RMMV Moon Haven - Battle Prototype

[Moon_Haven]

Hello all!

2020-08-25: I am releasing next prototype iteration, v0.03. This release comes with a plethora of changes, which are listed in the Change Log below.

In a nutshell:

• Addressed most of the concerns discussed so far regarding the difficulty,
• Fixed bugs, including no longer losing all of your spells when fighting the Matriarch,
• Broke down the Ranger class in two: the Path of the Archer and the Path of the Rogue. Just like the Mage, you can change the Ranger's Path by speaking to the Guild representative.
• Protagonists have been defined, and now showing the equipment (armor and weapons) that they are wielding.

Feedback
As per my initial release, I'm seeking community feedback on the battle system that I have implemented, as well as general guidance on what could be improved.

When possible, kindly provide a quantitative input (from 0 to 10, 0 being the absolute worse and 10 the best). I'm seeking feedback mostly on:

1- How easy it is to pickup and understand?

2- How fluid the battles are?

3- How balanced are the encounters?

4- How long the battles take to complete?

5- Anything obvious that I have completely missed?

6- Any suggestions?


Enemies In This Release
The monsters that you will be facing in this release are:

1. Yyrshs (Orcs). They are bread mostly for war: they handle themselves pretty well in combat and their hide is thick.
2. Niakiashs (Skavens). Scheming and mischievous, a good Niakiash is a dead Niakiash. Like rats, they come in packs. When around a Niaskiash, keep an eye on your purse and don't turn your back on them.

If you feel lazy, my game features an Autobattle A.I. System to control the characters during battles. You can switch the Autobattle system ON/OFF in the Gameplay section of the Options menu. The Autobattle system cannot be toggled during a battle. This means when using the Autobattle system, there's currently no way to end the battle.

Thank you all in advance for trying this prototype and providing feedback!


Manual
the README manual is attached (below) and is also included in the zip file. I have included a Tips & Tricks section which could be beneficial for everyone.


Screenshots

Spoiler

Change Log

Spoiler

v0.03 - 2020-08-25

• Reduced the Cleric's talent Justice down in priority, allowing for more ailments or boons to first be applied on the target.
• Whirlwind talent now properly removed when changing Ranger's path.

v0.02 - 2020-08-24

• Added a check so no heal or damage will equal 0.
• Balanced damage formulas for all classes and talents.
• Fixed critical hit rate formula. Piercing weapons should now trigger critical hit more often (as they should).
• Fixed major bug that would allow enemies to attack before it was their turn to act.
• Fixed major bug that would remove all mage's spell when facing the Matriarch.
• Rewrote code to change Mage's School of Magic.
• Split the Ranger class to Archer (ranged weapons) and Rogue (melee weapons).
• Increased critical hit chance on crossbow and increased damage on bows.
• New graphics for main characters, which also changes when armor is equipped.
• Renamed art with mh_ prefix to make public releases easier.
• Added the cooldowns (CD) to the talents descriptions.
• Added Cleric's prayer Mass as a group heal.
• Added Ranger Technique Double Tap.
• Added Rogue Technique Whirlwind.
• Changed behavior of Mage's Obscurus spell, no longer killing the user when Pact expires.
• Changed the scope of Ranger Multishot to group attack instead of multiple hits on random targets.
• Changed the scope of Ranger skills Flash and Smoke to one enemy. Removed chance to miss, increased duration and reduced the cooldowns.
• Cleaned up talent descrition and added colors to better identify effects.
• Fixed bug that allowed characters and enemies to drink potion that was not in inventory.
• Removed healing portion of the Cleric's Gift, but increased its boosting capacity and made it last longer.
• Replaced Cleric's prayer Serenity to Aura, allowing the whole group to benefit from energy regeneration.
• Slightly reduced the bonus amount of Mage's Enchant and Supercharge, to improve game balance.

V0.01 - 2020-08-09

• Initial release.

