Awesome!! Enjoy!! (BTW there is going to be a BIG update to the demo fixing most of the bugs and such that I have found.)
At the very beginning I am aware that the main character is able to move.. It has been fixed .. so when you start the game just dont move untill after the intro.
some of the animations are a little off (you walk down a latter if it were a staircase) I'd recommend changing that (you can use an event to rotate the player) and your shadows could probably be touched up a bit as well. Other than that though, I'm liking this a lot! Is your project non-encrypted so I can see how you did a thing or two?
on the first forest map out of the town you are currently able to walk through the fences. It's not game breaking but it's an issue I thought I'd bring up.There's also a tree that's missing a lower texture.
some of the animations are a little off (you walk down a latter if it were a staircase) I'd recommend changing that (you can use an event to rotate the player) and your shadows could probably be touched up a bit as well. Other than that though, I'm liking this a lot! Is your project non-encrypted so I can see how you did a thing or two?
I have fixed the ladders already.. not needing a script.. just had to fix the tile set to be known as a ladder.. As far as shadows.. I have fixed some..
the project is encrypted.. I dont really wanna allow it to be open.. Perhaps I can help you with something if you would like though.
Thanks for the feedback on the fences.. I just fixed that.. and the bottom tile for the tree.
I have fixed the ladders already.. not needing a script.. just had to fix the tile set to be known as a ladder.. As far as shadows.. I have fixed some..
the project is encrypted.. I dont really wanna allow it to be open.. Perhaps I can help you with something if you would like though.
Thanks for the feedback on the fences.. I just fixed that.. and the bottom tile for the tree.
Where did you get up to? and if ya want to send me a PM with some of the tile issues thats fine. I may have already worked on some. I need to get the latest version posted.
Where did you get up to? and if ya want to send me a PM with some of the tile issues thats fine. I may have already worked on some. I need to get the latest version posted.
I got to the point where the village was attacked and everyone was sailing away. there may have been a glitch that prevented me from continuing as I was able to move in that "cut scene" area and couldn't do anything beyond that point. That's as far as I was able to get to though.
Decided to give this a go. Most of the notes that follow were typed as I went along. Think of them as the written form of a 'Let's Play' review in that they give my thoughts as I'm playing, with an overall assessment at the end. I know it looks a wall of text, but I think it is probably more helpful to give lots of details, rather than just make overall comments. I'm starting off with a couple of general points, though.
Design decision to have small dialogue boxes. This breaks the flow of speech up to a significant degree. Sentences get split in strange ways, and the player has a greatly increased rate of clicking to get through the dialogue. It might look nice, being all neatly centred, but I question whether it actually makes for a more enjoyable experience for the player.
The other design decision you have made is to disable saving and to have no save point (at least at the early stage). The player can only save at the moments that you dictate – irrespective of what may be going on around them at the time they are playing. This, I think, is likely to turn a number of potential players off. I can see no logical reason why the player cannot save in this village at this stage of the game. It’s hardly likely that they will be abusing that facility. You might want to check out the several threads on this question on the forum to gauge opinion and the mechanics of implementing restricted saving properly.
The opening cut scene and initial maps give the impression that insufficient care has been taken over detail. It looks and feels as if it has not been adequately tested by someone not connected with the game’s development, so no fresh eye was brought to it to spot a large number of issues. I am going to put what I saw into a spoiler so as not to have an even more vast wall of text. This is what I found in just a tiny part of the game. As I am not your beta tester, I am not going to list everything that I found after this area. I think I have given you enough to substantiate my comment about lack of attention to detail, and lack of proof reading.
I have put the correct spelling in brackets.
Very opening screen has a typo
“in thier wake” (their).
Splitting Heroes from the rest of the very sort sentence on another screen feels a bit amateurish, but is an inevitable consequence of your tiny dialogue box.
“The goddess her self sacrificed…” (herself)
“Even though I was to late” (too)
The character speaks of “infant cries”, but the figure of the person rescued is not an infant, but a fairly sturdy boy.
“…and there hunts.” (their)
“My sight has far been taken from me” Something missing? This doesn’t make sense.
“...there homeland” (their)
In the opening house there are passability errors on the beds and errors in the lighting effects. Lights from a window in the back wall physically cannot illuminate walls further down the room which also face down.
