RMMV Colossal Conquest [IGMC 2017]

[SwiftIllusion]

"Battle in an evolving boss fight and grow your characters to face the challenge."​

- - - Gameplay Elements - - -​

• A tutorial boss that gives you an interactive introduction to the core knowledge you will need to succeed in future possible conquests.
• An overarching Boss 'mindset' that you can observe to help plan current and future actions you should take.
• A twist on the common rock>paper>scissors that creates an additional layer to guide who might want to target, while doubling as a way to plan what monster could give you the most trouble in the future.
• A shared method across all your characters to recover health during battle that creates a balance of risk, reward and thoughtful timing.
• Characters that grow inside the battle, with a focused pair of techniques you can learn at the most opportune time, or when you aren't busy surviving.

- - - Full playthrough (minus tutorial) - - -
I'd recommend just looking through bits and pieces of this video to see if you might be interested in it, then trying the tutorial boss (about <10 minutes). The reason for this is, though I know at least a few bad moves I ended up making, without the context of the tutorial the actions taken aren't necessarily understandable, and you may spoil the boss's patterns for yourself which is an element of the learning experience.​

Feel free to watch it all though, the above is just a heads up in-case you'd like to experience more first hand.
​

- - - Screenshots - - -

Spoiler

- Selecting a skill to use-

- Choosing your next conquest -

- A moment in the tutorial -

- A battle not going too well -

- A failed conquest -

- - - Credits - - -

Spoiler

(Also in-game)
Game Engine : RPG Maker MV + some RMV/RMVX/Ace resources

A project by Midnight Tinkering
Swift Illusion - Design, Development and additional art/animation/code

~ Plugin Credits ~
Yanfly
TheGreenKel
Tigress
Moghunter
HimeWorks
Victor Sant
DreamX

~ Additional Art Credits ~
Ækashics
Woestijn
Minikle
Yanfly

~ Additional Music Credits ~
StudioKannazuki

~ Additional Sound Credits ~
SoundBible

- - - Download/Game Page - - -
https://itch.io/jam/igmc2017/rate/191396


- - - Final Notes - - -​

I spent the large majority of the time just trying to get things working/polished, so regrettably there
isn't really variation in the enemies skills beyond stats/stances, though that and their varied buffs help.
However I'm really happy with the overarching Boss mindset/stance system and character skills with
micro goals to power them up. I hope you enjoy interacting with the the spawned enemies and navigating
the characters skills as you learn them and work out how to best use them to clear the field as the
Boss's mindset develops.
Yes, beyond the tutorial boss (which was made after the standard boss) there's only the one Boss.
I hope you enjoy the challenge all the systems present together though, and I'd love to hear if
you may be interested in more Boss battles with further varied enemies, as now that the system
is all in place I'd be happy to add new conquests for you to try and achieve depending on interest.

 

[Dalph]

Ok I finished it.

Let's start saying that the titlescreen is truly gorgeous with the animated tree and the leaves affected by the wind, it looks really smooth ingame. Very professional looking UI as well and the animations of the battlers are well executed like your usual.

The battle system seems frustrating at the start but as I continued playing it became quite fun, when it comes to strategy it's very well thought, because you have to choose which enemy you want to strike, which skill you want to use, and whether you want to heal this character first, that character first or wait until the next turn, since you can't heal again until you defeat another enemy.
It's interesting how you can learn skills with the points earned, or use them to heal yourself.
Wish there was a story around it but I think that's not what you are aiming for, since it's a Boss Rush game with a complex battle system in some sort of Arcade style, and I don't think a bs of this caliber and complexity would work for an Rpg sadly.

Suggestions:
- Indicate that Cheer heals the user and not the target. I thought it was a bug at first, since it increases the EP of the target.
- Maybe in a bigger and longer game you can probably carry forward some points and skills on the next boss.