Download
Download the game here: https://vincentracicot.itch.io/moonhaven


Game Manual

 

[duty]

I'd like to start out by saying that the UI and visual elements of the game are really polished. I dig the font, the left-to-right battle line up, the animations and how they're actually scaled to the battlers, the animated enemies, just about everything about this prototype is stunning.

Just based on this iteration, I'm very interested in keeping up with the next iterations on this project.

To answer your questions:

1. How easy it is to pickup and understand?
Very. I feel I got the hang of it in just a turn or two.

2. How fluid the battles are?
When you say "fluid" do you mean well paced? If so, then I think this is an area where you can improve.

The Cleric felt a bit useless if its healing skills were on CD. It would have been nice if it had a pair of buffs with short CDs that could be alternated one turn after the next, or even a decent, single target offensive skill that was a step up from the basic attack.

During a fight with the Matriarch, the Mage somehow lost access to all its skills. Seemed like a bug.

3. How balanced are encounters?
It feels like either the party's ATK and MAT values should be greater OR the enemies could stand to have significantly less HP.

The easy 4 on 1 battles took 3-4 turns to resolve, and that was after every party member tossed on every possible status ailment AND blew through all its hardest hitting skills.

Perhaps its decades of expectations set by other RPGs, but I feel like the party should be able to eliminate a foe a turn with focused attacks. Especially if the party is pulling out all the stops and tossing out their highest cost, longest CD abilities.

Even after buying better gear for the entire party and earning a level or two, the Normal encounter is a significant challenge.

4. How long the battles take to complete?
3-4 turns for encounters against a single enemy. 6-9 turns against the Very Easy and Easy group of enemies. 10+ turns against the Normal group of enemies.

5. Anything obvious that I have completely missed?
It would have been nice if the party started out with armor, or that the starting gold was enough to buy a full set of light armor for each actor.

Do you intend to have the party recover HP and MP after every battle as they do in this demo - or is that just behavior for the prototype?

6- Any suggestions?
Doesn't everybody? For your consideration:

• Reduce the number of multi-hit skills that strike multiple targets. These are great damage dealers vs a single enemy, but they significantly decline in effectiveness against larger groups.
• Increase the number of single target, high damage attacks. There's not a great option to focus fire when presented with a large groups of enemies. Even with buffs, the basic attack for the warrior and the ranger are very low.
• Create a "tell" for enemies about to launch high damage attacks or heal allies. I really wanted to use the warrior's taunt to divert some of the more powerful attacks and the ranger's smoke to stop the shaman from healing. It's difficult to justify giving up the action for these skills if they have such a low chance of being effective. Alternatively, prolong the effects of the taunt or smoke skill so it can be used preemptively before wailing on the shaman, or to divert damage away from the rest of the party while one of the cleric heals come off CD.
• The Cleric is kinda niche in his usefulness. If none of the enemies have status ailments or buffs and nobody needs healing or all the heals are on CD, there's nothing for the Cleric to do. It'd be nice if it had an every other turn ability that provided some form of DEF or ATK buff.
• The Ranger doesn't have enough alternative skills to justify equipping a melee weapon or dagger. Have you considered giving that class the same treatment as the "magic schools" and swapping out the skills for the use of each weapon? Or maybe just make the Ranger a pure archer and create a rogue or other dagger focused class?

 

[Moon_Haven]

Firstly, thank you very much for taking the time to test and write back! It's really appreciated!

2. How fluid the battles are?
The Cleric felt a bit useless if its healing skills were on CD. It would have been nice if it had a pair of buffs with short CDs that could be alternated one turn after the next, or even a decent, single target offensive skill that was a step up from the basic attack.

Noted, along with your later comment on this class. I had to trim down the skills for the Cleric as I had too many that were redundant with the mage's. Some of them was to absorb all debuffs from the whole group and spit them back out on one enemy. It came to clash with Cure spell, so I've removed it. I will definitely consider which spells I could reinstate or add to the Cleric prayers.

I should better clarify the Cleric attack skill named "Justice". It adds 3 points of damage PER state the enemy has. So if the enemy has 3 states (bleed, poison, endure) that's an extra 9 pts of damage.

