Ruins of Rydos [Demo Available!]

[Reynard Frost]

It's really fun! But I found a problem.

View attachment 594

Strange... I'll take a look and get that fixed right away. Any idea what part of the game you encountered that in?

Nevermind, found it. Forgot to rename the file properly. I'll have it fixed and updated within the next 20 minutes.

EDIT: Bug should be fixed and new version is available! Your save file should still be valid so feel free to copy it over.

 

[crimcrim]

finally.

I'm gonna play this tomorrow but there better not be any RTP sounds. I don't like RTP sounds

 

[Reynard Frost]

finally.

I'm gonna play this tomorrow but there better not be any RTP sounds. I don't like RTP sounds

The animations are untouched (including RTP sounds). But other sounds have been replaced. I'm saving updating the animations for the full game.

 

[Knightmare]

I gave it just over a half hour, I'll probably play it more when I have more time. So far I'm liking it. I like the retro graphics and the sounds/music are not annoying. The battle interface and graphics are nice. The balancing is decent. It seems a little simple right now but if you keep developing it it could be downright one of the best RM games I've played.

Here's a few things I think could use some attention.

-Have a possibility of encountering 1 or 3 enemies for battles and mix up the enemies a little bit. Fighting pairs of the same enemies over and over can get old.

-Have chests give you about 2 items and lower the amount of antidotes. I think I've opened 10-12 chests and 4 of them have been antidotes.

-Have the floors be a little more complex. They are simple and too easy to navigate. Maybe add some puzzles or make the floors about 20x20 bigger.

-More variety of enemies, I think I've only encountered 4 different ones.

-Level ups happen a little too frequent IMO.

I'm not exactly sure what a Nagademo is but if its supposed to be something short and simple you did very well. If you're trying to develop this into a more complex game I would address those points a bit. Overall nice work and I hope you do decide to make this a bigger and more complex game.

 

[Reynard Frost]

I gave it just over a half hour, I'll probably play it more when I have more time. So far I'm liking it. I like the retro graphics and the sounds/music are not annoying. The battle interface and graphics are nice. The balancing is decent. It seems a little simple right now but if you keep developing it it could be downright one of the best RM games I've played.

Here's a few things I think could use some attention.

-Have a possibility of encountering 1 or 3 enemies for battles and mix up the enemies a little bit. Fighting pairs of the same enemies over and over can get old.

-Have chests give you about 2 items and lower the amount of antidotes. I think I've opened 10-12 chests and 4 of them have been antidotes.

-Have the floors be a little more complex. They are simple and too easy to navigate. Maybe add some puzzles or make the floors about 20x20 bigger.

-More variety of enemies, I think I've only encountered 4 different ones.

-Level ups happen a little too frequent IMO.

I'm not exactly sure what a Nagademo is but if its supposed to be something short and simple you did very well. If you're trying to develop this into a more complex game I would address those points a bit. Overall nice work and I hope you do decide to make this a bigger and more complex game.

Yeah, NaGaDeMo was a 30 day challenge to make a game. This demo was all I was able to do within that time, but I plan on fleshing it out to a full game. Your points are very valid and I appreciate the feedback! The enemies do get mixed up with more variety around the 4th or 3rd floor I believe, and new enemies are introduced after the 5th. I planned on having entirely new batches of enemies every 10 floors. (There's only 10 in the demo). By the time you get halfway through the first section the variety should be mixed up a bit more. I originally wanted to make the battles random upon touching an NPC, but the way Ace is setup it would require me to turn on random battles while walking, which is something I didn't want to include. So as it is, every enemy location has a fixed encounter and I had to manually mix up the enemy locations and formations.

Multiple items in a chest? Never considered it but could try to do it. The antidotes I included because during playtests people were getting poisoned a LOT and I had no skill to cure poison. I included the skill last minute at an earlier level instead of the later level and have yet to adjust the items, so I will definitely make antidotes less common for the full game.

If I have time for puzzles I may include some every few floors, making the floors bigger shouldn't be a problem. I was going for a Diablo / Persona 3 feel for the dungeon layouts (maze-like, but just require wandering around to complete).

Leveling up happens too frequently? Interesting. Would you suggest making it occur 1/2 as often? 1/4 as often? A little less? A little more? The leveling rate so far allows a player to progress naturally with a minimal amount of battles and to avoid grinding. The bosses are the big road blocks that guage your progress. Also, leveling tapers at a certain point and becomes more natural in the later half of the demo.

