Pathway: Desire+

[Nirwanda]

Pathway: Desire+:
​

 

 
Abstract: A wanderer has to find her way out of a cave.
Genre: Fantasy, Dungeon crawler
Average Play Time: 1:30 / 2 hours
Game Progression: Finished!

 
Story / Setting / Purpose:


During RMC's Indie in a week V, I created what I thought would be a fun and simple dungeon crawler. Unfortunately, not enough playtesting led it to be too difficult and not very enjoyable at all. So I had to rebalance it. This rebalance has come out somewhat on the easy side, but I can live with that, maybe with some feedback, I can reach the exact balance.


Alone and afraid Erika finds herself trapped in a mysterious cavern where inscrutable forces pull at her and danger lurks at every corner. Can you help her survive the hordes of monsters standing between her and the truth?


Character Bios:


Erika:

Little is known of this wanderer, she's very confident on her own skills and more than a little naive, but she is determined to find the truth even if it costs her her life. Will her desire be enough carry her through this dark pathway?


A pure melee character, Erika learns only one magical skill and a few support ones she's your tank and she can take the punishment as well as she can deal it.


Valda:

A traveling priestess Who has also found herself trapped in the cavern. Sarcastic and somewhat violent, she's still an steadfast ally.


With few and far between offensive skills, despite her personality, Valda is mostly a support character. It falls on her shoulders to keep the team alive and healthy and she's well equipped for it.


Faith:

A mage and scholar from the Lyseria university, Faith unlike our two previous characters has been exploring the caves out of her own free will. Untrusting and with a sharp tongue Faith has some trouble fitting in your party; but her need for survival is stronger than her mistrust... for now.


Taking advantage of elemental weaknesses (most enemies have them *wink, wink*) Faith is the most offensive minded character of the party, sadly she's sorely lacking in the defense department making her fall to enemy attacks and strong breezes alike. Be sure to keep her alive!
 
Credits:

Scripts:
Yanfly
Modern Algebra
Tsukihime
Fomar
Craze
Wavelength


Redoo


Great Red Spirit

Music:
Teknoaxe


Evan King


Rolemusic

Windowskin:
Retro Halloween tileset


SFX:


SubspaceAudio


Graphics:


Enterbrain


Crazy_leen


Lannea Zimmerman


Nightblade
Nirwanda
 
Screenshots:

Treasure chests, goblins... adventure!

No time to pray when your life is in danger!

This forest is not at the edge of the world.


 
Features:
- Character customization and many diverse skills to suit your playstyle


- Mystery based plot


- Custom graphics
 
Download:
Without RTP (45 mb): http://www.mediafire.com/file/oimnofunye41xm6/Pathway+-+Desire+1.2+NO+RTP.exe


With RTP (231mb): http://www.mediafire.com/file/7vz2stscx2srgba/Pathway+-+Desire+1.2+RTP.exe



Known Issues:
If you are in the skill learn screen and switch party members with q or w, the new party member's skill menu will still feature the previous one's skillset Trying to learn anything will crash the game. Just move your cursor up or down to fix this.


You can steal the resources used in this game here:

 

[Vox Novus]

This looks pretty interesting! Will give it a download and get back to you when I finish it; might save it for October though, seems like a good game to play around the holiday.

 

[Nirwanda]

It doesn't have anything even remotely halloween related (except that I used the windowsking from the halloween tileset ), but suit yourself. Thanks for giving my game a look and I really, really hope it doesn't disappoint.

 

[Vox Novus]

@Nirwanda Yeah, I know it wasn't Halloween focused but it seemed to have a mysterious kind of quality to it not to mention things like skulls laying around. I promise I'll get back to you after I'm done. Been busy trying to get out a project of my own in time for the holiday.

 

[Nirwanda]

Of course play when you can and if you feel like it, your interest is greatly appreciated.

 

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Played through a little bit of it today, up to when you meet Faith.  I like the battle system.  It's cool to be able to select each of your characters and decide what order each attack will occur in, although it seems a bit easy when you are recovered to full health after every battle.  Sometimes I would have liked a stronger indication of what character is selected, the little box around their face was hard to see sometimes.  