During a fight with the Matriarch, the Mage somehow lost access to all its skills. Seemed like a bug.

Thank you for the report! The matriarch has a special skill that doesn't seem to kick in properly and stops the mage actor from using spells. I'll have to fix this ASAP.

3. How balanced are encounters?
It feels like either the party's ATK and MAT values should be greater OR the enemies could stand to have significantly less HP.

(snip)

Even after buying better gear for the entire party and earning a level or two, the Normal encounter is a significant challenge.

Bread for war, Yyrsh (or Orcs) are some of the toughest enemies to be encountered, thus your comment doesn't come as a surprise. That being said, 4 other testers told me the exact same thing, with the addition that the battles felt long-winded when everybody runs low on mana. I will tune the HP down, no doubt.

4. How long the battles take to complete?
3-4 turns for encounters against a single enemy. 6-9 turns against the Very Easy and Easy group of enemies. 10+ turns against the Normal group of enemies.

Too long? Or just enough? I don't want to burden the players, but at the same time, I want don't want them to only spam "attack" skill to get over with it.

5. Anything obvious that I have completely missed?
It would have been nice if the party started out with armor, or that the starting gold was enough to buy a full set of light armor for each actor.

Noted, will increase start gold.

Do you intend to have the party recover HP and MP after every battle as they do in this demo - or is that just behavior for the prototype?

Only for the prototype. Players will have to send the characters to the inn to recoup, or drink a few potions.

6- Any suggestions?
Doesn't everybody? For your consideration:

• Reduce the number of multi-hit skills that strike multiple targets. These are great damage dealers vs a single enemy, but they significantly decline in effectiveness against larger groups.
• Increase the number of single target, high damage attacks. There's not a great option to focus fire when presented with a large groups of enemies. Even with buffs, the basic attack for the warrior and the ranger are very low.

Ah yes, I see that I forgot to mention that I have unlocked ALL the skills for all the characters. At level 1, the character will only start with a couple of 1-target skills and a support skill. It's only at level 10 that all skill are unlocked, including multi-target.

In any case, I will have to study a bit what you've just said. I did not think of that at all, so I'm not sure what to do with this. Problem with high damage attacks is that they become almost out of control when a character finds a legendary weapon. Heck, the warrior with a 2-handed warhammer is creating me headache... I've seen a couple of hits at 30+ damage when buffed with warrior shout, mage fire enchantment and a nice critical hit on a brutality attack.

• Create a "tell" for enemies about to launch high damage attacks or heal allies. I really wanted to use the warrior's taunt to divert some of the more powerful attacks and the ranger's smoke to stop the shaman from healing. It's difficult to justify giving up the action for these skills if they have such a low chance of being effective. Alternatively, prolong the effects of the taunt or smoke skill so it can be used preemptively before wailing on the shaman, or to divert damage away from the rest of the party while one of the cleric heals come off CD.

Not going to lie, I've tried to build in a way to "telegram" big incoming moves, but I got stomped. Prolonging the buffs seems reasonable and easy. I'm also toying with the idea of reducing the cooldowns.

• The Ranger doesn't have enough alternative skills to justify equipping a melee weapon or dagger. Have you considered giving that class the same treatment as the "magic schools" and swapping out the skills for the use of each weapon? Or maybe just make the Ranger a pure archer and create a rogue or other dagger focused class?

Huh... well that's an idea I can definitely get behind! I really like it!

 

[duty]

Too long? Or just enough? I don't want to burden the players, but at the same time, I want don't want them to only spam "attack" skill to get over with it.

It's hard to tell. Based on your responses, it sounds like the Yyrsh are meant to be very difficult enemies.

Personally, I think a "simple" encounter should be 2-3 turns. It gives every combatant an opportunity to attack once and the party gets at least one if not two opportunities to defend.

The easiest way to prevent the player from spamming attack is to create an optimal order to defeat the enemies, an optimal method, or both.

