[IGMC 2015] The Beanstalk

[Vox Novus]

                                                   

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              Story/Synopsis:​

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Jack and his Ma have fallen on hard times as of late, Pa has been gone for a little over a year and the house is starting to go to shambles and they owe collectors gold as well. Ma and Jack have had to sell off most of the animals around the house just to get by which is where our story starts; Jack is trying to sell their old workhorse in a nearby town when he gets an offer for something far better than gold... (at least in Jack's humble opinion) magic beans!​

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Unfortunately Ma is decidedly less than excited and makes Jack throw out the beans in the garden to stave off the birds however during the night the beans grow into a massive beanstalk which they discover in the morning. Feeling that there is something special at the top of the beanstalk that can help them Jack sets out to climb it.​

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Relive the old tale of Jack and the Beanstalk in the best way possible; Rpg format!​

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              Basic Gameplay Progression:  ​

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Unfortunately the beanstalk only goes so high and Jack can't progress any further...Lucky for him there is a whole little world in the clouds! Help Jack aid in the growth of the beanstalk by collecting beans from defeated bean creatures and planting them in the cloud soil spots while staving off threats from those bean creatures and cloud creatures. Continue on through the stages until eventually reaching the Giant's castle and Jack's legendary encounter with the Giant!​

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    Battle Gameplay: ​

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-Emphasize is placed on managing CP which is capped at 20 pts. CP recovers by 3 pts every turn and by 5 pts when guarding.

-No traditional rpg healing items! Use satchel skills which are provided by an equippable item to heal in battle. Some satchel skills even provide beneficial states to reduce damage or prevent ailments.

-Inflict possible status ailments Expose (lower vitality), Wound (damage over time) and Lethargic (lowered agility) using the attack command.

-Characters Skills are provided by weapons and off-hand equips, weapons come in three types: disruption, damage and enhancing. Each type offers a different focus of skills for the character allowing the player to suit the character to their taste or formulate the best strategy against an enemy.

-Take advantage of an enemies elemental weakness in battle when using magic.

-There are no game overs from regular encounters and the player is fully healed after battle, allowing them to focus on progression of the game.

-2 other characters join Jack along the way totaling a party of 3.

Screenshots:

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Credits:

-Graphics-Enterbrain, Ying, Vox Novus

-Music-Aaron Krogh, Darren Curtis, Enterbrain, JohnnyR

-Art-Enterbrain, Vox Novus

-Scripts-blackmorning84 (website-bmscripts.weebly.com), Lone Wolf, Yanfly, Vlue

-Proudly made in Rpg Maker Vx Ace

Download Link:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/3324dqqaa64y1w3/The+Beanstalk.zip​

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Vids:​

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Artificer: ​

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Makio-Kuta: ​

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External Reviews:​

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Jtrev23 on Dev Fort-http://jtrev23reviews.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-beanstalk.html​

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*Like the game battlers? Check out my resource thread in VX/Ace resources and download them for your own use!*​

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*Like the game? Support the IGMC 2015 page:http://contest.gamedevfort.com/submission/311#.VcTvE_lViko*​

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*Really like the game or just want to support good ol' Vox Novus? Use this in your Signature*​

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[Bonkers]

I'm gonna take a look at this one in 4 hours and a shower.  I wanna see all the custom portraits and battlers used.  Not many people take that kind of time to do them.

 

[Vox Novus]

Lol thanks glad to hear it, my page is pretty dead on IGMC no comments

I didn't plan on entering IGMC at all but then woke up one morning after having a dream about a jack and the beanstalk game and felt like I had to make it. Ended up starting on the 13th or 14th with no prior planning. I have almost no resource packs or anything so I ended up having to use a lot of default graphics, I thought the best way to counter act this was to take the time to do all the artwork.

 

[BCj]

Gave it a go. Couldn't finish though

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Your first tutorial monster kicked my ass so.. yeah
Edit: tried again, I killed him woohoo haha


Edit 2: Aaaahhh I found an amulet, why can't I equip it? or save? where's my menu, help


Edit 3: why can I buy stuff and not equip them? Am I doing something wrong? :/


Edit 4: "Note before proceeding, it's recommend to save your progress", uhm, hoooooooow?


Edit 5: Ew, I almost got beaten by that dude doing pummel, 115 and 80 damage, leaving me to 1 hp? That's a bit hard


These battles are actually really hard on those knights and stone-like monsters, I run out of mp and I seriously don't know how to equip my brand new gear. I feel a bit weak


Edit 6: Okay I just died numerous times I can't kill those archers they hit me for 50-80, deal aoe damage, rass slash hits hard, and I can't equip my gear. I don't know why not. I also cannot save the game.


The battle system is interesting, but the monsters aren't very forgiving for your standard gear, heh.

