RMVXA I'll Defeat the Monster From the Comfort of My Bed! (No Travel Game Jam Entry) (1.0.1 update released)

[Lanteral]

A minotaur is bearing down upon the town of Gervasburg, and their resident witch has been tasked with defeating it! However, the notoriously lazy witch refuses to set out and confront the monster, but gets the idea to teleport the monster to her. To do so, she needs three items and tasks her curmudgeonly attendant, Norbert, with retrieving them.

Gameplay:
- The three items that can be pursued in any order and the player must find out how to retrieve them.
- Three dungeons with a fixed number of encounters--no randomness, no wandering enemies you'll wish you could avoid--and a few optional battles.
- Norbert has several options for equipment and skills.
- Norbert's familiar, Froschkönig, consumes Norbert's limited MP, making MP management important.

Due to rushing to meet the deadline, there may be some bugs or other issues. If you encounter any, please let me know. Thanks.

Screenshots

Spoiler

Credits:
Face Graphics: Stellatiria (https://twitter.com/stellatiria)
Char/Tilesets: Jason Perry
Battlers: Tyler Warren
Scripts: Yanfly, Hime, DoubleX, Galv, Neon Black, Jet10985
Music: Kadokawa

Download
1.0.1 (latest): https://mega.nz/file/YfRxFCzY#zWgE8iQFIBqMvCU5ib-Fcrd_Qocjq7SXZOwULpPlfj8
Original Game Jam release: https://mega.nz/file/ROhEHI5Y#q4tug-YTP_4wufdZrPyjXNKFubvvVJNOBOguMqxNHeM

Changelog (1.0.1):
- Adjusted weaknesses, resistances, and stats of various enemies.
- Blessing: corrected targeting.
- Mayhem: Now deals damage; user takes damage equal to double the damage inflicted.
- First Aid: Removed fail chance, but now has a high variance; increased skill's power.
- Altered the first floor of the wizard's tower.
- Lowered shop prices of elemental rings, Powder Pouch and Venom Vial.
- Removed elemental debuffing property of elemental rings.
- Changed font prioritization.
- Removed unused RTP files.
- Misc. changes and fixes.

 

[KV_Kingdom]

Review

This game started strong, but it failed to deliver in the overall experience. It makes me sad, because I wanted to love this game so badly!

The Good

• The premise is hilarious and, at first, reminds me of my own entry.
• The intro is well-written and funny. Given the title, I was expecting nothing less, and was pleasantly delighted.
• Speaking of writing, I didn't find any spelling or grammar issues during my playthrough. That's no easy feat!
• I loved the Pixel Fantasy look of this game. It's fun, colorful, and easy on the eyes.
• The music selection rocks. I'm familiar with the town theme you chose, and I must admit, you chose well. I can listen to that tune forever.
• Using colored squares to present on-map encounters was a clever move! I've been struggling with my own on-map encounters due to the limits of the sprites provided in the RTP, but this is a decent way to work around the problem.

The Bad

• While there were no spelling or grammar issues, I did encounter a different kind of text issue: formatting! There are line breaks all over the place that suggest they were intended for a different resolution, and some of the skill text gets cut off. Doubly perplexing is that it looks fine in your screenshots, so I don't know why this happened for me.

Spoiler

Spoiler

• The switch puzzle goes from an easy, press-1-button point to a crazy brain-buster. There need to be more steps to introduce the mechanics of the puzzle system, or at least some sort of explanation about how it works.
• The town layout is unintuitive, and I often had difficulty finding locations, such as the inn or the shop, when I wanted to.
• Some NPCs randomly move around their maps. When you talk to them, they continue to move.

Spoiler

• There are layering issues with the sides of buildings.