 

[Knightmare]

I played a couple more levels and beat the first boss. That makes sense about the Nagademo, glad you're planning on expanding upon it because it has a lot of potential. There's a couple work arounds for the enemy encounter thing you could try. One method is to use Yanflys Swap Monster script and have each enemy event have 3 random variables and use the dummy monster troops do like 2-6 enemies. Another method is to set it up like random encounters then use an autorun event to disable encounters and on each enemy event put the "battle processing" event command to "same as random encounter" and set them up like that.

The level up comment is mostly just a personal thing for me. I'm one of the few who always liked grinding especially when battles are fun and when a level up happens too quickly I feel it makes them seem insignificant. And I always feel like the game is going to be short when I level up like crazy. This basically applies to the first few levels the players get after that as you said it tends to start balancing out more.

Another thing that would be fun is adding a class system of some sort, maybe not anything overly complex but something simple to allow a little more customization. Look forward to seeing more of the game.

 

[Reynard Frost]

Yeah, I'm probably going to do either elemental weapons for the melee characters, or give them some elemental skills to work with. Weapons would be more along the lines of customization, so may lean in that direction. As far as a class system goes, I think I'll save that for the next game. If I have time for it I'll try to squeeze it in there, but no need to throw a wrench in the gears just yet.

Thanks a lot for the feedback, greatly appreciate it.

 

[Knightmare]

No problem. I beat the demo now, clocked in about 2 hours, it was pretty fun. Another suggestion and this is me nitpicking but I would like to have the option to reorder my party.

 

[Reynard Frost]

No problem. I beat the demo now, clocked in about 2 hours, it was pretty fun. Another suggestion and this is me nitpicking but I would like to have the option to reorder my party.

Glad you had fun.

As for the re-ordering. I left it out as it has no bearing on combat what order your party is in, (and I'd have to dig up a script, probably use one of Yanfly's to make it so you can't move the main character's position.) But if I can finagle it in there I'll keep it in mind.

 

[xShaddy]

INSTANT CLASSIC xD

And I entered 8bit world once again thanks to you~

Game is awsome gotta say, too bad it didnt make into NaGaDeMo >.>

Looking forward to finishing it (^^)b

BTW, Seeing as enemies get "excited" when they spot you, could there be any bonus dmg on first attack or something if u menage to sneak up on them(doing that like a baws)žž

again edit rofl: seeing as a lot of monsters hav elemental weaknesses will there be something like monster book where u can keep track of that or something like that(ie: how Persona 3 had option to analyze enemy and then u know his weaknesses wich enables you to attack with attacks that will leave highest inpact) /nvm that, realised its easy to remember weaknesses >.> sry for bothering

edit(again, i know im annoying but...): Noticed tiny bug, when you kill monster, if you run from it, "!" icon will keep following you until it catches you,.

 

[Reynard Frost]

INSTANT CLASSIC xD

And I entered 8bit world once again thanks to you~

Thanks a lot! Glad you enjoyed it.

Game is awsome gotta say, too bad it didnt make into NaGaDeMo >.>

Oh don't worry, it did make it there: http://games.nagademo.com/games/35

BTW, Seeing as enemies get "excited" when they spot you, could there be any bonus dmg on first attack or something if u menage to sneak up on them(doing that like a baws)žž

I'd like to include this, but I'll have to figure out some means of pulling it off. It's something I may include once everything else is settled.

again edit rofl: seeing as a lot of monsters hav elemental weaknesses will there be something like monster book where u can keep track of that or something like that(ie: how Persona 3 had option to analyze enemy and then u know his weaknesses wich enables you to attack with attacks that will leave highest inpact) /nvm that, realised its easy to remember weaknesses >.> sry for bothering

No worries. I don't plan on including a scan skill or anything formal like that, but I do plan on including in-game hints that allude to what type of weaknesses the enemies might have.

edit(again, i know im annoying but...): Noticed tiny bug, when you kill monster, if you run from it, "!" icon will keep following you until it catches you,.

Thanks for pointing it out. It's a known issue, and an unnecessary side effect of the system. It's a bug I plan on trying to fix near the end of the project.

 

[ZeroAtEnd]

I'm digging the 8-bit and battle system!

 

[Reynard Frost]

Updated the 1st and 3rd screenshots with current versions of the scenes. More screenshots to come this week or next!

 

[Hesufo]

I started playing this demo long ago, but I just finished it. The game is very fun, I really like how you caught all the old-school vibes and meshed them up with more modern approaches to role-playing games.

I didn't like the monotony of exploration. It reminded me of the Persona 3 main dungeon, Tartarus. This was a NaGaDeMo entry, though, so all in all it wasn't so bad. It didn't end up being a grindfest either - much more the contrary, since every battle gave more than 50% the experience bar!