When you said customizeable characters, I thought you meant that they could change costumes, like in an MMO game, but now that I've played it I see what you mean.  

 

[Nirwanda]

Thanks for playing it, man. I'm really glad. Maybe I should look into a custom cursor script to make selection more noticeable.


And yeah, the game is somewhat easy right now. But, is it boringly so?

 

[AcetheSuperVillain]

The goblins were definitely boring.  Once I felt assured that they could not defeat me, I just rushed past them and didn't bother fighting.  The ogre or cyclops or whatever was more interesting since I had to use strategy do some thinking to defeat it.  I fought one enemy after the cyclops and that was okay, so hopefully it's just the goblins that felt like that.  

 

[Nirwanda]

Ok thanks i really, really hope you enjoy it.

 

[Vox Novus]

@Nirwanda Apologies if you thought I was forgetting about this, was attempting to get a game out for Halloween but I will likely fall short of that goal so I went ahead and and kicked off a countdown to the holiday starting with your game. Also apologies in advance if I become too harsh in criticisms, its honestly something I've been trying to improve upon as reviewing games is still something relatively new to me.


Positive Feedbacks:

Spoiler

First of all, I adore your custom graphics, they seem fairly simple but still show quite a decent amount of detail. I saw you made them available for use in a thread, thanks for that; its always appreciated having great resources for use I'd certainly like to make a game with them one day. Going along with this you capture the retro vibe here very well, I'm unfamiliar with those whom you gave credit for the music but a big kudos to them as well as the songs were quite catchy and had that touch of spookiness to it while enhancing the retro feel.


Going into the mechanics and what not of the game, I enjoyed the character development system; there were a variety of choices to choose from many of which I didn't even see because of how I developed my characters, I enjoyed that you had to think about which skills you equipped into battle as well. 

Final boss fight thoughts:

Spoiler

Okay, now for the final boss. This is where my biggest issue with this game was. It was a very stark contrast to the rest of the game in that all of a sudden I needed to incorporate item usage into it when they weren't necessary before. That aside this fight represented something about bosses that I think people often get wrong; that a long fight and a challenging fight are not the same thing.


This fight became a massive task of frustration and battle of wills against who would last longer my patience and stubbornness or the game's boss. There is a lot in this fight that just serves to drag it out way longer than necessary, both enemies drain hp/heal hp, etc basically every turn...negating a lot of the damage you do each turn, not to mention that after dwindling Domina down I suddenly find out enemy erika substitutes and takes damage for it, so I have to attack that one instead, having sort of wasted a lot of time on Domina. The two foes seem to have different resistances and what not so continuing to attack Domina and letting enemy erika take damage til she dies isn't a real viable strategy. After subduing enemy Erika the fight became a further test of patience in that I noticed all of Erika's damage gets nulled when that creation state is on Domina. This left me doing almost nothing with Erika for multiple turns and only left me two characters, unfortunately I developed Valda to be a non-damage dealer so I was basically left with one character; faith to deal any sort of damage. Of course Domina heals basically every round as well further making this frustratingly long. In between when I could attack with erika she was sometimes blinded giving me almost no chance to get an attack off with her; granted you likely had some skill to cure or resist this available that I didn't have equipped. I recommend adjusting this fight, there's just no reason for it to be that long. Reducing the healing amount from the enemies and/or lowering their over all health would make a huge difference. 

Other thoughts:

Spoiler

Difficulty wise, I found the game to be easy; none of the items were necessary except for one specific fight. I felt like some enemies like the monolith became way too easy when fought without any allies supporting it because status ailments like stun or sleep occurred fairly frequently. Some skills seemed really overpowered against the standard foes, skills like Faith's Destruction spell hit for a lot of damage, especially when I focused on magic boosts and would wreck enemies in the beginning of a fight. Over all I mostly stuck to the same relative strategy with only slight variations and didn't have a difficult time with any troop. I felt like the exchange skill wasn't nearly that powerful even at 1 mp, especially for a skill that has a 2 turn cool down; it should do a lot more damage.


