Runaway [DEMO]

[highlord90]

31st October 2015 - Runaway is being worked on once again

PLEASE BE AWARE THAT ANY COMMENTS MADE BEFORE THE 31st OF OCTOBER 2015 ARE RELATING THE OLD, VX ACE, VERSION I HAD STARTED WORKING ON

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RUNAWAY​

A Dark Fantasy by Highlord90​

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Current status: In production​

Demo Status: Released​

https://onedrive.live.com/?id=C65F0830827CB748%211177&cid=C65F0830827CB748​

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Story



I figure while the game is still heavily underdeveloped I can divulge some of the story.

It revolves around two main characters.

Garrick is a Bounty Hunter from Port Vill who specialises in using a Sword and Buckler which allows him to counter attack fairly often in battle. He has a keen eye and a good sense of morality and is easily swayed into doing the right though his first thought is usually of the potential payoff. Upon meeting a strange, mute Slave-Girl his life suddenly takes a strange turn and he finds himself caring deeply for the lost soul put under his care. He also cares very deeply for his Guildmates and see's the Guildmaster as something of a father figure.

Miria is a mute Slave from the gargantuan Kronian Empire. Only fourteen in the story, her life seems to be coming to an end after being brutally tortured by her Master and then being left to die after her wounds become infected. When a guard moves to finish her off the Gift of Strife, or Magic, awakens inside her and the newfound power sends her leagues away where she is found on a completely different island by a group of Sahagin known as the Younglings who, in their curiosity, befriend the child.

They meet a month after Miria's escape when Garrick is assigned to investigate a string of robberies where only food had been stolen. He immedietely figures it's the Sahagin Younglings, a merman species living in the sewers and vast caves therein, but is shocked to find a girl living happily among them. She was weak and hungry but he also finds out that she has the Gift of Strife, magic, and so Garick decides to bring her to the Guild over turning her into the guard so that she can learn to control her Gift. She ends up becoming Garrick's apprentice and so the pair begin to work together on missions and are first sent to a nearby farming village that has been plagued by Hornets which are destroying the much needed crops.

The setting of the Demo is that pirates have been attacking the coast of Hiron and to keep his citizens safe the king has decreed that the only ships that are authorised to leave port are military vessels. Because of this, the lack of imported goods coming into the Vill Grasslands has left the people who live in that reigon desperate. When supplies became too low people turned to Banditry to fill their bellies and pray on the desperate folk who have tried to make the journey East to the Capital. Garrick's guild has been trying to keep the peace in the months that followed, makling sure the Bandits are being dealt while the town officials share food equally. Already, men women and children are starving and some are even dying, Garrick knows it's only a matter of time before the Pirates have to be eradicated if they don't back off.

To make matters worse people suspect that the Kronians are involved and are using the Pirates as a means to weaken Hiron in preperation for a large assault on the small island and unlike in the past, they may not be able to repel them so easily...

Demo



The Demo has ended up going further than I initially planned so I've designed the ending of it and I hope you'll be disappointed when it does end I want to give you more but if I don't push out this early Demo then any bugs in combat, movement, scenery and so on will be much harder to fix and you'll probably get a really bad game which is the last thing I want.

Demo: https://onedrive.live.com/?id=C65F0830827CB748%211177&cid=C65F0830827CB748

There will be issues so if you want to help with development then download else go browse around and get a finished and possibly better title

Screenshots













Demo Features

Spoiler

- Around 1-2 Hours of Gameplay

- Animated Battlers

- Clever Boss Fights

- 3 Dungeons

Age Warning: If I had to rate my own game I would give it a 15+ at most.

Spoiler

This game is not for kids because it has-

- Cursing

- Implied sexual assault

- Violence

- A mature story aimed for adults, not kids

 

[Kes]

I downloaded it, but when I tried to open it, I got the error message that it could not find the file

Graphics/system/logo1

.

 

[highlord90]

Old Comment from before restart!

 

[Kes]

It's obviously trying to find this at game start up, so it must be something to do with your title screen, or maybe you have a splash screen with your name on it?

 

[highlord90]

Old Comment from before restart! 

 

[Kes]

Great.  So you'll be uploading a new demo?

 

[highlord90]

Old Comment from before restart!

 

[Kes]

Okay, fairly detailed feedback on the game up to getting the girl.

Powerful opening scene, with the dehumanisation of the slave girl summed up with the line “Get rid of it”.  Overall the story so far (I have got the girl and am about to head out to the farmers) shows a lot of potential, though I did think that the innkeeper was just a bit too quick to forgive and pay up.  I would have expected her to give the girl some sort of ticking off.  I think you have also overlooked the possibilities of character development by having Garick make replies to some of the NPCs.  As it is, they just spout their lines and that's it, there's no interaction.  This would be a way of building up more immersion and reveal something of Garick's personality.

I also think you have not taken sufficient account of the fact that the player cannot know the game as well as you do.  I started off in the sewer, got hammered, as I was at a very low level, and did what every player would do, I went back to the inn.  But no healing at the inn.  What?!!  Much, much later I discovered where I could heal up, but actually by then it was really too late.  I had suffered, and I'm not sure that every player would have continued.  I think you need some sort of hint when Garick is in the Band's HQ that he can heal up there.  However, there is a drawback to healing there and that is - dash has been disabled.  What?!! (again).  So it takes forever to crawl around town, and as the HQ is at the furthest point away from the sewers, going there to be healed would be a pain.  I think the distance was another reason why it never occurred to me to go there when I found the inn didn't function as an inn.

