Atonement: Scourge of Time

[cabfe]

Just finished the demo with both characters.
Here are my notes taken while playing:

Spoiler

Nail's story:
When I saved, I realised that the sprites are too tall and appear above the text mentionning the map's name for the save.
Maybe you could tweak the script to display the sprites slightly more below?

I heard the sound indicating an update to the quest log, but there's no indication of it and the shortcut Q to access the log isn't mentionned either.

Music for 1st dungeon is not long enough and gets quickly repetitive.

Denshor Village:
I like the fact that everybody has a name and face.

Outside:
After the fight with the 2 beasts near the cart, there is a camera move upward. On the left of the screen, there must be some empty tiles (to the left of the stalagmite and left of the southwest wall) because I could see a parallax instead of ground tiles.
Related? There seem to be a passability issue when I walk to the left. But with this parallax thing I can't say if I'm supposed to walk there or not.

Same parallax issue when I'm at the Health Regen spot (with a banner on its left)
Or maybe this issue isn't one and is supposed to show a sense of perspective? Looks strange anyway.(actually got an explanation when playing as Elleria)

When you run to help your brother, the sprite for Nail is a running one. Maybe you could see if you can display this sprite when you use Shift to run on the map too?

Herseras Wood:
That thing attacking you when you cross on the left deals too much damage! Just showing that you can't pass is enough.

Elleria's story:
OK, I got the parallax thing. It's supposed to show a much lower ground, right? Maybe you could add blur to the parallaxed picture, like adding a depth of field. At first I didn't understand what it was and thought of a bug.

Gashrun is an interesting character. The Karmit people have a nice background.

Yay for Kizu! I needed a healer so badly sometimes before meeting him.

Great idea of showing the story under two actor's perspective. It explains some elements that couldn't be with the other and adds a lot to replayability.

 

[Matseb2611]

Thanks for the feedback, Cabfe. I'll see where I can make the changes.

Hehe, I guess that's a fair point about the plant hitting the player. I was hoping the cutscene just before it kind of shows that getting close to those plants is dangerous. But perhaps I'll have a dialogue line there too as a warning.

I was wondering if someone would mention the running sprite animation for when the player presses 'Shift'. I was actually considering that, but the running animation looks a bit funny, especially if you press 'Shift' but do not move. The character kind of stands still in a funny pose, so that's the reason I decided not to go on with this. Perhaps I'll experiment more with this and/or see if more people suggest this idea.

A blur for a parallax pic is a good idea. I'll try that.

Glad you like Gashrun's character and background. There's going to be more revealed about him and his people later on in the game. 

 

[Dalph]

I did other 2 playthroughs with both Nail and Elleria (and both in Challenging mode):

Spoiler

I like Gashrun too, he seems like an interesting character so far but my favourite character is without doubt Elleria, I like the badass female anti-hero(?).

I was complaining about Makkon (in Normal mode) but even in Challenging Mode he's nowhere near as hard as that damn Apocrita thing.

Needless to say that I liked a lot the battle against this monster and how the beast changed strategy\skills\stats when flying, I had to grind till level 7 also here and abuse some Potions.

Poison worked pretty well when the monster was to the ground, and Lighting Bolt was very useful when it was flying.

Suggestions:

Please don't change anything on Makkon, Ronard, the Apocrita and all the other bosses because they are pretty well balanced so far (even in Challenging Mode).

The things that you can change are the stats of the regular enemies (in Challenging Mode), because they were pretty easy to deal with (at least for me), so I believe that you can even buff them a little without problems.

There's that annoying squished text error in the Quest Log, it's not a big issue, if you want you can fix it with Mithran's text cache script.

And may I suggest also to add a namebox script for the windows?

It will be easier to read the character names during the dialogues in this way.

Looking forward to see more Matseb, awesome game.

I love how both the story arcs fits together and how you can view the same story from a different perspective.

 

[Matseb2611]

Many thanks for all this feedback and suggestions, Dalph.

Spoiler

I am glad you liked the boss fights, especially the battle with Apocrita. I remember I felt quite proud when I finally pulled it off the way I intended for it to be, and you've discovered its exact weaknesses during each stage, so good job. Using Dark Cloud to dim its vision is another nice method, especially when it unleashes that sting barrage attack that hurts all your party members.

Ah, so regular enemies were still quite easy? The thing is, for bosses, I create two different versions, one for Normal and one for Challenging. With regular enemies all I do is just add some new skills to them, to make them seem stronger in Challenging (since making two versions of each enemy would take a while and will be quite messy). But perhaps I could simply make duplicates of some of the skills they use and make those stronger. That is a possibility.

Thanks for the script suggestions. I'll look into those to see how I can optimize the interface better.

And awesome, glad you're liking the dual-POV nature of the story-telling here.

In regard to future revisions of the demo, I am thinking of having a select few people who will be my special playtesters and I'll be sending the game to them for feedback from time to time. Since you've given so much useful feedback already, you can be one of these special playtesters, if you're up for it that is. The content that will be added from now on won't be released to general public until the game is complete, so only a handful of people will get to witness it early on.

 

[Dalph]

@Matseb2611:

Spoiler

Thanks for sharing that other strategy to deal with the boss (I totally forgot to use Dark Cloud, I'll be honest), it will make the battle less painful in the later playthroughs.

Yep, I think it's a good idea to buff the regular enemies a bit (in some way), it will make the whole thing more challenging for sure.

Just go with stronger versions of their skills if you want, I know it's a lot of work but will be worth it at the end (mainly for veteran players who love challenges).

