The following notes were typed as I went along, so it's a bit like a 'Let's Play', but written, in that you get my reactions at the time I was writing. There is an overall assessment at the end.
Interesting title screen.
Nice to have the visual aid for the controls, though it is also has the potential to be a bit perplexing, as what does ‘Active Defense’ and ‘Active Attack’ mean? Just a thought – as you have gone to all the trouble to get a picture to show at this point, it might be worth considering using a picture of the whole keyboard. The reason I say this is that if the player is using e.g. a French, German, Spanish, Italian etc. etc. keyboard, the D and A will not necessarily be in the same place as for an English qwerty board. My understanding is that the keys are bound to the position on the keyboard, not the actual letter it types, though perhaps there are ways round this that I don’t know about. But as the RM community is pretty international, it is something perhaps to take into account.
Cream text on that yellow window skin is not easy to read. It was more or less legible in daylight, but switching to artificial light in the evening made it extremely hard. Also that harsh yellow got a bit tiring in its own right after a while.
As far as I can see, the whole of the opening house is visible. 3 people live there and there are 2 beds. Just saying.
I wanted to check something and so went to save – the Save option was not greyed out or anything, but it was impossible to save. You have not told the player anything about this.
That music theme for the village is ‘Signs of Life’ by Scythuz. Are you sure that you are permitted to use it in an unencrypted game? I had understood that no custom material could be included in a Steam Workshop game until they permitted encryption, as an unencrypted game counts as distributing the resource. Certainly I know that no paid-for resource can be used, but I’m wondering if an REStaff release is okay or not. It might be worth checking that out. Also, you haven’t got it looping properly, there is a distinct gap before it starts again.
If you click on the book on the desk in the inn it changes to a pickaxe. You need to check the Direction Fixed box on the event. You have stairs going up in the inn, but no transfer event and no text message to tell the player why they can’t go there. There is a typo for ‘inconvenience’ on the hospital notice board.
Upstairs in the Headmaster’s house, the room with the green double bed – the wall by the bed switches from being grey brick to being wood. You should try and use shift-click mapping for your carpets e.g. downstairs in the Headmaster’s house so that they appear to run ‘behind’ the bottom wall. It gives a much better sense of perspective. Why has the item shop got enough tables to seat the town twice over? If you didn’t make your interior maps so big you wouldn’t have to fill up all the empty space with inappropriate objects. Added later - here, for example, is a very simple item shop which I did. It’s about a third the size of yours, and has everything you need in it. I'm not saying that you should do your shop exactly like this, just showing that it's possible to get everything into a much smaller map.
Your battle tutorial is an info dump, and if the player needs a tutorial, there’s too much information which goes too fast, and no chance to put it into practice as the info is being given, so it’s highly unlikely that it will be an effective tutorial. This bit added in later – nearly all that stuff about skills was irrelevant as I didn’t have skills needing that info. By the time I get them I will have forgotten what was said, indeed, I’ve nearly forgotten now.
I think this battle is problematic for your first battle. The player has had no chance to learn the mechanics and juggling the right hand for selection, and then action bar and left hand for D or A requires practice unless the person is used to playing like that. I’m not, even though I’ve played hundreds of rpgs, because my left hand does not have fast reflex timing. You have not allowed for anyone who is physically slower or new to the mechanic to get up to speed. Coupled with an unhelpful tutorial, it meant that the first battle was not in the slightest bit enjoyable. That is probably not a good thing if you want the player to stick with the game until they become proficient. It would have been very easy to get game over, and no developer should allow game over in the very first battle.
Even after I’ve given my sister the medicine, the mother is still telling me to go and give her the painkiller. You forgot the switch.
As for whatever reason you have disabled save, you should find a way of telling the player what’s going on and not leave it to chance for him/her to find after the battle. If I had lost that battle and got game over, with no save file I would have walked away because I would not have wanted to go through all that stuff all over again. At what point did the diary become available for saving? Was it only after the battle? The first time I clicked on it, it just gave me the message “This is my diary”. It was only after the painkiller was given that it became an open book. Even though I tried to save at that point, it didn’t work. The first time I could do it was the next morning. That is too late.
Alliance has 2 ‘l’s, not one.