OMG reading comprehension fail, I just scrolled up and saw the controls. Retrying :')


Edit: Okay, I just played for 45 more min, I just got the bard. I have to say I like the story, the music and the self-drawn portraits (and enemies) are really cute (especially the beans) but my god those archers are hard! I can't get past the enemies after the bard. I also went for a chest to an upper level, went back down and the enemies respawned, think I got some more beans than intended but I'm not sure. I'm also a bit confused because the bows which I can buy seem worse than the bow the guy had when he joined me. Maybe in a future version you can increase the damage of your skills a bit too because sometimes I felt like auto-attack did more damage than the skills. But I did like it so far and the battlesystem was definitely challenging.

 

[Vox Novus]

Yeah, I even put the controls on the title screen.

I potentially made the archers a little on the difficult side since they do sort of spam arrow reign so I understand that. My suggestions:

-Goose can use counter stance to go into a counter state since the archers spam arrow reign almost every turn he will usually counter it every turn under the state (actual chance of counter is at 75%)

-You can make use of Jack's Disruption weapon (Pa's Axe) it has a skill which inflicts cripple reducing enemy power or you can make use of it to stun enemies.

-Jack's power weapon Parashu is useful as well it has a skill which does more damage with less hp.

-What's you off-hand equipment set-up? If you use the orb hitting the beans elemental weakness will give you a massive damage boost. If you need extra healing you could always give both characters satchels.

-Remember to keep up the beneficial effect of healing spells it applies a defensive state that slightly reduces physical damage and panacea not only heals ailments but provides a state which prevents them for a few turns.

As for other stuff:

-Weapons aren't meant to get stronger every stage, the weapon's power is determine by it's type. Damage weapons have the highest boost while disruption is 2nd and enhancement the lowest. Weapons are meant to provide different skill types to use strategically  and the best choice of weapon isn't necessarily the one that gives the highest damage output.

-Attacking has the chance to inflict states like wound or expose (this one lowers the enemies defense for a few turns) that might seem why regular attacks do so much more if you were to spam attack. cause your inflicting expose more often.

-It's highly possible you ended up getting more beans than intended, I copy and pasted a lot of battle events and may have forgot to adjust something. During my play-throughs I never actually went back to check to see if enemies re-dropped beans. Doesn't really break the game though. I'll go and check this out later so I can fix it thanks.

Hope you keep on wanting to play, the epic battle against the giant still awaits!

-edit: I should say I'm a bit of a hardcore rpg player (I've played a lot of them) to me I designed this battle system relatively easy. I wanted it to appeal to player's like myself I guess. To me games like persona aren't even all that difficult.

 

[BCj]

I've never played persona


I'm going to retry later!

 

[Vox Novus]

Awesome! Also you must play persona especially 4, fantastic rpg. Many say the games are difficult though, I found it relatively challenging.

 

[Makio-Kuta]

Played this just now~

I didn't read anything ahead of time before going into this, so I didn't know what to expect! Turns out this is a really charming little game! Only playing games for 1/2 hour to try to get through lots of them, so I didn't make it to the end, but I really enjoyed what I had played.

Great work on the character artwork and the custom enemies. The designs and style were really cute and imaginative. I harp on the beansprout a lot in the video, but it was certainly very graphically underwhelming for being the star of the show. Mapping wasn't the best; the house in particular has logic errors in it's construction. That was the only thing that jumped out at me as being wrong though, everything else was logically sound - just not the most attractive. The cloud world maps worked well for what they were though.

Now - battle system! This was great. I actually had a lot of fun in the battles. I love the idea of having two different sets of equipment that change your battle commands. The very fact that I didn't want to just bash attack through the whole thing is the first sign of a battle system that's better than most. But yeah, this had neat skills, neat ideas, idk - I just really found myself enjoying the battle system a lot. Battle animations were really laggy sometimes though and that dropped the intensity of the battles a lot. I would look into that; throws off the pacing.

I also like the concept of growing your pathway upwards. Wonderful work on this; if I find time to come back to it, I certainly will leave more impressions.

Video:

 

[Vox Novus]

Thanks for playing and making a vid, I appreciate the feedback. Not many people have tried this out I don't think.
 Some responses to issues you brought up:

Animations: some of them seemed laggy probably due to how I made them so good point, I think I repeated the same animation in three parts before advancing to the next part. I'm still relatively new at customizing the animations; this is only my second finished game so I'll keep that feedback in mind when working on them.

Mapping: good point about the house I'll keep track of that, not entirely sure what I'm going to do with it after the contest period. If for some reason I place or do particularly well I might continue. I'd like to re-map a lot of the areas with some prettier tiles and such. I was unprepared for the contest because I hadn't planned on entering at all didn't start working on this game (including all of the artwork I made) until the 13th.

