Shining Farce [Demo Available]

[Zephydra]

Synopsis


Themes


Shining Farce began as kind of a silly project of mine and its seen multiple iterations across a whole bunch of versions of RPG Maker since I first started work on it pretty much a decade ago (Although this current iteration is only 22 months old or so). What began as pretty much a stupid, slapstick game with a more or less incoherent story has evolved over time into what I'm presenting to you today: A JRPG that is intended to be amusing in places for effect by subverting common JRPG tropes and events, but is mostly pretty standard in terms of story, a little cheesy even but this is more or less what I'm aiming for.


Mechanics


Shining Farce is a traditional JRPG in terms of mechanics. Sort of! What I'm aiming for with this game is to provide an entertaining JRPG experience with what players come to expect from this sort of game: adventuring around a world following a story with a group of already established characters, taking on enemies in random battles with swords and sorcery and all that sort of lovely jazz!


HOWEVER, what I am attempting to do with Shining Farce is meld in some of the lovely customisation found in Action RPG titles (like Fallout and Dark Souls) to let players feel really in control of their characters and how they develop. Want to field a mage squad? Totally possible! Do you hate magic and want to smash the entire game to death with giant weapons? Why not? Healer squad? Probably not advisable but theoretically yes!


I am designing the game with all this in mind, such that it should be completable with any party setup, though for obvious reasons certain setups and abilities will have advantages in some situations that others dont!


Additionally, any character can learn any magic spell or special ability for further delicious customisation purposes, and if that wasn't enough, each character has their own Skill Tree with multiple branches which offer different benefits.


I am somewhat rambling here but just to touch on another couple of features briefly and summarise:

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  Customisable character progression
  
• 
  Complete freedom on teaching abilities to characters
  
• 
  Different weapon types offer different statistic bonuses
  
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  Simplistic achievement system
  
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  It is a pretty difficult game (more on that shortly)
  
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  SAVE POINTS.
  

Characters and World

I won't go too in depth in this section as there's quite a lot of character and world building information already ingame.


The game takes place in the world of Lossock; a world populated by many countries and civilisations dotted around its surface. And also a supreme ancient evil because of course there is a supreme ancient evil.


The story follows the tale of Dereck, a a young student at a magic academy and how he is unwittingly thrust into a series of events he is not really prepared for or eager to participate in. Among the way he will meet a slew of colourful characters (sometimes in the literal sense) that will hinder or help him along the way!


As stated, the game begins at the Undelheim Magic Academy, a large facility on the large but mostly unpopulated foresty Undelheim Island but the game world is chock full of unique areas to explore that will only increase in number as development continues!


Screenshots


Couple of quick screenshots of some of the games menus and a skill tree so you can see the sort of information the game presents to you, followed by a couple of screenshots of some of the games locations. I have just linked the imgur url of a few of them as I took the screenshots with the editor to show off more of the area and as such the screenshots are a little big

http://i.imgur.com/1TkYyyG.png


http://i.imgur.com/7wmb0IY.png


http://i.imgur.com/IklnW16.png


http://i.imgur.com/xWf2cT0.png


http://i.imgur.com/r116cOv.png


Critique


Now, as fond of my own creation as I am, it does have some flaws to it that I'm already aware of and willing to admit.


Glaring flaw #1 is the sheer amount of RTP all over it forever. Sadly this comes down to me not being able to art at all pretty much and just making do with what I have available. I feel like I am doing an ok job with the RTP graphics though and I don't expect this to ever turn into a commercial project realistically so I only consider it a fairly minor issue in the grand scheme of things.


Flaw #2 is possibly the difficulty. As I mentioned a ways up the post, the game is pretty hard. This is intentional, but its entirely possible that the game is actually way harder than I think it is and I'm just used to it. This is part of the reason for the save points (though the bigger reasoning there is I feel like it is a good idea to let people know when something important/difficult is coming up and also forgetting to save in a game with perma-saving allowed everywhere and losing progress is really dayum annoying). The save points are pretty generous though as they also fully heal the party up. This point got aways from me a little, but the gist of it is that the game might actually be much harder than I intend for it to be, and I just don't notice anymore because I know it like the back of my hand.


There are probably more flaws than this but these are the big two for me currently.


Credits/Download Link/Dev Blog


There's a credits file located in the games folder, I won't link the contents of it here because it's starting to get a little long at this point


Download Link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/eguq212luvyees9/SF_V0.2.2.zip


Dev Blog: shiningfarce.tumblr.com


Thank you for reading this far as I know it's a little long, but there are quite a lot of things I like to ramble on about with this game, so sorry about that! X)


I look forward to any and all feedback, whether its just observations based on this post or from giving the game a whirl yourself!

 

[Bwoltz]

I tried out your game, now i didn't play it all the way through, but I have a few insights for you.

RTP: using RTP may be OK or not depending on the person, personally, I think if the game has enough charm, RTP is perfectly ok.  That being said, there are a near infinite amount of free to use resources that are plug and play.  Using some adds some different personality to your game.

