itch.io

Awesome, thanks!

One more question about exporting, is there a way to export every file spaced out like how large weapons are? When you export with these it puts a lot of space around each sprite, compared to normal weapons which there is no extra space. However, when importing them into the game all this extra space throws everything off. If I could export every file with this extra space it would solve the problem. Is there any way to do this?

I see when exporting large weapons it splits the image into different animations. Is there a way to export all images like that without having to have a big weapon?

Are you able to export a piece without a base? For example, can I choose an armor set and export it so that it just shows the armor but the body isn't shown?

Is there a way to manually add in all the LPC sprite stuff? This only has about 10% of what exists. In addition you can't even change the heads, which leaves out 90% of the combinations of different fantasy races you should be able to choose. You can't change shoulders, beards, accessories, neck options, or wrists. And the options of things you can choose which is very limited in what is out there in FREE character generators, 

I personally feel ripped off from buying this. There are hardly any options for LPC at all, and no indication in the purchase page that this is the case. IMO if you're going to continue selling this in the future, you need to be very descriptive of how little of LPC this actually has in it so that others don't make my mistake. 

Was just wondering before I purchase this, did you make write something more about how to recolor the time fantasy stuff to match this character generator? 

Thanks for the review aura. Do you think in the end the gameplay loop could be salvaged? If not I can take the framework and use it to make something less convoluted without losing too much progress.

Thanks for the thorough review Tomodev~ Really appreciate it, and this gives me a lot to work on

Very well made. Great animations, sound effects, and smooth gameplay. My only concern is for your health. How many mushrooms did you have to eat to come up with a concept of floating platforms in which you must poke toads with a fairy? I honestly think you should cut down a bit, it might be bad for your health.

Thanks for the input, and when you're breaking it down like that, it does seem like a lot is going on.  And thinking even harder, it does get pretty complicated, especially with the amount of skills there are. Later on, you need to have really well designed classes to take on enemies.
The boost is there for really your big damage after you break the shields of an enemy. But I suppose it's all the same in the end, it just adds some variability. But there are so really cool things I think too, like for example: Sorry for wall of text:

Having a rogue in your group, you can use an ability that when used on an enemy, the overkill damage is stored for the next attack. So in theory, you can use it to kill an enemy and store that damage. Then the next turn you have an ability that grants your next attack an automatic crit. So on that turn you timed it to break the big enemies shield before you rogue's turn, then your rogue uses their relic power to triple their damage, which now consists of the overkill damage as well as being an automatic crit, then you have the bard cast their ultimate spell on the rogue which replicates their next attack. So this huge combo does a metric fuckton of damage.

But thinking about doing stuff that complicated, maybe it would get hard to balance, because then I'd have to balance for those really big attacks? 

As for downsizing, which would you think would be a better way to go about it? Losing the relic damage boost system, or losing the shield break system? (The weapon swap needs to stay because of stats for hybrid characters, and some abilities require certain weapons. When you can choose any classes' abilities, being able to equip 2 weapons gives you more of a wide variety of abilities you could use at least.)

Wew lad this is a long one, lets see if I can get through this. 

I kept all the folders and stuff because I was exporting without using any of the unused items and stuff from my cluttered regular folder, but the game kept crashing for some reason on this build. There is some file in there that is getting referenced that is important and it's gonna take time to figure it out, so to get it up in time I had to keep everything in there just to make sure it actually loaded.

All the intro stuff is just a mismash of open source pictures and stuff I found and edited together in premiere. So that's why it looks like that. Just a placeholder until I have funds for an artist to animate something nice. Considering how much that's going to cost, It's gonna be a while so I needed to have something in the meantime.

Actually showing things on screen takes different sprites for every animation, so rather than do that, I opted for a narrator. I know it's not for everyone, but it will be very dialogue heavy, and more like a fantasy novel than a game in that one regard.

Bloodied man isn't bloody yet because I'm still commissioning artwork, so it'll be a while before I can afford everything. 

All the sprites for the characters are just close approximations I could make with the generator until I can get those commissioned as well. 

I didn't do the voice lines, had people volunteer for that. They are placeholders until I rework the entire voice lines system and hire actual voice actors.

CM = class mastery points. They are used to buy abilities.

As for the battle system, it's basically a direct ripoff of octopath traveler. so although it feels overloaded, it's basically just the mechanics from that game, with just all different spells and abilities and such.

Yeah, the menus are pixelated atm, going to work on upscaling the sprites instead of using nearest neighbor.

As for the equip skill option. In the future you will only be able to equip 4 skills to start with, so the skills you unlock on other classes can be placed there. However, in the demo atm, all skills made are open, and you have basically infinite equip slots. Everything in that regard is a work in progress.

The collisions messing up in a few of the starting map is due to being in the middle of switching from grind based collision to collision maps. All but the very few beginning maps have that, and are being changed right now. I've gotten around to everything except those beginning forests and cave parts.

Dang I liked the sword cursor

Yes, a few of the sprites when you enter meriwynne were upscaled using the wrong algorythm so they are blurry, I've gotten around to upscaling around 75% of all the sprites correctly now, and am working on it atm.

The guard and man in merriwynne have no collision, neither do the children. This is intentional.

Yeah, still writing dialogue for npcs, but also holding off on a lot of them because I want to do quest things with them, so going to finish the first part before giving them dialogue.

As for being overloaded with systems, it's really jsut a shield break system with a boost for combat. And unlocking skills with class mastery points gained from combat. It may seem overwhelming at first, but it's really not. Maybe the way it's presented atm seems crazy because everything is unlocked for testing, but the next build for DD I'll have all the locks in place. The programming of how the skills being unlocked is REALLY fucky so I have to have every single skill done in the game and its id exactly to play on every other skill to get an exponentially increasing iteration of CM cost, so I needed to make every skill (which other than ranger is basically done) before I could add all that stuff.