Spoiler

• The doodad placement makes it looks like there are more interactive elements than there actually are. That vase in front of the fireplace? It does nothing. That rock in a funny location? Nothing. There are books all over the witch's house, but you can't even get a title from them, which is a missed opportunity for more humor. There was a random jar in an item shop that can be taken for free, though.
• If you exit the well before completing the quest, the water ambience will persist.
• Why do you have to press the action button to open doors?
• Why do you have to press the action button to exit the well?
• The player starts out at level 30 with a lot of skills to choose from, some of which are affected by the weapons equipped. This would be awesome in a larger game that has more lead-up, but because I was thrown into it without any prior context, it ends up being rather overwhelming. Not having many battles and no clues as to what would be more effective against certain monsters means I have little to help me evaluate whether I want to use one weapon or another, so I just went with the default equipment.
• Attacks happen so fast that it's hard to tell what happened.
• Why does Klaus' heal spell have a chance of failing?
• Speaking of Klaus, what happened to his face?

Spoiler

• Does the frog party member's spells use Norbert's MP? It's not clear.
• Is Klaus' Mayhem/Catastrophe (inconsistent name) bugged? It says it damages the user equal to 50% of max HP (the target's max HP, or the users?), but it only does about 5 HP of damage to Klaus.
• Norbert's MP shows full on overworld and when selecting the next party member to attack with, but then shows the actual(?) value when selecting magic skills. Not sure if this is the actual value, because all valid skills are selectable even if he is out of MP.

So you see, I did not like this game, much to my dismay. I didn't even finish it. That's not to say there is nothing to like about this game; the concept, writing, art style, and music are all strong points, indicating future potential. I hope you continue to improve your game dev skills, because I want to play the game this almost was!

 

[Lanteral]

Thanks for the review.

I'm unsure about the text issue; I'll look into it.

The block on the first floor of the tower is just meant to show you how it works, though in hindsight I should've included at least a few more blocks in order to better demonstrate which blocks need to be depressed in order to move to the next floor.

I'm surprised you liked the writing since I did most of it in a single day shortly before releasing the game, with the intro and ending being written the day of...

I also enjoy being able to examine things in the environment, but I didn't have the time to do anything like that except for what was necessary. The books strewn about Lieselotte's home are just meant to show what a slob she is (and her interest in reading when she's not sleeping), though it's also that the tileset doesn't have many things that work for that purpose.

I had initially planned for the enemies in an area to have certain themes, e.g., primarily magic-users or prominent enemies weak to a certain physical damage type in order to make it easier to decide what you should use, but I wasn't able to do it in the end due to scrambling to meet the deadline. Actually, due to time constraints I had to pull most of the enemies from an old unfinished project of mine...

Mayhem reducing Klaus's HP by so little is a bug. His heal has a fail chance due to the thing that inspired his character; it's something of an in-joke between a friend and I, though it's also that I couldn't think up many ideas to convey Klaus as a well-meaning but accident-prone guy in a short amount of time. The reason he doesn't have a portrait is because my artist struggled to come up with something she thought looked right, and I told her to forget about it since I only had a day or two left before the deadline. As an aside, Froschkonig's status menu calls him a king missing his crown because I couldn't get it to look right in his sprite, but there's an unused face portrait with him wearing it. (attached)

I'm unsure of the rules on updating games with bugfixes after the event is over, but I plan on updating the game or releasing a new version that fixes its issues someitme in the future.

 

[KV_Kingdom]

I’m not an official of any sort, but I did see this quote on the original announcement thread:

Remember everyone, the spirit of this is to complete a game with the theme of staying in one location. This isn’t a contest with prizes so there aren’t a ton of rules and restriction. It’s just meant to be a fun, productive thing to do while many of us have more free time. So make it with an RM engine or VNM, keep it in one town/location and you’re good to go.

Given this and seeing others release updated versions of their projects, I interpreted this to mean that you can apply updates as desired. I updated my own project, but left an “original jam version” just to be safe.

EDIT: I was perusing the announcement thread and came across this post from Tochfuzzy:

Honestly it's just participatory and and really more about finishing something. As long as the project is finished before the deadline, going back to fix a few bugs here and there doesn't matter much to me.