For an optimal order, you just need to have 1 enemy that the player doesn't want to see act. It can be a foe that just hits really hard, easily stuns actors, steals MP, casts a party wide debuff, etc.

For an optimal method, you can have an enemy have just enough HP that it can survive a basic attack. The player then has to decide to expend resources on a skill to eliminate the enemy or devote two party members to attacking the same target.

I know you've got limited room for skills, but have you considered eliminating the basic attack command altogether?

If balanced right, I almost feel like you could have the actors juggling "skills" all the time. Might get tricky balancing MP restoration, but Pokemon does it effectively with PP.

 

[SirGatling]

I like the concept I give you 8/10 something can improve but pretty good m8

1- How easy it is to pickup and understand?
I read the pdf before playing the game so I got no problem in understanding everything (also the tooltip in the games helps a lot )

2- How fluid the battles are?
I think are on the good spot with good duration and entertaining, btw the first time caught me off guard because the party are on the opposite side of normal battles haha

3- How balanced are the encounters?
In my opinion, the balance needs some work just a little, maybe more damage to the party o nerfing just a pinch the orcs because they are pretty tough. I'm sad because I made the strategy around buffing the Mage and protecting meanwhile she destroys everything but she bugged and all of her abilities gone :C, so I tried to survive the rest of the prototype with a dagger XD

4- How long the battles take to complete?
4-6 turns, I calculated more than 10 turns in the hard and impossible combats

5- Anything obvious that I have completely missed?
No really, I see everything fine

6- Any suggestions?
- Maybe the cleric needs an ability to restore allies MP
- earning more money from the battles, so you can scale and equip properly before the impossible combat
- I think the dagger needs a buff, playing it I feel it like a weak coinflip, (literally, I got more critical strikes from the quarterstaff than the dagger xD)

¡Good Luck with your project looks awesome!

 

[Moon_Haven]

Thank you very much for your detailed feedback!

2- How fluid the battles are?
I think are on the good spot with good duration and entertaining, btw the first time caught me off guard because the party are on the opposite side of normal battles haha

When it comes to JRPG, it's interesting to see how conditioned we are to see monsters on the left and actors on the right . For the sake of my player base, mostly in the Americas, I had to switch the battlefield Left/Right. I should probably mention this in the user manual.

3- How balanced are the encounters?
In my opinion, the balance needs some work just a little, maybe more damage to the party o nerfing just a pinch the orcs because they are pretty tough. I'm sad because I made the strategy around buffing the Mage and protecting meanwhile she destroys everything but she bugged and all of her abilities gone :C, so I tried to survive the rest of the prototype with a dagger XD

Couple of questions:
1- Did this happen on autobattle, or player-controlled battles?
2- Did this happen after changing the mage's class?

I'm asking as I get the same issue, but only when the game is deployed, not in testing. I think there's a bug with Yanfly's AI plugin, but I'm having a hard time finding where. My gut feeling is something to do with class change.

6- Any suggestions?
-

Maybe the cleric needs an ability to restore allies MP
- earning more money from the battles, so you can scale and equip properly before the impossible combat
- I think the dagger needs a buff, playing it I feel it like a weak coinflip, (literally, I got more critical strikes from the quarterstaff than the dagger xD)

The cleric class is a support class, not really meant for hitting. I like the idea of MP restoration for the whole group, so I will implement a version of it.

Money will be better balanced in the next release. I'll give more money to begin with and increase the coinage a little for each enemy defeated.

Dagger has a higher rate of critical hit than any other weapon, but it doesn't do much damage... so in the end, it's not a very useful weapon (unless you get one of the legendary daggers later in the game). I'm toying with the idea of allowing the ranger to use the spear (2 handed weapon) for the backstab talent or create a new class called Rogue, as Duty mentioned above.

 

[SirGatling]

Couple of questions:
1- Did this happen on autobattle, or player-controlled battles?
2- Did this happen after changing the mage's class?

I'm asking as I get the same issue, but only when the game is deployed, not in testing. I think there's a bug with Yanfly's AI plugin, but I'm having a hard time finding where. My gut feeling is something to do with class change.