Bugs(?):
- Sometimes when the rogue defeats a minion, he will attack again where the minion used to be.
- At one point of the battle, when there were 3 enemies in a row, the target cursor kept defaulting to the leftmost enemy when I tried to select the others. Alt-tabbing out seems to have fixed this weird bug.
- Music changes halfway through the battle. (? intentional).

Overall this was a solid entry and very fun to play, your battle system is very well made, even a tad too complex for my tastes but I can see that a huge amount of effort has been put into it. Balance is definitely great too and it's not something simple to make, especially in your case where the minions seem to generate randomly.

Great job! Looking forward to play a longer version with more bosses to beat!

BTW I got an A as a score (not sure if it's visible from the screen but it should be):

 

[SwiftIllusion]

@Dalph
Thanks a lot for playing through it ! And for the thorough response about your time with it.

Happy to hear you enjoyed the title screen, I spent a silly amount of time on that but I'm glad all that polish paid off .
UI is usually a big weakness but I somehow made it work for this one, glad you liked that along with the animations too .

Awesome to hear your thoughts on the battle system evolved as you started developing strategies for it. I was worried the jump from the tutorial boss + all the systems to the battle boss would be too much, so glad it ended up working out for you even though you mentioned it being a bit complex for your taste. I'm not sure of what scale of project I'd be able to grow it out to but it would have been nice to have separate stages to grow the mechanics, e.g. keeping random buffs on the enemies until 'stage 2'.
Especially when I would like to add even more layers to the battle, based on your thoughts I should consider carefully how I build those things up. I also mentioned elsewhere it'd be neat to have 2 'categories' of boss's, some super tough/short then others like the current Automaton where its a battle to get through the Boss's mindset and enemies for a final victory.
Yeah I had been thinking about a light story to wrap it up in, but I think that would contradict the pacing of the battles and wouldn't benefit the mechanics/strategy/battle heavy structure of it-it would likely just get in the way of those wanting the fights but not be enough for players wanting an overlapping story. It would also then be limiting to the logic of what kind of Boss's/battles could exist within it. So personally I don't plan to add anything like that.

Response to suggestions:
#1- Oh that's a good point I didn't consider. I thought only the second half referring to the target would self-indicate the first part just referred to the battler, but I can certainly see the confusion. I'll be sure to re-word that better.
#2- Yeah, I did something like that with a previous project that let you actually customize battles to be stronger for you to gain higher scores. It'd be pretty cool to be able to for example unlock S/SS/SSS rankings for boss's like that.
My concern with taking something like points/skills to followup boss's would be that it could vary greatly based on the initial boss you fought, how well it went, and the consecutive followup boss's you might choose to fight, etc. That would be outside the scope of what I could playtest and try to balance for the project.

Response to bugs:
#1- Regrettably that's not a bug, but a limitation I discovered regarding players targets. They choose available targets before they start attacking, so I can't stop it attacking a dead target mid-combo. For some attacks I choose to specify the new targets had to be 'other' targets, like how the Alchemists basic attack will only attack a second time if there's another available target in the row. I wanted the Rogue's attack to be able to have a chance of hitting the same target again though, not just a blanket hit every target once. I believe there might at least be a way to stop the enemy dying until the end of the attack sequence, but I didn't get time to work that one out. I'll have to take another look for the possible followup release.
#2- If an alt+tab fixed that, regrettably that's probably a hard coded issue or something outside my scope of understanding (during testing I had 10+ in a row without issue).
#3- That was intentional, it changes when the Boss's mindset evolves during the battle .
#4- Regrettably I feel like I've been saying regrettably way too much ^^;

Thanks so much ! I'm glad your overall experience with the project was a positive one even though it was outside your general comfort zone which I can understand. Hopefully there will be projects in the future with lighter but still engaging battle systems for you to latch on to alongside more story, as I love designing systems like this at various levels of complexity but I've still got work to do on my stories (hopefully the upcoming Visual Novel Maker will be good and I can practice stories in that ).

Thanks seriously so much, and so sincerely happy to hear that ! I'm not sure what kind of pace I can manage considering this month absolutely killed me, but I thought it would be super cool if I could add a new Boss each month/2 months by choosing one of Ækashics awesome battlers I get to animate to build a battle around .