Coming now to the sewers.  The player cannot know how long they are going to be, and so cannot know how many potions will be needed to get in and out safely.  Remember that I think I can't heal anywhere, so I have to use potions.  So I need to grind to make the money to buy the potions.  But I also need to use the potions to heal the damage I get trying to earn the money.  With the amount of damage that is dealt out, I need a potion every 2 rats (either 2 single fights or one double fight).  I earn 80, but a potion costs 50, so I'm only 30 ahead, which is less than the cost of another potion.  It took a long time to build up the money to get a decent number of potions (remember, I don't know how long the dungeon is going to be; in fact I had more than I needed, but I couldn't know that).  

I saw that Garick had learned a healing spell.  My cheer turned to gloom, as I discovered that it was TP (so no healing out of battle) and that it cost 30 TP to use.  Even using the building up skill, it took a minimum of 2 turns to build up the TP needed, and then it doesn't heal all that much, in fact only 20-30 HP more than the damage I'd taken building up the TP to use it.  It is, therefore, counterproductive to use it.  I think you should consider reducing the cost dramatically to, say, 10 TP.  An alternative would be to make this a MP spell.  I see that Garick has MP, but at the moment is not using it.  That would allow for healing outside of battle.  The other side of the equation is the rats.  They seemed to have a lot of HP and ATK for level one enemies.

Anyway, I get the girl, and there are some nice touches in the HQ with events and people's comments.  I collect the Hornets quest - and now I'm stuck.  I can't go out the gate, as Garick says that he shouldn't leave town without a reason (but he's got a reason, he has to go and deal with the farmers' problem), and I can't get back in to see the Master to check that I've got the details of the quest correct.  I can't find anyone in town who might say something to trigger a switch which will let me out, and I have no quest log to check details either.  So I don't know what to do, and have stopped.

Overall assessment.  This game has a lot of promise; the story begins in an unusual and moving way, giving us a character who is far from cliched.  But you need to pay a lot more attention to detail.  Mapping is a bit rudimentary.  You could reduce most of your internal maps to about half their present size and they would look a lot, lot better, without huge expanses of empty space.  You have also made an error with the steps in the HQ.  The steps at the top are going up, not down.

The biggest area of correction, however, is in the dialogue.  I shall put all the errors that I found (and I wasn't especially looking for them) in a spoiler otherwise you will have a vast wall of text.  There are typos, grammatical errors, spelling errors in abundance.  You must get into the habit of proofreading everything carefully, and even then you will miss something, so you should try and find someone who will play and check, or use the script by Shaz which extracts all events into a text file and have someone read your dialogues for errors.  To have so many errors breaks immersion and looks careless, and you don't want your players to be thinking that.

This is a game which is definitely worth developing further.

Good luck with it.

Spoiler

Quite a lot of your sentences are missing the final period.  E.g. when the bounty hunter asks for his reward after getting the mugger there is “Of course”  Then 2 dialogue boxes later “No problem”  I think you’ll have to do a careful read of your events to track them all down.

Guard outside the prison

“…we send them up to the city for sentancing.” (sentencing)

Guard over on the right

“Real though nut…” (tough)

Man in town

“Me daughter love’s those statues…” (loves)

Nun in town

“I’m used to cramp condition…” (cramped)

When the little boy says “Hi Garick, did you beat up the bad guy?” Garick should respond.  It makes it seem much more lively and interesting when there is a bit of interaction with NPCs instead of them just spouting out their line.

In the Guild, the young woman behind the counter

“Hey your back…” (you’re)

“I bet your hungry…” (you’re)

Armor shop

“Thank’s for the business.”  (Thanks)

When the guild Master is sending Garick and Miria out on their first quest he says:

“…too (to) grips with basic combat”

After the duel with Instructor David

“Recieved (Received) 2 daggers”

Little girl by the statue

“Hey you look scary woth (with) that eyepatch!”

Trying to get to see the Master

“I won’t disturb the old man unless I have too (to).”

Lots of sentences have been turned into questions by using a ? and often I cannot see how they can be questions.  For example there are about 3 or 4 of them together when Garick speaks to the receptionist at the Inn about the thieving.  Then a bit later in the same conversation there’s another little spate of them e.g. “Okay, describe her?” but in context that’s not a question, but a request.

 

[highlord90]

Old Comment from before restart!

 

[highlord90]

Old Comment from before restart!

 

[highlord90]

Beyond this message are (possibly) all messages relating to the newest version of Runaway

 

[DosBuster]

Are you referencing the album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by any chance?

 

[highlord90]

Are you referencing the album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by any chance?

I've never heard of it haha, I'm not a big music fan and my taste is mostly anime music

 

[highlord90]

Bumping this project to announce the first playable Demo of the new version made from scratch.

 

[highlord90]

another bump, i forgot to upload the demo to OneDrive xD, so sorry