Happened in the player-controlled battles idk if was after the matriarch combat or after I equipped to my mage the Quarterstaff 6

 

[ThinkN]

The UI has a nice to feel to it. It's minimal and doesn't get in the way, which is exactly what I want from a UI. The bubbly font is easy to read. The state tooltips are a great way to present info in an unobtrusive way.

3- How balanced are the encounters?

I made a beeline for the "Easy" group battle... but I found it really hard! It's probably because I was a dummy and didn't buy any equipment.

I used a lot of multi-target skills because they sounded powerful and useful against a large group. But they missed a lot and dealt disappointing damage. The enemy could take down over 50% of my character's HP in one round, but I was taking down only 10% of the enemy's HP. It felt like I didn't have the healing capability to sustain the incoming damage, nor the offensive capability to defeat the enemy party before it defeated me.

But - that could be my fault for making the most terrible choices. I'll edit this post after I've played more.

6- Any suggestions?

Add a little more "oomph" to the attack animations to provide a more visceral sense of impact. There's a video called "The art of screen-shake" that's worth watching. It's about 2D action games, but plenty of what is said can apply to RPGs too.

 

[Moon_Haven]

Awesome, thank you for your feedback!

3- How balanced are the encounters?

I made a beeline for the "Easy" group battle... but I found it really hard! It's probably because I was a dummy and didn't buy any equipment.

I used a lot of multi-target skills because they sounded powerful and useful against a large group. But they missed a lot and dealt disappointing damage. The enemy could take down over 50% of my character's HP in one round, but I was taking down only 10% of the enemy's HP. It felt like I didn't have the healing capability to sustain the incoming damage, nor the offensive capability to defeat the enemy party before it defeated me.

But - that could be my fault for making the most terrible choices. I'll edit this post after I've played more.

You didn't make terrible choices, I did. The way I had balanced the skills was to concentrate all of the output damage onto one target, or spread it out to many targets. It makes the skills balanced, which in retrospect, was a big mistake: what's the point of using a skill over another, if they all do the same amount of damage? I'm working through a lot of balancing right now, hope to have this resolved in the next iteration.

6- Any suggestions?

Add a little more "oomph" to the attack animations to provide a more visceral sense of impact. There's a video called "The art of screen-shake" that's worth watching. It's about 2D action games, but plenty of what is said can apply to RPGs too.

Thank you for the link! I had a lot of screen shake, camera zoom-ins and flashes. My player base is old-ish (we're mid 40's to high 60's) and was told by many that this whole fanfare of special effects was giving motion sickness. So I've removed pretty much all screen effects except a few flashed, and even then I'm still concerned for people with certain conditions like seizures.

 

[ThinkN]

My player base is old-ish (we're mid 40's to high 60's) and was told by many that this whole fanfare of special effects was giving motion sickness. So I've removed pretty much all screen effects except a few flashed, and even then I'm still concerned for people with certain conditions like seizures.

I appreciate that! Considering the health of your audience is really commendable.

If you had the desire to add any of those effects back into the game, maybe you could have them disabled by default, but give a toggle in the options to enable them.




I made a second attempt at the game with a new strategy, but I failed the "Very Easy" battle. Here are the gory details:

Spoiler: battle details

This time I bought as much equipment as I could with the 100 gold allowance, and I tried to focus on giving armour to the Mage and Cleric, since they seemed to have low Defence.

I attempted to fight the "Very Easy" battle against 3 green guys.

Since the multi-target skills weren't great in my last attempt, I changed my tactics and focused my attacks on 1 enemy at a time. But I didn't see any success from this strategy either.

After a few rounds, I reduced 1 target to low HP. But then I missed an attack that definitely would have killed if it had hit. Then that same enemy healed itself to almost full HP.

My Cleric took a ton of hits all of a sudden. I'm pretty sure every enemy attacked the Cleric that turn and took them from full HP to dead in 1 round.

