Grind Storm (Demo)

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Grind Storm:











Download:  http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/2fd091242fe1a75756fd5e984eeec204


Synopsis:  

Spoiler

Grind Storm is a gameplay-focused adventure, designed to offer a quick, fun experience, akin to an arcade game or rogue-like game.  There is no plot to speak of, but there is some quick dialog to set a personality for the characters and hint at some world building.  Currently, the forest and forest temple are playable, next would be the northern tower, but I haven't designed that far yet.  I think the final game would have about 5 dungeon areas of similar length to what is now available.  


The game uses Yanfly's ATB system and almost any damage will interrupt actions or decrease the ATB bar, so attacking blindly or dog-piling a particular enemy is not always the best combat tactic.  The game has a very challenging pace.  Any new area can be extremely dangerous.  New equipment is often more important to your success than leveling up.  Instead of a traditional equipment and spell system, each character has 3 general equipment slots and 3 general orb slots.  Orbs either allow a character to use a particular spell, or grant a passive effect, such as increased TP accumulation or immunity to poison.  All enemies can drop several types of items.  


New characters can be found in the dungeon, indicated by green crystals.  In general, some challenge must be overcome to obtain the new character.  Currently, 4 characters are set up in the game, Mackerel and Wolfo are available from the start and Fae and Dim Sum can be encountered in the forest.  4 additional characters would appear in the next dungeon.  Since all the characters besides the first 2 are optional, I'm considering added some kind of bonus area in the late game for players who do not pick up any extra characters.  


At a considerable depth, you will start finding Ironwood, and the road to the Ironwood Sage who can craft items from it.  The idea is that each dungeon area would have its own special material and sage.  Littered throughout the game are Grind Fragments.  They have no value yet, but the idea is that at the end of the game you encounter the Grind Sage who can craft the ultimate weapon if you have discovered every single Grind Fragment.  

Honestly, I'm not sure I want to continue making this game.  I like the general mood of the game, I'm just wondering if I should keep building on what's here or start over with what I've learned.  The Cover Art characters are cool, but my heart yearns to produce my own artwork.  There are also a lot of plugins that I've been finding that I'd love to try, like SRD's timed attack plugins and Yanfly's item synthesis and alternate currencies would work well for this style of play.  The way that the current battle system works, there's an extremely high need for AGI, which I'm not sure I like.  


So for feedback, I'd really like to know if you think I should continue, or what features are worth carrying over in a new project, or if I'm even on the right track at all.  I like hard silent RPGs, but I don't know what the general reaction to them is.   

 

[slimey]

I gave your game a try. Gotta say, it's a very basic game - the kind anyone can make in a few days. You did say "with what you've learned" so I'm guessing you're new to RPG Maker in general.


Your game isn't necessarily bad, just very plain. Random encounters are very annoying though, especially when you can't retreat. In any case I'd suggest continuing to expand your RMMV skills. The more you make, the better you get.

 

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Well, I was hoping the difficulty of it would stand out a bit.  There are all those plugins I'm itching to try that would spice it up, but to incorporate anything major it would require enough rebalancing that I might as well just restart from scratch.  So I guess I would take that as a vote to start from scratch with plugins.  


You can retreat from random encounters.  It takes a couple of tries.  You cannot retreat from event encounters.  My taste for RPGs was forged in the fires of Final Fantasy, Pokemon and Dragon Warrior, so I've never really understood why people complain so much about random encounters.  I think not using the battle backs really helps to remember where you were and what you were doing too.  


My own graphics are also coming along pretty quickly, so ditching the cover-art would be another reason to reboot.  

 

[slimey]

I was getting an encounter every 5-8 steps. In Pokemon games I always carry lots of repel, so I'd say I'm not a fan of random encounters. And I couldn't figure out how to retreat. Maybe I didn't look hard enough? I'm not sure, the option didn't seem to be there.


If what you want is to go in another direction or just remake it all, starting from scratch would be a good idea. Good luck and have fun, whatever you end up doing.

 

[Kes]

I haven't had a chance to play the demo (and with my schedule at the moment, I'm not likely to) but I was struck by your comment about doing your own artwork = ditching what you have already done.  That doesn't have to be the case.  Many (most?) games start off with place holders and these are replaced as the artwork is done.  That, therefore, does not have to be a deciding factor when you're thinking about whether to continue with this or not.

 

[AcetheSuperVillain]

@slimey With the Yanfly ATB and CTB systems, you can get an extra menu by pressing the X/Cancel button when one of the character's turns pop up.  This is where the option to run is.  


@ksjp17 It's more that when I used the cover art graphics, I based the game characters around what I had to work with.  They are not really characters I would have created if I were in complete control.  If I were making my own graphics, I would not make AceSV versions of the cover art, I would make completely new characters, which would entail differences in what stats and equipment they would get and changes to the existing dialog.  So in that case, it would be preferable to just start everything over from scratch.  


As for having time to play, it's designed to be a pretty quick game.  I got to the end of the demo in about 4 hours of game time, albeit this involved a lot of getting killed and restarting, so maybe 30-60m longer in reality.  You can definitely feel like you're making progress after an hour or so of play.