren't a monster-effective sword some random enemy dropped that Trevor could use, I would've been softlocked against this guy. So I killed that boss and imagine my surprise when a third wave starts. This time the enemies spawned right on top of Trevor, whose action wasn't refreshed, and he was promptly killed and game-overed. Between the slow pace and the frequent bugs (error messages popping up any time the song would change), I called it quits there. Hopefully that was the last wave so I didn't miss much.

The passion in this project is clearly in the worldbuilding and the team customization. It's genuinely interesting thinking about what team to bring and what weapons and items to buy. It's a shame that I did not click with the gameplay at all. The player's toolset in this game would be much more interesting in a smaller, tighter game.

Stream of consciousness thoughts:

• cool font
• cool ost
• playing on normal i guess, readme didn't say which was intended but it said the end was imbalanced so I assume that means I should err on the side of easy
• the opening cutscene is thoroughly bizarre but I like that ness was happy to see paula. feel like "ugh fun ruined" was a low hanging joke, glad you didn't go for it
• "celice" but not "zigludo" smh
• funny premise too. "train" (armor knight) can't stop, have to clear the way ahead of it. cool setup
• canto+ on everybody sick
• kaiba's description is pretty fucked up (visually)
• lots of shadow tiles are misplaced in the roads and grass
• animations seem pretty standard so I'm turning em off. the no-animation combat stats are in here so that's nice!
• honestly the obsession over the train details, even having version numbers and stuff, is funnier than the cameos and jokes. random characters constantly sharing the history of and their opinions on trains, circles around to being unironically funny. this is great
• there's a sage at the top that just has a steel axe...?
• gave the energy ring to kain just because he was there
• i assume the near victory theme uses the same channels as the cursor sfx because moving units totally fucks up the song lol
• map was routed just as the armor passed the halfway point. getting the feeling i was supposed to play this on hardmode. enemy units were completely unable to threaten mine in any way. all just got doubled and 2hko'd

I gave it another shot on HM:

• noticing on my second run this has the hold L to toggle animations thing, very nice :)
• enemies used a silence staff and a sleep staff that I never even saw on NM. not like peach was contributing much anyway but 4 turns of giga-uselessness is fun
• I had to be a little more careful with kaiba around the archers but otherwise nah this is about the same difficulty as the first run
• paula is too good at killing things to waste her time using barrier. honestly trading her and Ness' staves was the play
• is the tyrfing a swordslayer...? I saw it do 56 to a hero and 61 to a swordmaster
• oh TWO sleep staves wow. interesting to have these without a restore when there's a time limit. cool icon for sleep though, looks more like Freeze. Tbf you have so many juggernaut units it's not the worst thing for a couple to be frozen/silenced
• I routed the map with the train at exactly the same point he was at when I finished the NM run. So I didn't miss out much by going Normal.
• forgot about the energy ring until after the map was routed so i gave it to rosa

Closing thoughts:

I love escort missions like this. It's not very hard, but its interesting to have a team full of canto+ users so that every action makes progress forward. This kind of shitposty cameo humor isn't really my jam, esp since I don't really know some of the characters, and honestly there weren't a lot of jokes as much as situational comedy. I can tell the creator loves trains, which I think is cool and got some smiles out of me. Didn't have anything to do with the theme, but I love romhacks and gbafe, so this was fun :) I mean I played through it twice!

My stream of consciousness thoughts while playing:

• cool font
• cool artstyle
• like the menu sfx. could be a bit louder, I thought there wasn't sound for it at first
• nice original music
• cool narration box and cool dialogue box and cool portraits and cool background art... honestly the presentation is a total banger
• nice use of \at command to have characters interrupt each other, underrated. I think a longer wait would be better though, like when ki talks about "the M word" when there's no way you could've read livra was about to say "mercenary" in the previous line. Like, \at[30] or [60] would probably be fine (edit from later: this bit does get a little overused)
• I like Ki, very funny
• super cool tileset and ui. the unit window looks sick but I have no clue what any of the information in it means (edit: oh looks like it's atk/def/res/AS. cool)
• oh and just realized it has the range of the weapon next to the weapon's name?? that's SO sick
• portraits for the enemies are also awesome
• kind of a confusing start. not really sure what I'm supposed to do. just started walking east and fighting the stationary enemies. takes multiple turns to even reach one of them. not a great start
• there's some spanish in the combat forecast telling me to press C to do something?
• ok the swamp tiles hurt. would've been nice if the ui said that. i have a plugin on my github (terrain details) that lets you show more info about terrain in its hover window
• when a player unit's in the bot left corner they get hidden by the unit window when you hover them. should make the window flip sides depending on the cursor location. Stopped being an issue once I disabled mouse controls tho
• yo... just realized movement stats are big and normal tiles impede it but roads don't. That's cool. Good backtracking measure
• "I think she's more likely to kill herself than any of us" SHEESH
• oh and forts heal too. I honestly forgot the vanilla UI doesn't tell you that, got too used to using plugins
• I like that you can mark individual enemies. I do wish you changed the "all range" color to something besides the vanilla piss yellow tho lol
• somehow I completely overlooked the village right by the starting area. didn't know what they looked like until I visited the one with bismal in it. a "focus location" event over the village on turn 1 would've been good
• realbattle seems to be vanilla animations only so I'm disabling it, hope I don't miss anything cool later but I can tell this will take a while even without needing to sit through combat
• zyman is funny
• maity's dialogue is great. all the apostrophes are in the perfect spots. nice name too
• what's the point of the port that appears after defeating the enemies in the southeast? can't visit it. the soldier that spawns in that corner of the map doesn't even spawn on the port tile
• was about to complain about the 2% crit the horse mage had on Ki but then she got a 5% crit on him so what can I say. Lots of low% crit throughout but thankfully I never got unlucky
• there was no cutscene for tek, he just appeared when I visited the village. that's too bad
• so it seems like the goal is, leave a couple units to defend the home castle while the rest traipse across the land. I like some of the individual ideas but man there are tons of dead turns
• the city on the north edge of the sandy area isn't visitable
• lytomi super struggles to keep up with everybody. feel like his heal staff should be stronger than 10 hp for how annoying it is to have him keep up
• wait the fortress just south of the unvisitable village is itself visitable, did these get switched up? it gives Ajerdo (with no cutscene)
• what does spd do? game doesn't seem to have doubling, so is it just an avoid stat?
• the enemies seem to scale much faster than my dudes. everyone gets 2hko'd and tend to 3-4hko back, need to slowly enemy phase most of them
• on the save screen the world map looks pretty impressive tbh
• speaking of saving please get the plugin that enables you to save regardless of whether anyone's moved
• can't visit the village next to the bridge that opens up either. I think this backtrack point opening up is pretty sick though. I think I understand now what the port in the east is going to be used for later
• no recruit dialogue for fakt either. are we done hearing from the characters? :(
• fakt doesn't have a portrait in his unit window
• that being said fakt is so much better than lytomi it's crazy. 13 mag vs 0, he can actually capably heal. granted I didn't realize til now that they could use tomes if I bought one for em
• can't visit the village east of fakt's hometown
• markyjoe's smooth scroll plugin would've gone a long way to beautify this game. the jerky vanilla cursor and camera is really hard to go back to
• the very last shard holder for me is the death emperor, and he can't even damage Hohum
• finished in 48 turns. took me about an hour and a half
• aw man it's the kind of end screen you can't proceed past. well gg
• never did find out what the port was for

Closing thoughts:

I never used the strong healing. Feel dumb for not using it, you get 2 free ones for 6 uses and it could've sped up a couple sections if I'd used it. Never knew I was a dirty hoarder

Never found out what the spanish text was for, so I DeepL'd the text and it seems to be the "check enemy skills in forecast" plugin. But no enemies have skills. Strange

I only ever bought 1 dark eruption and 1 healing item. Durability's a nonissue, even Ki and Bismal who I used the most still had durability in the teens for their starting weapons at the end, so I didn't need to buy refill weapons and the shops just didn't have anything particularly cool. I could've bought a weapon for Fakt or Lytomi I guess, only real thing I would've done differently

Aesthetics are gorgeous. Having an original soundtrack for a jam game is so great. Map theme got a bit repetitive for how long the map took, maybe could've switched tunes at some point, but that's no big deal. Character and UI art are both fantastic, and I love the tileset. Even its simplicity (e.g., doesn't have big sprawling mountain tilesets, just single pieces) adds to the charm

The idea of, "cross the world in 1 large map which evolves to become easier to traverse as you progress, meanwhile your ever-growing army needs to spread out across that continent to protect your home base" is a really awesome concept, and the idea of rebuilding an already shattered empire is a great use of the jam's theme