From there, my mage died. Then the ranger. Then the Warrior.

Perhaps the elements of randomness can allow for too far of a swing from probable success to probable failure? I think that one miss cost me the battle. Maybe there was an element of randomness in my Cleric taking all those hits too?

 

[xsmittyxcorex]

Off to a great start! Don't have much to say that hasn't already been said, so I'll just be another voice affirming that it's intuitive but the battles are indeed a bit *too* tough.

One specific thing I would say that I didn't catch anyone else in the thread saying yet is that I think the enemies would seem much less OP if they didn't have potions. As far as I could tell, there was at least one way to deal somewhat with the shaman, but not the potions (which are present even without the shaman and even at the "easy" difficulties as well), which seems like something that typically enemies only start using mid-to-late game. Especially with the health already being so much, as everyone else has pointed out, them getting down to a sliver but not quite dead then using a (n extremely effective!) potion was frankly just annoying (and a little depressing) for a non-boss battle.

*Beautiful* UI btw! I know I'm not the first to say that either, but I just really wanted to express it. I would just make a custom rather than default layout for the out-of-battle sometime by the final version (I'm new, so I have no idea when people typically add which touches), but other than that, it's impressive!

 

[Moon_Haven]

One specific thing I would say that I didn't catch anyone else in the thread saying yet is that I think the enemies would seem much less OP if they didn't have potions. As far as I could tell, there was at least one way to deal somewhat with the shaman, but not the potions (which are present even without the shaman and even at the "easy" difficulties as well), which seems like something that typically enemies only start using mid-to-late game. Especially with the health already being so much, as everyone else has pointed out, them getting down to a sliver but not quite dead then using a (n extremely effective!) potion was frankly just annoying (and a little depressing) for a non-boss battle.

Thank you for your feedback, much appreciated! This is the first time the potions are brought up, so this is quite interesting. The potion were a late addition. It works like this: the bigger the enemy group is, the higher the chances the enemy group will start the battle with a few potions. The quantity of potions is finite and chosen at the beginning of the battle, thus if the enemies run out of potions, that's it for them. Just like players, the enemies will only use the potions when they are in danger, not before (I think 40% HP or less). The potions can be looted from the enemies, if they have not been used.

I totally get what you are saying. It's not something that I want to remove from the game, so I will tinker a bit with the quantities given at the start.

Cheers!

 

[Moon_Haven]

Released v0.02 today. First post has been updated to reflect changes and additions.

 

[duty]

Phenomenal update and excellent execution on the feedback received.

Totally didn't expect the "paper doll" application of armor on the heroes or the addition of the second enemy faction.

1- How easy it is to pickup and understand?
Very. No extra dialog was needed to bring me up to speed on the new changes, either.

2- How fluid the battles are?
Fluidity felt better. Not sure if it was the inclusion of the Niakiash as a point of comparison or just expectations set from the first go round, but the Yrsh battles feel like less of a slog.

Out of the dozen or so battles I ran, each actor always had a skill coming off cool down, and choosing the next action felt like a meaningful choice.

3- How balanced are the encounters?
The encounters feel balanced. The more difficult groups definitely give you some nail biter moments when party members get beat within a few HP of their demise.

4- How long the battles take to complete?
Niakiash Easy. 2 turns
Niakiash Normal. 4-5 turns
Niakiash Hard. 6-10 turns
Yrsh Easy. 5-6 turns
Yrsh Normal. 5-6 turns
Yrsh Hard. 10+ turns

5- Anything obvious that I have completely missed?
Did you intentionally remove the dialogs that occurred when you stepped on a rat?

6- Any suggestions?
Lower the speed rating on the Justice skill. It'd be nice to use it in a combo with a skill like Puncture in the same turn. If Justice is set to always happen towards the end of the round, it's more likely that the target will have taken on a few more states.

Should the "Gift" spell come with a bit of a heal?

The Ranger keeps the "Whirlwind" skill even after she switches back to the crossbow specialization.

