The game has very few side quests at the moment and all are completable at any point. The Canoness' staff quest can be picked up in Flumen pretty early, and doing the mine investigation quest eventually takes you to the area with the cave (the one where you fight the bear).
Thank you very much! It's nice to hear good things about my works since I have a very average opinion about everything I do myself :P
There is indeed another cave on the road to Aerzen, and it's on the map where you fight the warg bear. You need the key from the priest to enter the cave fully.
That's a good pickup on the Lily's quest. I've had similar sequence break bugs in the game before, but sometimes they just fly under the radar so to say. Out of sight out of mind kind of thing. :3
And for purchasable cosplay items... I'd have to do it in same way as in Noel's quest where he wears the "religious ritual garb", but on a technical level it's not impossible to start a quest by buying X item in a store. (I might have something already planned regarding Rose and maids)
I put in my design document an ironclad rule that I would not touch the party members after the player has acquired them. The playable party is (almost) completely independent from the story. I'd be MAYBE willing to break this rule if a character canonically dies or if there was be a branching story path where you completely abandon the Agency or something. I understand the immersion aspect, but I draw this design aspect from more modern games like Star Rail. Players have their favorite characters and team comps, and while RPG Maker allows adding and removing party members at any point, I feel it would be detrimental to the overall gaming experience. Many would find it annoying that you can't suddenly use the character you've put most effort in and given the best gear to just because this bit of the story happens to dictate so.
The latter feature is likely possible, but would require a lot of modding. Especially if it needs to show the current equipment, since I'd need to have graphics for every single armor/weapon/shield I put into the game. Not impossible, but too much work for one guy considering it's a purely visual feature. Canonically most of the characters wear the Agency uniform anyway.
Yes. Every accessory slot item works on every character, even if the name or the ability makes no sense. You can make anyone counterattack, thou I would not advice it with low ATK characters. :3
That's a good find. There's a haywire autorun event there which triggers due to the switches that go on in Noel's and Lily's quests. I have patched this issue in v2.5.
Not unfortunately. I can only do fluent english and finnish. Some people have asked if they can make a fan translation, which I'm open to, but I have no idea if those projects ever came to anything.
It doesn't affect anything story-wise. You just need to choose between a nice staff and a pile of money. You CAN sell the staff to a store too, but you won't get as good of a price for it.
Thanks, but this is a really big project mostly due to how much art goes into it. If I make another game I need to think how to streamline its design in a way that is not so dependent on pictures.
The game is a one-time purchase and a relatively inexpensive one at that, so I'm not that concerned about the game being infnitely playable. Just a nice story you can finish in a weekend or two. Replayability would ofc be a nice bonus, but in the end I'm serving a specific story here that's a concise package and X hours long.
There may be some end-game content available in the future once we get there. I like the idea of having a branching story for replayability, but that would broaden the developing scope vastly and add months of development time. For now I try to get the core story out and we'll see how the game looks then content-wise.
Thanks! What a bunch of excellent lore related questions. :3
I won't go too much into detail, but I can comment on some aspects of the bigger picture. "The trench warfare" is not necessary a spitting image of our WW1. It mainly emphasizes how the war has gotten completely stuck (thou trenches are likely involved). This is why the area the game takes place in, the Frontier, is largely neglected by de facto governing power, and running the area has fallen mostly into the hands of local nobles and the church. There's no doubt lethal weapons are used in the war, both rune-based and conventional, and yes, mages and rune weapons fill many conventional military roles. Chemistry and physics have evolved to a point, but much of it has likely evolved hand-in-hand with magic. While flamethrowers exist, we do not know what they shoot out for example. Gas warfare is mentioned, but how they produce chemicals for it is unclear. The combat in the Frontier is medieval largely due to the area being, well, a frontier and under quarantine. Due to the evident lack of guns in the frontier it's correct to assume that they do not exist in the form that is familiar to us, or they are such a new invention that most people in the Frontier do not even know they exist. The guards seen in the game are personal hires for whoever is running the area (usually Catherine). Everyone is having very bad time generally, so the quick and easy solution is to just hire a lot of guards until the root issues can be solved. The society is more or less circling the drain, though I admit it could be better indicated in the game.