But god damn there is SO much walking in this one. Was this inspired by death stranding? Walking for ages, trying to rebuild society? That'd be funny. But yeah the moving enemies were more of an annoyance than a threat since they don't target you (which is fine on its own!) and the bosses hit so hard that the only strat I had was to wait next to them on EP or pick them off from a range they couldn't attack from, so the game was walk, wait, walk, wait, while I had 3 or so units goalkeeping the start position. I feel like better movement mechanics could've gone a long way, maybe something like rescue, or being able to use map features like the port or something to cross sections of the map quickly. Also the game kept adding new ways to backtrack, but I didn't really need to do that very much myself, so it just benefited the enemies. Which isn't a problem, but it would've been neat to have reason to return to base sometimes. Or maybe that would've slowed the pace even further. Hard to say

The exp curve was a little punishing for earlier-joining units. "Falling off" is too harsh, but they were definitely never as good as later-joining units since they need multiple kills to level up and there aren't really lots of kills to go around (except for the base defense crew)

Character writing was really fun. I'm sure time constraints were why there was almost no dialogue in the second half and I think that's a huge shame - that's one of the game's strengths. "Well we can't sell these artifacts of power now, so we might as well use em to rule the world ourselves" is fantastic, and everybody was funny. Just wish I knew what goofy quirks Tek, Fakt, Ajerdo, Delicia, and Hohum had too

I enjoyed Shard Saviors! Thanks for making it :)

Thanks for the comment! I rewrote the UI for the unit menu and the terrain window myself with custom code. The UI took a lot of hard work to implement, so I'm really happy you liked it. Thank you so much for playing!

Hi there! Unfortunately, SRPG Studio games are only for Windows. Even emulators like Wine have problems with it. I hope you have another Windows system to play this on, otherwise I'm really sorry. :(

Finished playing this and enjoyed it! The middle part made me sweat a little since I was getting really bad draws and was being carried by lucky crits from my minotaur, who was honestly my MVP the whole way through. The swarm at the end where you fight the guy with throwing knives was also a point where I only got through because of some pretty good luck. I thought making the boss move without warning as soon as you attack him was kind of a dick move, and the village that gives move+1 is really weirdly placed... You're already being pressed to hurry, so I sent a monster to that village (a ballistician who had already missed both of his shots) and wasted it. The extra move bought me an extra turn of letting that ballistician kite the cerberus rider, but I was mostly just thinking "really, are you kidding me".

From a technical standpoint this game is awesome. Love the card drawing and the balance was surprisingly good, and more importantly cool. The assassin's gimmick was probably my favorite, besides that minotaur whose back probably aches from carrying me so hard. Stacking buffs on him was really fun and had that card game feeling to it. I appreciate how useful the buffs are, too; I think you mayyy have erred on the side of them being too good over too boring, which was the absolute right call. The fairy dancers were also neat, mostly because of the 3-turn timer that I thought was really interesting. On another note I would die for Sarah

The balance is good, the cards are dope, and a couple of the encounters turned out really fun, especially near the end when I started drawing better cards (not sure if coincidence or design). Kiting the cerberus with summons that had fallen behind was fun. Mostly I'm just not in love with the map design and most of the first half, the fun of which seems to rely very very heavily on what you happen to draw due to how dangerous the enemies are and how shaky the hit rates are for the most part without any real way to improve them. I saw you said in another review that you had improved hit rates in an update, so I'd hate to imagine what they used to be like.

All in all, great concept and execution of the main mechanic, but I think the level itself holds it back. That is, the parts that are still Fire Emblem are what I feel are lacking, haha. All the interesting enemies are saved for the end, and luck is a huge factor in how annoying the early and middle parts are, not just in draws but also accuracy and crits.

Be sure to download v1.1, as it contains bugfixes for the mouse controls and shows the unit's kill counter in the hover window as well as the unit menu! Thanks to Neopolis and Prismalice for finding that mouse bug for me :)

Updated Gun Game to v1.1 with a bugfix for mouse controls and a progress display in the unit hover window, please redownload if you haven't played yet :) (Or if you have played it but want to replay it the way it's intended to be played)

I guess you were playing with mouse instead of keyboard, because keyboard controls do let you access a unit inspect screen. I'm sorry about that, I never playtested with mouse controls so I didn't realize they were busted. The poison lance was inspired by Black Ops 2's gun game mode saddling you with some really trash weapons near the end :) If the mouse controls hadn't been broken, you'd have seen the unit menu DOES have a Kills stat on the right side that shows that unit's progress. Sorry again about that :( Glad you liked it anyway, though!

I was scratching my head wondering what you meant by not accessing the unit menu since I could do it just fine, when I realized my edits to key bindings must have broken the mouse controls. I only ever play with keyboard controls, so I didn't even consider that. Sorry about that, but glad you enjoyed it anyway!