Can we change the color for the Cleric and Mage's outfits? They end up looking really similar. Rationally, it makes sense since they're wearing the same armor, but I kinda wanted something that made the two of them stand apart.

And can the party get some starting armor? Feels a bit weird getting dropped into the game in your underwear.

The battles feel really good as they are, but you indicated that the finished product will not have complete heals between encounters, and that the actors will gradually acquire their skills as they go. Any chance that a future iteration will test the battles at different party levels and/or a bit of resource management on a dungeon crawl?

7- Things done really well
Splitting up "the stab up close" or "stab from a distance" Ranger specializations like your spell schools is a clean implementation. The Ranger didn't leave me feeling like she had access to only half her skills every battle.

Again, love how well the UI conveys a lot of information without overloading you.

The Obscurus magic school is rad.

 

[Moon_Haven]

Phenomenal update and excellent execution on the feedback received.

And you are awesome for taking the time and providing valuable feedback, thank you so much!

2- How fluid the battles are?
Fluidity felt better. Not sure if it was the inclusion of the Niakiash as a point of comparison or just expectations set from the first go round, but the Yrsh battles feel like less of a slog.

Niakiashs were included for comparison, yes. But since they are part of the ecosystem, I thought I should just get on with it and add them now. Shows different use of skills and have different weaknesses.

5- Anything obvious that I have completely missed?
Did you intentionally remove the dialogs that occurred when you stepped on a rat?

Yes, I was told that my quirky humor did not translate well into the game. It was the slap in the face that I needed to realize that at some point, I will need a writer: English is not my first language and there are people who have better penmanship than I, so I might as well get people who know how to actually write.

6- Any suggestions?
Lower the speed rating on the Justice skill. It'd be nice to use it in a combo with a skill like Puncture in the same turn. If Justice is set to always happen towards the end of the round, it's more likely that the target will have taken on a few more states.

Understood, agreed and fixed.

Should the "Gift" spell come with a bit of a heal?

Used to, but not anymore. Should it? Should it not? It's already doubling the HP pool.

The Ranger keeps the "Whirlwind" skill even after she switches back to the crossbow specialization.

Uhh... oops. Fixed.

Can we change the color for the Cleric and Mage's outfits? They end up looking really similar. Rationally, it makes sense since they're wearing the same armor, but I kinda wanted something that made the two of them stand apart.

Hm. Sure, not too hard to do.

And can the party get some starting armor? Feels a bit weird getting dropped into the game in your underwear.

Yes, the game will have you started dressed up.

The battles feel really good as they are, but you indicated that the finished product will not have complete heals between encounters, and that the actors will gradually acquire their skills as they go. Any chance that a future iteration will test the battles at different party levels and/or a bit of resource management on a dungeon crawl?

The next step is to add more enemy races and build up the 300+ troop variations. This will take a while, but the next release will have a small dungeon because I need to start integrating the puzzles logics.

7- Things done really well
Splitting up "the stab up close" or "stab from a distance" Ranger specializations like your spell schools is a clean implementation. The Ranger didn't leave me feeling like she had access to only half her skills every battle.

Glad you like it. The implementation made sense and opens up a few ideas for the storyline.

The Obscurus magic school is rad.

It's the Magic of the Underworld and the Undead. It's a lot of fun, until you meet Mortadae the Lich.


I'm uploading v0.03 with the fixes above.

Thank you again for your help

 

[duty]

After a bit more though, I think the Gift skill is fine the way it is. It doubles the HP pool, but the party has to fill it to take advantage. That's not hard to do since each actor has a self-heal capability.

...at some point, I will need a writer: English is not my first language and there are people who have better penmanship than I, so I might as well get people who know how to actually write.

Your written English is excellent. I have colleagues who grew up and worked all their lives in the US - and they still cannot write a complete sentence.

If you're looking for a second pair of eyes on your project, I have a BA in English, a few years of technical documentation and editing experience, and a bit more free time during the pandemic.

The original rat dialog wasn't bad, but anything small with bones "crunches" when stepped on. Stepping on a muffin feels much softer.