A few other things that seem to be small errors or issues:


-Drain can be selected from the menu


-Felt the goblins were a touch too easy or boring early on once you found out they were all weak to ice in the first battle.


-I really wish you would have added retro sound effects to the project because everything else screams retro about it and works so well to enhance that ( I know from IGMC experience though that when you are working on that sort of deadline you don't have time to fudge around looking for things). There's the retrospective pack on the store and Shabz/shabraxxx has some retro stuff here: http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/39143-shabz-somewhat-subtle-sounds/


-Here a user pixelized ace's default animations so they may be of interest to you as well: http://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?/topic/63248-pixel-animations-vxace/


-Some of the text is cut off when Domina uses that one skill that talks about endless flames being summoned.


-I noticed some slight instances where an incorrect word was used, like confusing these and those or having a non-plural when it should be plural. Very rare occurrence though.

Knowing you did much of this in a week, I'm actually significantly impressed by the amount you got done (I'd doubt I would get the same amount done myself) and despite what otherwise I would call an easy game I was having a fairly good time up until the final boss fight which frustrated me. Adjust that final boss fight and give a few other small tweaks and over all you'd have a very solid short rpg experience with its own fantastic visual look. If you have some other games kicking around, I'd certainly be interested in giving them a look sometime after trying this out.

 

[Nirwanda]

Thanks a lot for the feedback, @Vampire Vox, really. Sorry about the boss battle being so tedious. Believe it or not, it was severely toned down from its original incarnation... everything but the goblins was. I'll playtest it some more.


Thanks a lot for all the compliments they mean a ton, I'll take a look to the links you sent me. About my other games, they're linked in my signature if you're curious. They were all made for contests so they're all short.


Also don't worry, you were not harsh at all.

 

[Vox Novus]

Awesome, I'll check them out sometime. I think the difficulty of the final boss fight is actually appropriate, although to me its still odd that its the only fight in the game where I needed items (in part because of the length and the mp drains). The main issue is really the length of it. I'd try experimenting by either reducing healing done by the enemies, lowering their defensive stats or just lowering their over all health (this one in particular might be enough in itself).

 

[Nirwanda]

@Vampire VoxHonestly, I tried the final boss with my test game save and I don't find it so hard. It took me 7 minutes to win, and I wasn't particularly lucky with the rng or had a particularly powerful party. I don't think it's that long Honestly i think that a shorter battle woulodn't be climatic enough. Was your experience so different from my playthrough? Also I was testing out the pixelated animations and retro sound effects. What do you think?

 

[Vox Novus]

I love the change there, huge improvement. Ah, I didn't have water abilities for any of my characters though seems that's the trick there for domina.


hmm, even then though it seems your party is stronger than mine was, as the damage seems to be higher. With my party set up as it was at the time, the fight was well over half an hour. I'll try adjusting my abilities to see how it goes then, knowing about the water element weakness.


@Nirwanda edit-Yeah, the poison effect from that water spell makes Domina child's play. I think my problem was without out that spell and killing off other erika first I was left with this boss with a giant hp bar doing very little damage to it each turn. Without Poison Other Erika substitutes and takes damage from any attempt to kill domina and so you must finish her off first, resulting in the situation I fell into. I guess I just didn't notice that spell had a poison effect when learning my abilities. 

 

[Nirwanda]

Cover is a temporary effect, tho, it's not set in stone. BTW, the other Erika has literally the same skillset than the original (though some skills have been nerfed a little)

 

[Vox Novus]

Hmm, I thought it was permanent. Perhaps that was me just making an assumption after seeing it active for a few turns; I thought it might be a trait you added to the battler; knowing she had the same skill set it makes a lot more sense as I myself had the skill that applied that ability on my Erika. Perhaps that was me getting caught up in the battle and failing to notice they were using the same moves, still I don't think its entirely obvious either.