About the wargs' abilities: they do not replace body parts. While they can plug wounds and can even fortify broken bones to some extend, at some point the host is just done for (warg queens MAY be an exception to this). If a person with no arms puts on a warg with arms in place, the warg would either morph to match its host on that part, or fill the arms with its goo to make it appear it has arms, but they would not be functional, or they would be very weak. But a complete limb replacement - probably not possible. If the host takes a grievous injury like a dismemberment, the warg may separate from its host willingly and find a new healthier host. When it comes to eyes and ears it may be different. The wargs *technically* form working eyes and ears on their host, so if the host's brain can interpret sight and hearing signals, they should be able to see or hear at least somewhat even when they normally could not. I mean wargs carry over fully functioning genitals too, so why not eyes?
Hope this clear things. Yea I haven't thought the war aspect much. It's mainly there to justify why the Frontier is so neglected and there's really nobody properly in charge. The empire would likely solve the warg issue immediately if it was in full strength and stable, so war it is.
That sounds about correct. Some bosses work more or less as level/gear checks, but there are tricky ways to get around that (Tabitha's Bakuretsu being the most obvious method). Quinn can also force crits to get rid of the two adds quickly. Status effects are also good against bosses since many status effects do % HP damage and most bosses are not immune to paralysis. So there are options if your gear or level is too low.
When it comes to balancing it's hard to hit a good spot since some players skip most of the fights and some fight all, some buy gear constantly while some hoard money, but I try to have the boss fights be somewhere in the middle.
That kind of scroll would have to work only on specific maps which would possibly require some tricky coding. For example using one after the bridge collapse in the mine would soft lock the game and hard lock it if the player uses a save point. Deducing the specific exit point for every dungeon and applying that to a single usable item would be yikes (unless there's a plugin for it). I would rather put an exit mechanism manually to each dungeon or make the dungeon loop around itself, but only if the dungeon is long. The current dungeons are on the shorter side.
At this point it seems unlikely due to technical reasons. RPG Maker is a bit annoying in a way that these kinds of things should have been done in the very start and applying weaknesses retroactively is a pain. Applying them based on who is in a Warg and who is not is even bigger of a pain. I'd only have made it something like 4 or 5% to get the 'weakness' indicator, and fire damage is rather rare in the game at the moment.
Download it again, and then move your save files over to the new one, or move the files from the new version to the old one and overwrite when it asks. Former way is safer and easier.
You are very much correct. I think I pondered adding fire weakness to the party members, but it just dropped out at some point and I forgot the whole thing. I might add a minor fire weakness to the characters.
Thanks for letting me know! There seems to be something wrong with the mine lever indeed. It should open the iron gates to the chest but it might be tied to a wrong switch.
The other one is more like an oversight. I'm not that worried about NPCs being in two locations at once. It's pretty common in MMOs for example.
Unfortunately there's a lot here that would spoil a lot of the story which I cannot comment. I can comment on a few. 1) The game's main story will end in a v4 or v5. After that I won't raise the version number anymore. 3) No. This would require too much effort to have VXA keep up with who wears what if the user could play a warg dress-up game. E.g. if you could put Noel into Lily and Quinn into Rose, there would have to be a custom dialogue section for each host-suit combo for every event where the characters show up. VXA has no dynamic way to handle this (might be possible with plugin). Suit swaps will be reserved inside specific quests. 5) The black wargs are not a reference to anything. They could be red, blue or pink. Black is just a cool color. 9) I think I can manage by myself.
My first guess is that you've talked to a side character outside the church. You need to go to the building next to the church and recruit Noel. After that you can go to Rehling and remove the sign in front of the mine entrance. You can get to the area with the stolen Canoness' staff after exploring the mine.
I'll see if I can clarify this step in the walkthrough.
The issue with the servant lady sounds more like an oversight, but I can take a look at it.
And congrats on getting that much def. :D NULL sounds like the game is trying to tell you it's 0. When an enemy attacks your character, the character's def gets subtracted from the total damage. 100 def would negate the damage completely from lower level enemies. I need to check to what extent this applies to upper level enemies, but enjoy being unkillable for now~
Paying any amount towards the game grants you a unique download key you can use for every later game version. This applies even if the price goes up (but don't worry, I'll keep it at $3). So you will be eligible to v3, v4 and as far as it goes.