On that note, I can relate to the deadline scramble; the reason I had to release an updated version was because I didn’t have time to thoroughly test my game before the deadline! I enjoy jams like this because it helps us identify ways to improve our dev process while exposing each other to ideas we may not have thought of on our own.

 

[Lanteral]

1.0.1 released.
Download: https://mega.nz/file/YfRxFCzY#zWgE8iQFIBqMvCU5ib-Fcrd_Qocjq7SXZOwULpPlfj8

Changelog:
- Adjusted weaknesses, resistances, and stats of various enemies.
- Blessing: corrected targeting.
- Mayhem: Now deals damage; user takes damage equal to double the damage inflicted.
- First Aid: Removed fail chance, but now has a high variance; increased skill's power.
- Altered the first floor of the wizard's tower.
- Lowered shop prices of elemental rings, Powder Pouch and Venom Vial.
- Removed elemental debuffing property of elemental rings.
- Changed font prioritization.
- Removed unused RTP files.
- Misc. changes and fixes.

I’m not an official of any sort, but I did see this quote on the original announcement thread:


Given this and seeing others release updated versions of their projects, I interpreted this to mean that you can apply updates as desired. I updated my own project, but left an “original jam version” just to be safe.

EDIT: I was perusing the announcement thread and came across this post from Tochfuzzy:



On that note, I can relate to the deadline scramble; the reason I had to release an updated version was because I didn’t have time to thoroughly test my game before the deadline! I enjoy jams like this because it helps us identify ways to improve our dev process while exposing each other to ideas we may not have thought of on our own.

Thanks for the info.

In my case, I wasted too much time coming up with a town design and trying to make it look nice as well as overestimating how much time I really had ( I still have to work despite the pandemic). If I didn't happen to have an old project I could draw from, I wouldn't have finished in time. Regardless, I'm proud of myself for actually releasing something.

 

[hiddenone]

I gave your game a go, but ended up stopping after beating the dragon in the well. There are a lot of good parts, but the size of the maps and grindy battles made me lose interest.

Spoiler: Feedback

⦁ These notes are taken as I play
⦁ Playing the first version, because it's what I downloaded

⦁ Quite a funny intro, I was wondering how the game's title would work into the game's story

⦁ Whoops, can use some cliff edges to walk up onto another layer near the witch's house ^^;

​

⦁ Who is this random person in the large black-roofed building who says "Come to me if you need anything, okay?"??? I need all the stuff for the teleportation spell, will this person give me that?

⦁ It's clear that you've spent a lot of time and effort in making all the maps for the town, but it's just a touch too big for a new player to enjoy. With no real clues about where to find the things I need, I'm just wandering aimlessly until I stumble into something important

⦁ The fact there's a hint guy in the pub is nice, but 2,000 gold is just too pricey right now. Since the witch didn't give me any help, I fear that I'll need the money later so I can't waste it here

⦁ Haha, I love how Klaus is just like "You want my shirt to help people? Sure, why not!", the writing is pretty entertaining

⦁ Battles being marked on the map is a great choice, it makes it easier to decide if I need to heal or not

⦁ The well map is very large and rather empty. You could probably cut its size in half and still have enough room

⦁ It's nice that there are weaknesses for enemies, but the battles just didn't feel super balanced. It's entirely possible that has been fixed in the updates though

⦁ Just barely beat the Great Dragon, and I have to find my way out of the well?! Nope, I'll be stopping here because I have no sense of direction and am totally lost down here...

Overall you've got a lot of good ideas here, but clearly time got away from you. It sounds like your update probably fixed a lot of the issues with the battles, so it's a bit unfortunate that I played the original version (but my internet said no to downloading things repeatedly, so no updates for me ). I hope you can take what you've learned from this jam to make yourself an even better dev. Good luck!