Maybe I can figure out a way to introduce the system in a more lore friendly way rather than just dump it all in a tutorial. Maybe tutorial as you go or something. 

Pretty fun little game. A few suggestions, is just show the whole controller when you are giving controls, and highlight what button it is in a bright color, it can get confusing the way it is. As for the first boss in the tutorial with the big axe, I think he's pretty well made, and the explosion when you kill him is a good addition

Thanks for checking out my game auradev, I just woke up but I want to answer some of the questions because some of the inherent flaws you've pointed out I've noticed too.

1.) The game is 2gb because 3 lines of code was fucking up my game so I was uploading it to test on different pcs around my house which required me to try everything, and in the end the build that worked had a few folders of just un processed images and maps and everything took up a lot of space. In the end it will not be that way, but after spending 36 hours just to try to squash this one bug to get the game running at normal speed, I said fuck it let it be.

2.) Walking is a bit slower than default RPG maker games because of inherent movement speed buffs that will be available in the game. Right now I'm balancing for how fast you will be with how slow you should feel in the beginning of the game. 

3.) Enemies do feel meaty in terms of HP because how to combat system will play out in general. I'm having a bit of a time balancing wise. For 1, if you smack mobs in the beginning of the game with autos to bust shields then relic to burst it takes forever. However after fighting those mobs to learn their weakness and using a 1 point relic with an AOE spell or ability you can kill entire group in seconds. This is just very very apparent in the very start of the game when you have no items and little mana to spam AOE. 

Although each map I make takes around 8 hours to make, I've actually spent the majority of time making the combat system. And with the synergy from being able to mix any abilities from any classes I've found crazy combinations that make it fun, but also reduce combat times to seconds. I'm trying to balance around 3 things that are challenging.
A: Those being having a sense of progression going from battles seemingly taking forever to learning the mechanics and building a character that kills groups in seconds.
B: Making fights challenging after you've gained power
C: Having your characters still feel powerful after enemies become hard enough to actually give your characters a challenge. (Think high level d&d battles, where your characters have so many options that battles become hard to make challenging as a DM)

4.) Enemies DO get aggroed during cutscenes, an easy fix that I just haven't implemented yet because working on other things lol.

5.) I think the decimal part of the damage is from how I'm rounding numbers for damage over time abilities. Something that needs to be fixed for sure.

6.) Battle animations are just under the option under the same name in the options menu. They default as "fast" but have 2 faster speeds. This was actually the cause of all of my problems getting the demo out...long story.

7.) You are able to save on the world map, it was explained on the 4th forest map during the end of a cutscene. Having you not realize this leads me to believe that I haven't explained that aspect of the game well enough. Saving is done on the world map by using the tent in your inventory. This sets up a camp which is very important. As the game doesn't have a journal, instead it has the camping system where you will discuss current events with your party, be able to heal via rations, and save by sleeping in the tent. This is another reason movement on the map is slow, because it is meant to feel like a journey. At later parts of the game using your tent and camping is imperative to story progression and travelling in general, I just think I need to explain it better because it was only briefly glossed over in the story.

8.) Enemies should stick around after dying, and have a death animation of crumpling to the floor. I'll look into this and make them disappear if they aren't all just crumpling. 

9.) The class system does feel overwhelming, but only because everything is unlocked in this version for testing. Realistically every class will only start with 1 ability, and then you buy them with "class mastery" points from battles. I'm still working on them and the way I programmed this can't be changed until I have 100% of them done. This is because they are all stored in an array that needs to be exact or it returns a NULL value. This is because every time you buy a skill I want it to change to a higher value. So buying skills in the beginning of the game is quick, and tapers off the more you get. This is for class balance reason, since you can switch classes at any time to learn their abilities, I wanted the player to have meaningful choices, where they can get multiple skills from other classes, but they will risk not getting skills from their "main class" because of the exponential time needed to get them.

As you can probably tell I'm just using yanfly's JP system for this, and have some custom code I added to achieve this:
       

<Custom Learn JP Cost>

var pointArray = [100, 350, 900,1000,1100,

1200, 1202, 1203];

cost=pointArray[user.skills().length];

</Custom Learn JP Cost>

So until I have every skill completely done, I've just left it as having them all unlocked for now.

10.) The target marker is something I'm actively working on the to fix.

11.) The character sprites are pretty much all placeholders at the moment. The wizard girl is the only 1 that is 100% finished, still working on the rest of the commissions, but in the end everything will match. I can do mapping myself, but as for drawing actual characters I don't have that kind of talent. Even when I was working with 3D I can do buildings and stuff like that, but organic just throws me off.

12.) The opening and closing of the text box is a hard one for me too. I'm just using galv's bust plugin atm, and if you don't put a delay in between text it gets really wonky. I was thinking of using another plugin but I'm not exactly sure what to do yet. What do you use for your bust overlay if you don't mind lol?

13.) Can't believe I didn't see this, that there is only exit to title. Will fix this for the next build lol

Thanks again for checking out my game, I'll do the same for yours as well, although I don't think my words will have the same gravity as yours lol

From on RM dev to another, thanks for appreciating the polish on the maps, they take a crazy amount of effort, an effort that will probably be lost on people not familiar with that kind of stuff~

Honestly, a really well made demo.  I love the aesthetic, the music reminds me of diablo, and the general feel is great. The only thing that bothers is the slam you do after hitting attack no matter how far you have jumped. It just really feels like there should be a slash or something if you hit it earlier, and the falling with the slash at all times is out of place. 

I feel like Neo from the Matrix being attacked by agent Smith, thanks anon.