Not enough thought given to the logicality of object placement. The comfortable chairs are about as far from the fireplace as it is possible to get. This seems unlikely. Mixture of RTP and other tiles which don’t always match. I shouldn’t be able to see that bottom door, as I can’t see the bottom wall. In fact the placement of your bottom doors on all internal maps are like this and all of them look strange.
Next map (Forest of Desi): the wooden path which goes right on to the next map – the tiles on the next map (the Docks) do not match the tiles on the first map. You have a lighting overlay of sun beams on the first map which does not continue onto the Docks map, resulting in a significant visual change. Sunbeams don’t vanish in one step, and reappear when I step back one pace.
But in fact the maps don’t marry up at all. I’m on a bridge with a large block of fir trees below and above me, but when I take one step onto the next map the bridge and those trees have gone. A cliff has appeared from nowhere, and the single little tree is growing out of the cliff face rather than the ground.
An impassable tile next to the cliff, just below the 3 yellow plants.
Stallholder there “Were not quite open” (We’re)
That text box ends: “Please come” and the player expects another text box containing at least the word “back”, maybe “back later”, but – nothing. No more text.
I can walk all over the bushes. Perspective errors on the large cliff section on the right. The stairs have been placed incorrectly (top edge still has the cliff edge tile) and I don’t understand the strange stairs at the bottom which, because of the way the tiles have been used, appear to be flat.
What are rows of turnips doing growing out of the dockyard surface where everyone is going to trample all over them?
Winged on the bridge “Im ready to…” (I’m)
Winged blocking the way to the boat – 2nd sentence begins with a lower case ‘p’ instead of an upper case one.
The considerable height of the jetty, as implied by the height of the posts supporting the lower part, is contradicted by the short length of steps to the rowing boat on the other side of the jetty. The animated water you are using clearly stops underneath the jetty – one can see the sand it is lapping against – but the water obviously continues above the jetty, we can see it and the boat is floating in it.
Winged at the bottom of that map: “I am extreamly busy…this vegitation…Wont be long till its time to harvest.” (extremely, vegetation, Won’t, it’s). “I must have forgot it…” (forgotten). The final word ‘morning’ runs off the edge of the text box. “My home resides beside the “Pub”. I don’t know why Pub is in quotes, but no building resides anywhere, that’s what people do. His home is beside/next to the pub. I can walk all over his plants.
So back to the Forest of Desi to complete the side quest. Typos etc, A face appears when I check out a door, but no sprite to go with it. Just a disembodied face. I must stop listing errors, I shall never finish this.
When I try to interact with the sparkle where the old man dropped his letter, nothing happens. It looks like the event might be set to ‘Above character’, rather than ‘Same as character’. I can’t collect it, therefore I can’t complete that side quest and that is presumably why I can’t get at whatever is in the chest. I do hope there’s nothing of great importance there.
When Grand and the protagonist come out of the armory, the door event on the Pub was shaking from side to side in a noticeable way. Very odd. Then it did it again, along with the house next to it as they passed by. Now I see that the winged sprite just ahead of them is vibrating in the same way. This is only as long as they are walking, it stops when they stop. How have you set up your move route commands? Why is it affecting everything?
We have had all that stuff about how Grand sold his weapon until the hero is ready to use it, he’s gone to the shop to get it – but I then find he’s equipped with a wood chopping axe. There is a dagger in the inventory (I thought the dialogue was all about a sword, maybe I’m wrong) but I can’t equip it. Huh? If this is indeed a dagger and you’ve set the hero up to use swords, that would be why I can’t equip it. Otherwise I have no idea what’s going on.
But no proper weapon, no access to what’s in that chest, hmm, not feeling confident about this.
Mapping errors, typos, grammatical mistakes and spelling errors continue.
I can see no logical reason why I am being prevented from saving. It has now been some time since the last save, I have a RL and I now have the classic dilemma of whether just to drop this, losing all progress so far, or hope that a save will be coming up soon.
At last a save point.
This is not helpful - because I can’t get to that other chest, I have 50 gil, and that is the price of a single potion. Having expensive potions that heal a lot of HP is not much use at the very beginning of the game when I need cheap potions that heal smaller amounts of HP, because that’s all I’ve got. Going to have to grind to get enough to buy 2 potions, as there seems to be nothing to recover MP, so I can’t rely on the healing spell.