I would personally implement a few sidequests or a secondary activity to complement the travelling through 10 floors of Dungeon Generator maps

The battles are well-balanced but later on the number of enemies makes them a tad annoying; I'd rather have fewer, tougher enemies than just increasing their numbers as you go up in floors. You did add some new ones towards the end (spiders and rats), but I didn't find it to be enough. The difficulty of the battles was pretty easy. You didn't have to manage resources at all, and the MP pool is excessively large. If this design decision was taken purposefully so the player could be able to cast stuff to their heart's content I think there needs to be a balancing factor because it makes the gameplay so much easier and doesn't encourage the player to look for enemies' weak spots or play intelligently through each battle. The boss was a bit more challenging but he only attacked once per round so it was easy to heal his damage and keep going with little effort until he died.

Overall, a fun dungeon crawler with a balanced gameplay and a decent assortment of spells and equipment to keep exploration and levelling interesting, but with an uninspired dungeon and a very easy difficulty.

 

[Reynard Frost]

Thanks a lot for the review, Hesufo!

Yeah, Tartarus was the vibe I was going for NaGaDemo (simple, yet effective). The full game will include some extra things such as damage floors (to vary up difficulty in routes) as well as locked doors and other hidden goodies. There will also be collectibles that will expand on the story.

I really like how you broke down your view on the combat, this will help me a lot in trying to balance the full game to be more entertaining and engaging. I increased the numbers mostly because I wanted to spread the amount of enemies I had among a certain amount of sections (About 5 enemies per section) I could mix it up and make it with fewer/stronger enemies, but I may end up going with a re-color route, which is something I was trying to avoid. Once you finish that 10 floors, there would be another completely different set of 5 enemies in the next section and you wouldn't see the previous 5 ever again. I find it curious that you thought the MP pool was too large, as without recovery items I would end up running out of MP before reaching the next warp stone (if I was using spells constantly). I may consider lowering the MP pool to see how it works out, as an emphasis on using recovery items and strategy is definitely something I want.

I found your review to be very spot on, and I greatly appreciate the feedback. If there's anything else that comes to mind, please let me know!

P.S. How many more enemies would you have liked to encounter? 2 more? 5 more?

 

[Hesufo]

I'm not very sure - I just don't think you can follow the Tartarus vibe to heart - after all, it is only one half of the Persona game, meaning the player has been involved with a lot of talking to people, increasing their Social Link and advancing the sidestories, so they go "enough messing around; now I'm prepared to go for some hour-long monster-whacking at Tartarus".

However, if you're following through with the design, I would say keep the number of enemies (perhaps add 1 more), but add some very strong enemies to appear in the Red Ghost sprites alone, with very high HP, strong attacks and maybe high defenses and a specific weakness to exploit; on later floors, you can include it with some smaller enemies alongside. This kind of "mini-boss" enriches the gameplay by adding different kinds of battles and keeping the single-target spells relevant (god I was so glad I got the "Flame" spell when I did! XD)

On that line, if we were talking numbers, with your current floor design I would say 6 regular enemies and 2 "mini-boss" enemies. In the end, all I'd like to see is for you to get rid of those 5+ enemy encounters.

I did forget to add to my review (but it's something I think I commented on your blog) that I'm pretty darn amazed from your use of custom graphics. This is a really big deal and you should be proud of it because very few users go our of their way to do this, especially if this was for NaGaDeMo. Kudos on that!

 

[Reynard Frost]

I'll definitely keep those recommendations in mind! The red monsters were supposed to be more difficult challenges, but your idea makes them even more so. I'll definitely reduce the amount of enemies encountered and try to make the encounters a bit more smart.

Glad you liked the 8bit graphics. It took up half of the month to make all that was shown, but I felt it was time well spent. It really helped kick in the nostalgic feel. This wouldn't have been the same game if I had decided to use RTP (although I would have been finished a lot sooner).

Thanks a lot for the input! I greatly appreciate it.

 

[Reynard Frost]

Apologies for the double post, but just wanted to share that Touchfuzzy was kind enough to write a review for Ruins of Rydos! Also includes a short interview with me. :x

http://blog.rpgmakerweb.com/games/ruins-of-rydos-demo-review/

 

[Genii Benedict]

What does he mean, "it's not going to be the next Final Fantasy 7."??! BLASPHEMY!! Who is this Nick Palmer guy, anyway? Some type of media critic?! What does he know about RPGs?

/sarcasticfanboyrant



GB

 

[Travatar]

I just started this last night... and so far, it's really, really good. I like the overall atmosphere, and the writing is, so far, water-tight.

It reminds me of a of a better-written version of Dragon Warrior after it had a baby with Lufia (with Lufia as the baby-daddy.) And that, sir, is a GOOD thing. Bravo