Congratulations on getting an A , and thanks for sharing a screenshot of it!

 

[Freank]

nice fanarts! Great!

 

[Krystek_My]

Interesting Battle System and dragon bones aniations.

 

[SwiftIllusion]

Interesting Battle System and dragon bones aniations.

Thanks a lot. Considering my in-progress revision/expansion of the project, I've felt awkward leaving this available as-is,
but I'm happy to hear you were able to get some enjoyment out of it as a result .

 

[BCj]

I opened your game to try it, but my aintivirus went bonkers and told me my pc had been infected.. Even started deleting random rpg maker mv files.

 

[SwiftIllusion]

I opened your game to try it, but my aintivirus went bonkers and told me my pc had been infected.. Even started deleting random rpg maker mv files.

That doesn't make any sense at all. Especially as I haven't touched the current file since submitting it for the entry, which I double checked multiple times after uploading it to make sure all the files were there/it was submitted correctly, etc.
Not to mention the person above just having successfully tried it recently.

I know some anti-viruses can have false alarms but your case doesn't seem to be like that.
What do you mean when you say it started deleting random rpg maker mv files?
From what directory? Did you have your own rpg maker mv exe running at the same time?

 

[BCj]

That doesn't make any sense at all. Especially as I haven't touched the current file since submitting it for the entry, which I double checked multiple times after uploading it to make sure all the files were there/it was submitted correctly, etc.
Not to mention the person above just having successfully tried it recently.

I know some anti-viruses can have false alarms but your case doesn't seem to be like that.
What do you mean when you say it started deleting random rpg maker mv files?
From what directory? Did you have your own rpg maker mv exe running at the same time?

I didn't have MV running at the time, no. It started deleting .temp files, from internet, windows and MV but also stuff like kadokawa\rpgmv\gpucache\data_0 is and data_1/data_2/data_3. It was really strange.
Said it was infected with Atc4.Detection, including your game .exe.

 

[SwiftIllusion]

I didn't have MV running at the time, no. It started deleting .temp files, from internet, windows and MV but also stuff like kadokawa\rpgmv\gpucache\data_0 is and data_1/data_2/data_3. It was really strange.
Said it was infected with Atc4.Detection, including your game .exe.

Searching the internet, it looks like this isn't a result of my game but rather the result of how bitdefender works.
Saw other users get the same false positives with bitdefender for one shot on steam
If bitdefender can't 'fix' a file, it deletes it instead - https://www.bitdefender.com/support...tomatically-delete-an-infected-file-1286.html
Any RPG Maker game often uses those locations and temp for saving purposes or is connected to them in some way.
So regrettably as bitdefender falsely detected it as a virus, but couldn't fix it-because it isn't a virus, it deleted related files.

 

[BCj]

I see, thank you for looking into that. I'll see if I can fix that on my end as I'd like to try your game.

 

[SwiftIllusion]

I see, thank you for looking into that. I'll see if I can fix that on my end as I'd like to try your game.

No worries, thanks a lot for your interest .

Because I've been putting my effort into rebuilding the experience, I haven't been able to adjust this further post-contest.
So a few extra tips to give you a head start in-case you get to play it, based on others hurdles:
- The 'Cheer' skill recovers your own health-targeting another party member is just to give them the buff.
- Pay close attention to skill descriptions to help best utilize them. You can see previews of what you'll learn by selecting the grayed-out skills on the right hand side in the skill selection menu.
- Try to time defeating the final enemy as early in the turn order as possible (the Boss's actions/enemy reinforcements are based on turns passed, so killing an enemy with your first attack gives you an extra 2 attacks against the Boss before it's protected again).

Good luck getting it working, and hope you get to enjoy your experience with the game if you do. Still happy to hear more constructive criticism/feedback I might be able to bring with me to the new version-especially regarding difficulty/learning experience. And hopefully about any part you enjoyed most ^^.