Beanstalk: I completely agree with you about the beanstalk being a little idk wimpy I guess. Maybe if I had planned on making this game I could have found something better. Having something custom made would be most ideal though.

Menu: Yeah I don't have Luna or anything so I'm pretty much stuck with what I can find for menu scripts; over all I thought blackmorning84's menu was actually fairly unique especially with the animated characters and sprites. I probably could have done without the items section mostly because of how I made my skills but you do get some key items later and there are 5 total cloud stages so you can potentially end up with a decent stock of weapons and armor especially if you are one of those people who has to keep everything. 

You played quite well I'm impressed. I designed the game's enjoyment mostly to stem from how the battles made the player think, I wanted combat to be approached differently; especially for the judges who are comprised mainly of expert gamers. I was inspired by what remnants of isolation achieved last year, the true success in that game is that they took an idea for a battle style and made it the highlight of the experience. I wanted to achieve the same type of feel.

Font color: this seems to be an issue I hadn't expected,I wanted it to be different visually but maybe I'd be better off with just plain white.

I do hope you continue playing at some point , if you think Goose is awesome wait until you meet Harp. Thanks again though!

Here's a couple tips if you do though:

-Use the panacea more often to heal status ailments, also it prevents status ailments for a few turns as well. Since enemies commonly inflict states using the attack command it will make things a lot easier. Going along with this, that means you can use panacea before being inflicted with status ailments to prevent them in the first place. The healing skills in the satchel also have a similar effect except it provides a defensive increasing state. There is also a multi-healing skill in the satchel for when you have more than one character (again these can be used pre-emptively before you actually need to heal to gain the beneficial state).

-Goose isn't the greatest mage, you are probably better off having it on Jack if you are going to use it. Elemental spells can inflict status ailments but the main use is in targeting elemental weakness (all beans are weak to wind as stated in the guidebook) the cloud monsters vary though. Of course using satchels on both characters is useful as well since that's how you heal and revive characters.

 

[Makio-Kuta]

Thanks for the tips!

I think you could get away with the font colour if you changed the background. I do enjoy when games have different font colours for different characters, it makes it easy to tell who is talking at a glance (since without voice acting I get lost sometimes admittedly to who is saying what) Maybe a more solid background for the text box would help. It's the colours leaking through the transparency that do the most damage towards legibility. 

Having since seen Harp's artwork in this thread, I might play more just to meet them. I love the design!

 

[Vox Novus]

Ah good suggestion, i could probably try to change the shade of brown or something. I made the windowskin around a tree/earthy design with vines on the sides, changing the color too drastically in the background might kind of lose that though.

If you think Harp's design is cool (which of course it is but I may be biased ) wait until you see his personality...

 

[Vox Novus]

Small bump here; added a very thorough review to the main topic by Dev fort user Jtrev23 (Jtrev23 touches on some excellent points and really noticed all the ways I used the theme in the game.)

http://jtrev23reviews.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-beanstalk.html

I've also since added Makio-kuta's and Artificer's let's plays to the main topic as well. If you are in the contest and haven't checked it out yet Artificer is trying to go through all the games in some way or another so be sure to check out his thread and look for your game.

http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/43730-the-list-of-all-projects-in-the-igmc-2015-with-their-links/

 

[Chiakscare]

Giving this game a playthrough on our stream!

 

[Vox Novus]

Okay now that some of the announcements are over for IGMC and we will find out all the winners soon I wanted to take the time to say this:

For anyone that did play my game or was kind enough to give it a vote, I truly wanted to say thank you. I hadn't planned on entering IGMC and I started late but I think I managed to put out something pretty good in the 15 days I worked on it. I only got like 17 votes by the time voting closed but hey I was in the top 8 pages out of 55 and on the 2nd page for rpgs which I think is absolutely awesome.

I'm not in the top 10 of course but I still hold hope of being a contender for best in theme, that's mainly what I designed this game around.

I've came to the decision of reworking and expanding this game because I think there is a neat idea here and it shouldn't take to long to get up to snuff since the core of the game is done. Things I plan to do:

-Many new tracks added into the game

-New starting area that eases the player into the battle system

-Better tutorials that pop up as you progress and are introduced to the concepts

-Map/re-map the game in  Sharm's absolutely fantastic Pixel Myth Germania (If you don't have it buy it now!)

-New artwork for battlebacks and parallaxes in spots (admittedly not all of it will be mine)

-New character in the story that leads to an alternate boss fight at the end of the game.

-An ending area rather than the existing word close out.

-Some balancing on certain skills.

Here's some of what I've done so far:

title screen re-done-

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New starting area Holz Arbeiter Town (incomplete atm)-

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