Through the game I played to the first town and got the items from the weapon shop, here's my observations:

-I like the idea of an achievement system in the game, it adds something most games don't even if it's just for show.

-Your mapping isn't all that great. Now mine isn't either but I would say huge areas that sprawl for miles gets tedious for the player to go through. I would make maps smaller and populate them with more things to look at. Perhaps have some puzzles in the dungeons. Looking at a mapping tutorial will help give you ideas how to flesh out your maps. 

-I didn't dig into the skill system, but from what I see in the screenshots, it looks like a cool and unique way to present it.  Perhaps have the player start with a couple skills though, to make them do more than attack in battle.  

-Random battles aren't the best system... You can get away with them if they are sparse or the battles are really short, but I would recommend touch based battles. They are easy to implement, just search around the forums.

-The dialog is fairly plain. For a game called Shining Farce, I would expect it to be a humorous game of some sort personally. I don't really care about a super deep story, but characters are important. I would spice up their dialog and give them more personality. Perhaps check some tutorials on character/story writing online.  Personally, I give a character a personality (usually quirky, lol) and think in my head what I would say if I were that character. It makes writing fun, perhaps the most fun part for me, and when playing a JRPG, usually for me the game stands of falls on its writing and characters.  

-Overall I hope this helped and thank you for posting your game! It seems you understand how to use the editor, as your game was solid and mostly bug free from what I played, but you should flesh out the game more! 

 

[Zephydra]

Thank you very much for taking the time to give my game a go and leave some feedback! Hopefully I can address a couple of your points and intrigue you to play further!

RTP and Mapping

When I started out on this particular iteration of Shining Farce, it was a mini competition between myself and a group of friends to see if we could make a game in two months. WE COULD NOT. But that aside, the RTP graphics were always intended to be placeholder but I've grown rather fond of them. While they don't give a great impression, as any RPGMaker user has seen them before, I was always aiming for a game that let its gameplay stand on its own rather than its graphics.

As for my mapping, I tend to map locations in rough approximation to how large they should feel when compared to where they are on the world map. Each location tends to have a "speedrun" path through it, in the forests case its the path, so that you can travel through the area in next to no time at all if exploring isn't your bag. On the other hand though, I like to include branching pathways for the people that do enjoy exploring. The first little forest is a little plain visually, I'll give you that though. Some of the early maps are on my list of things to go around and rework a little bit as they were from a time when I was cranking out the dungeon-y maps as fast as possible (after I spent hours and hours on the Academy) so that I could ask my friends to playtest what little gameplay was actually there X)

Dialogue, Characters and all that Jazz

The very first few iterations of Shining Farce were really slapstick in the way they handled the humour I wanted to put into it. It's been a literal decade since then, though, and my own humour tastes have matured a bit. Expect more affectionate parody than wacky hijinks for the most part. As for the characters feeling bland and such, this tends to change a bit once other characters are introduced for them to bounce off

Combat and Skills

The older versions of Shining Farce from years ago actually had touch battle encounters. I like them a lot, but I don't think they are right for my game personally. It is much easier to balance a game thats intended to be challenging on the assumption that a player is going to earn x levels in y area, so on and so forth. As for skills, Dereck starts with one special move and up to three spells from the academy, which I felt was more than sufficient for the little tutorial forest. Maybe five minutes from where you stopped playing you get access to the skill tree system (and a new party member) which opens up a whole bunch of new stuff for punching enemies to death.

Sorry if this response is a bit WALL OF TEXT but I am genuinely super greatful for some feedback from someone that isn't a friend I've pleaded to play my game XD so I wanted to take the time to respond properly and hope to intrigue you into playing further!

Even if not, a huge thank you for even going so far as to download it and give me some initial feedback

 

[Bwoltz]

Fair enough, big maps are a-ok, but they feel very empty, they need more detail put into them.  

With the sheer number of games being released on the platform, you need to make a very good first impression with your game, or people will delete it before they get into it.  The dialog should be engaging from the start, as should the mapping and the battles. I would say it needs more tweaking. 

For example, I just made the third pass at tweaking my first dungeon area in my game, ex balancing encounters and tweaking map/dialog.  It isn't something that can be finished in one go, not for me at least.  I need time to mull over it and come up with some new ideas  

Also I really really would recommend lowering the random encounter rate. At least in my opinion they are waaay too high, but that's not a super hard fix, and is also a matter of opinion somewhat. 

Best of wishes developing your game, it sure is a fun rewarding challenge though, I tell ya!

 

[Marrend]

To be honest, I expected this to be a parody of Shining Force. After reading the opening post, I think it's safe to assume that's not what this is.

 

[FleetingInfinity]

To be honest, I expected this to be a parody of Shining Force. After reading the opening post, I think it's safe to assume that's not what this is.

I was expecting the same thing when I clicked on it.

 

[Tathel]

I was expecting the same thing when I clicked on it.

I was expecting the same thing when I clicked on it.

Yep same here. Great, now I wanna go and play shining force again.