And that sounds awesome, I'm glad that you choose me as one of your special playtesters.

I have some spare time recently, so I'll be happy to help you in testing the future updates of the game, I won't be around in the mornings however because I'm so damn busy with my job.

Just let me know through a PM about the future updates.

 

[Matseb2611]

Yeah. I've had a number of Incitement 2 players say that Challenging difficulty there wasn't hard enough, so I am hoping to have it live up to its name in this game. If that means making enemy skills deal more damage, then I'll do that.

Thanks for accepting to be one of the special playtesters. I'll send you a PM later about it.

Btw, do you know of a good namebox script that can be used commercially? I've found Yanfly's and it is a really decent script, but one of the functions it provides is making it possible to completely skip the text boxes, a feature that may interfere with some of the cutscenes and that I can't seem to disable, so now I am not sure if I'd want to use this script. I was also wondering of some alternatives. Do you think perhaps instead of nameboxes it would look good to simply have the character names appear in a different font colour to the rest of the text? (in fact anyone can give an opinion on this; I am curious to see what everyone thinks).

 

[Dalph]

Besides YF's one I don't know much about them sadly (and I don't think there are a lot of them tbh), but maybe you can do it recolouring the names yes, that would be a very good idea. I say to go for it.

 

[cabfe]

@Matseb:

About Yanfly's script, do you mean the TEXT_SKIP = :A option?

I had tried to disable it once and used this line instead:

TEXT_SKIP = 1

Although that should work with any other value.

 

[Matseb2611]

Yeah, that's the option I meant. That's quite strange how changing it to '1' seems to work well (just tried it out). So that doesn't cause any other bugs in-game?

 Well, since that works, I guess I will use that script after all. I think namebox will look better than simply coloured text. Thanks very much, guys.

 

[Matseb2611]

Update galore:

Hey guys. To begin this update post - I am still looking for a handful more special playtesters. Special playtesters are those who I'll be sending future revisions of the demo to to give feedback on. If you're up for it, please say so. The only requisite is that you would've already given some reasonable feedback on the current demo (just so that I know you're serious about giving detailed feedback) and that you've got the time of course.

In other news, I've been working on Act 2 already and here are a bunch of screenshots of the next area visited by Nail's team - Abandoned Fort Caskell.

The Ghost Hallway puzzle:

And a battle screen to show you the kind of enemies you'll be dealing with here:

And yet there's more in this update. Check out the next two character drawings by Ehcs - it's Anrid and Gashrun:

And finally, we've gotten a bit of evil on this thread (Dalph, was this your doing? )

 

[Matseb2611]

Thought I'd post some screenshots of the next area (this time Elleria's team). I'll probably try to post an update about once a week or so.

Temple of Lomgorth, the upper levels

Temple of Lomgorth, the lower levels (it gets pretty dark around here)

And who is this???

Also, you guys should totally check out some of the new tracks Scythuz has done for the game. Many of these are new ones, done for Act 2, and aren't in the demo.

(the last 6 tracks are new, starting from 'Fighting in the Shadows')

https://soundcloud.com/scythuz/sets/project-atonement

I am thinking of doing a video sample of one of the boss fights very soon. Might be in the next update or the one after. We'll see. BD

 

[The Stranger]

I like what I see, and look forward to meeting that vampiric\undead character.  I can't wait to play through Act II.

 

[Scythuz]

I finished both Nail and Elleria's perspectives for Act 1 yesterday and had a lot of fun with it, looking forward to Act 2 now!

 

[Dalph]

Very promising work Matseb, I like the artwork, the music and the effect that you used in the second screenshot, everything looks so nice ingame. Also yes...the 666 views were my fault (I have to admit it, ahahah), can't wait to see the rest of the story now.

 

[Matseb2611]

Lol. Next goal - 666 replies. Then we'll truly turn evil. Haha.

Glad to hear you guys are all looking forward to Act 2. There'll be a lot of backstories in this one. I've already started working on Elleria's. This will be one and the same story told both from her point of view and from Nail's that will explain why they dislike each other so much.

 

[Matseb2611]

Some new stuff...

A couple of more characters drawn by Ehcs - Kanden and Kizu

(next time you'll see Meya and Habach, the two characters we still don't know much about from the demo)

And a couple of screenshots for now.

A small flashback showing younger Adesard (the main villain) talking to his daughter

And a small section of a Teglan village (I'm still a bit unsure of the mapping in this one)

Hopefully in the next update I'll have a gameplay video of one of the boss fights. Stay tuned.

 

[The Stranger]

I always love looking at the concept art for your games.

I'm looking forward to playing through Act II. I hope it comes out soon.

 

[Matseb2611]

Thanks man. Yeah, there's still a fair bit left to do in Act 2 (it is possibly the longest act in the game), but I am still looking at August for its completion. I also have to go back to Act 1 and change all the dialogue text boxes to have the name box tags. Not sure if I'll do it when I release Act 2 or leave it for later, as it can take quite a long time to do.

Also I notice we're over 1000 views. Thanks to everyone who checked the game out so far!

 

[Matseb2611]

Well finally, here is that promised gameplay video of a brand new boss battle - Makkon and Rakea:





^Thoughts?

Also some screenshots of this mountain level:

 

[Dalph]

Looks awesome.

I like the strategy in that battle, and man you make it look so easy (well obviously...you're the developer after all, ahahah).

I'm sure that for the player it will be quite challenging.

Good stuff, keep it up.