What’s with the half-speed battle music? It doesn’t sound any better at that speed, and just reinforces the feeling that these battles are slow and nothing to get excited about. Listening to what is effectively a dirge becomes quite depressing after a time. And yes, the axe has the usual low hit rates that axes are usually given, so it can be next to impossible to build up the TP needed to access his skill. With that plus the dirge, I’m slowly losing the will to live. Even the out of battle music is slow and slightly painful (although it’s a track I’ve always liked in the past.)
I might have known – I’m in my own town, but I cannot rest in my own bed. Why not? What is the logic of that?
Oops, Lonnie has just learned ‘Cure’, that means poison is going to be dished out – but there are no healing items for sale, and still no way to recover MP except by going all the way back to the village. Ah, an antidote in a chest. But why are they not for sale? What is the logic behind that design decision? ‘Cure’ is also for paralysis, but supposing it’s Lonnie who is paralyzed. What do I do then with no item to heal that either? Oh, but joy of joys, an enemy has just dropped an antidote, so that’s 2 I’ve got now.
Now in the caves.
Bright blue water seems an odd choice. The presence of a path and the way the cliffs are shaped gives the impression that there ought to be a path going off to the right. I hope there isn’t, because it’s not passable.
Up the stairs. No indication about what the main route is supposed to be. Given that there is one long trek back to the village if I need healing this is not good news.
O no!!!! I’ve been pressing shift to activate dash because I really cannot crawl around all these maps. I spot a red chest and go left to see if I can reach it and some sort of text flashes by me. It flashes because I’m holding shift. A lot of players will be holding shift. I now have no way of ever knowing what that piece of information was. I suspect that it was telling me something about the puzzle/switches or whatever I need to get through to activate the doors. If it was important enough to tell me, it should not have been on a once-off autorun event when I enter the map.
It is generally considered poor design to have monsters in the same area as puzzles. I’m trying to push boulders around while fighting off enemies who keep inflicting poison on me. This is not amusing. Oh great, they are now inflicting blind on me. I have no way to heal that. I of course miss them because I have no offensive spells. These fights drag on until with luck I get enough hits in to finish the bats off. I wonder if that missing info was about how to reset the boulder without having to exit the map. I’ve been doing the one that’s in the far NW corner of a map. I made an error, I had to fight my way through 4 battles to get off the map to reset it. This is so not funny.
Decided at this point that as I’ve got more than an hour of game play time (and considerably more time spent, because of pausing the game to write these notes), I’ve done enough to form a judgement on the demo, so left the caves, saved and stopped.
Overall assessment
This played as if it had never been beta tested. The number of dialogue errors, mapping errors, passability errors, eventing errors all point to a lack of attention to detail.
Some questionable design details. Restricted saving can work, but in the village it seemed pretty arbitrary. It may be that I could always save in the Inn, but what player is going to go and rest in the Inn to find that out when they haven't had a battle yet? Enemies in puzzle zones is something that significant numbers of players, and people on this forum as well, have expressed a strong dislike for. Expensive potions might also need balancing out. I have to fight around 8 - 10 battles to be able to afford one potion, and there is nothing to replenish MP.
it is very difficult to assess the story or the characters, as there hasn't been much of it in the first hour of play. We have the story element of the protagonist's rescue, his desire to undertake the test to become a Knight, the attitude of the villagers towards him, and that's about it. The lack of interaction between the two actors mean that we have have learned nothing further about them. They haven't said a word beyond one comment in the cave since they left the village. Comments could have been made when finding chests, or triggered when passing pinch points on the maps.
Battles so far have not been interesting. No one expects too much of level one fights, but to have that slow, heavy battle theme and lots of misses (especially if they could have been avoided by being able to equip something else instead of the axe) did not make them enjoyable.
My recommendation is that you go over this demo with a fine-tooth comb. Maybe get someone else to do your proof reading, certainly get someone else to give it a thorough beta test. There are simply too many issues to leave while you continue to develop later sections of the game.
Yay, now back in action Happy Christmas time, coming back!
Back in action to develop the indie game that has been long overdue... Final Fallacy. A game that keeps on giving! The development never ends as the developer thinks to be the smart cookie by coming back and beginning by saying... "Oh bother, this indie game has been long overdue..." How could one resist such? No-one c
To whom ever person or persons who re-did the DS/DS+ asset packs for MV (as in, they are all 48x48, and not just x2 the pixel scale) .... THANK-YOU!!!!!!!!! XwwwwX
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as my project is encrypted as well. I'll message you about my problems so we can keep this thread about your project. 