I am now in the cave. There is no exit, I had no chance to check out if I could get more supplies, there is no indication of where the save point is. In my opinion, this is not how to start a dungeon at the beginning of a game. You tell the player that there will be a game over if Maria dies, which means at the very least going through a not very interesting cut scene (because having seen it once, why would anyone want to see it again?) back at the village when the party is formed, plus anything else the player has done. That could be a significant amount of game play time depending on whether the player did any further checking around the village after leaving the house and before getting to the exit.
Spiders in an ice cave? It think it helps immersion if the enemies have some vague correlation to the terrain they are in. I have a character inflicted with poison and no item or skill to heal it with. Given the way poison destroys HP there should be some way of getting rid of it. If I want to get back to the fire to heal up that way, the bats have regenerated already , so I have to refight them with a poisoned member of the party. Not good. I suppose the regeneration time is influenced by the time I take to stop and type these notes.
Next time round I managed to dodge most of the enemies, but that’s bad in that I’m likely to be under levelled for the boss. However, to get to the little red chest, I got caught by the spiders and this time 3 people are poisoned. Now I have to hope that I can dodge all those enemies again to get back to the fire to heal poison up. As one of those with poison is Maria this is worrying. Still no save point.
On the next stage, I go for the little chest in the bottom right hand corner. To get to it I have to fight the slime that is stationery in front of the chest. As soon as I finish that another slime comes up. By the time that battle is over, the first one has respawned and so my way to the chest is still blocked. Fight it again. Fortunately the other one respawned a tile or so away so that I was able to get the chest and move away before being stuck again. I think you need to adjust your respawn times, as this is far too fast a turn around time.
At last a dispel herb in the next 2 chests. But, although I saw it come up on both chests, there’s only one in my inventory. Typical of my luck that the bugged item should be the poison cure. Sigh, now I’m being afflicted by blind, and no way to heal that either, unless I use my one dispel herb. Not likely!
Now I’m seriously hacked off. Still no save point that I’ve been able to find, and I’m faced with this ambush on the next map. Not amusing, not clever, just annoying. Why is there no obvious save point? You have set this up so that even one death (if it is Maria’s) means game over, and yet you provide no save points? See the many, many threads on this forum about save points vs save anywhere, where the general consensus is that if you must restrict saving, you need to plan your save points with great care.
By definition mazes are confusing, and the player will take some time to work out the layout, get the chests and move forward. This is made doubly hard when everything respawns so fast. I have now been doing this dungeon for nearly 40 mins and I still have not found that elusive save point. I have to close down. That’s a lot of game play time lost. I will not be playing this again. I suspect that many players will have the same reaction. It’s one thing to lose a big chunk of time through one’s own mistakes, but to do so because of a design flaw is quite another thing.
Overall assessment
Mapping
Not many actual errors, but your interior maps could do with rethinking. They are far too big and I'm not surprised the Headmaster's office/house has 2 totally empty rooms. The others are so big that you've used up any conceivable item already.
Story/characters
It strains my credulity that after the way Maria was treated she should be so eager to go along with Rick and the others. I just cannot believe it.
The bit about dragons felt like another info dump. I don't need all that back lore at this stage, and it's not very realistic conversation between 2 people who've just met one another and who then plan to go somewhere together. The will be interested in asking questions about each other, not the elemental aspects of dragons depending on their skin colour.
I'm not at all sure what the story is about. That's not necessarily a problem at this stage, but I'm curious about why Maria's father is living in another town, things like that. All I know is that I'm now (or rather, was) wandering around an ice cave for reasons which are quite unclear. Why should Maria be interested in helping to track down this whoever it is? Why should people who only the day before were trying to inflict serious, maybe even terminal, damage on her, suddenly willing to have her tag along? Why has the subject of the token suddenly disappeared, and what was it about anyway? It all seems a bit messy.
Battles
Enemy respawn time needs looking at.
Having status afflictions which take big chunks of HP without having adequate means of curing them is not, imo, a good choice.
I have often played games with only save points, and enjoyed them (though my personal preference is for save anywhere). However, I want them to be obvious and I want them to be frequent enough. As it is exceptionally easy to get game over, as it only requires the death of Maria, then it is even more important that save points are around so that people do not lose huge amounts of game time. If I'd been able to save, I would have gone back to this and played to the end of the demo. As I couldn't, I shan't be doing that. You should try and prevent players doing what I'm about to do. Maybe there are save points and I managed to walk past them (why can't the camp fires save? or at least some of them?) in which case, all I can say is that they were very cunningly concealed.
