RMMV Small Town Shutdown (No Travel Jam Submission)

[webgamesetc]

SMALL TOWN SHUTDOWN (No Travel Jam Submission)​

Spoiler

SYNOPSIS

Spoiler

Intro

The Kingdom is under a Shelter-in-Place order by the King. You got stuck in Small Town after stopping in to ask for directions. After meeting some of the locals and running some errands, you haven't been here long enough yet to realize you're...

Description

Small Town Shutdown is your classic multi-thread adventure story game with hints buried in details and story lines and chores that lead from one to another until all the items needed to solve the final mystery reveal themselves. Your path is not spelled out step-by-step, but comes into focus by exploring, talking to NPCs and revisiting them after progress is made.

Characters

Matthew
The traveler who has stopped into Small Town to ask for directions and got stuck by the timing of the Shelter-in-Place order. Going from house to house to visit the townsfolk leads him on an unexpected path of innovation, mystery, history and a lot of piddling around in other people's problems.

The Mayor
A third-generation Mayor and eccentric figure bent on popularity and making sure everyone knows how popular he says everyone says he is.

The Priest
God is infinite, and therefore he needs a big crib. The Priest may come off a little money-hungry, but he can actually keep you from having to make the extra trip out across the gates of hell when you die in combat.

The Metalsmith
He's got a lot of great ideas, problem is, most of them are flights of fancy beyond the scope of technology that he lives in. But he's a lot of fun to listen to!

Stacy's Mom
Stacy is having a hard time keeping her garden tended. If you talk to her mom, Stacy might just let you help her do her chores.

The Old Fisherman
You don't have a fishing rod, so why am I even telling you about Old Man Fisher? This would only annoy him.

Frank V. Linda
Frank and Linda are neighbors and have been fighting for years. Being brand new to town, the Mayor is keen to let you make an unpopular decision. Will you side with the guy who has connections in this small town, or the crazy growing-plants-indoors lady? Your decision will dictate how the game unfolds.

Bryce
From the other side of the world, Bryce is in town for a quick tour.

Dru
Even Small Town has a down-low casino. Depending on the decisions you make, you could spend your time making easy money on slots and cards. Or losing it. Luck be a lady.

Featuring

• Lots of quirky, humorous dialog
• Bunches of pop culture references
• Quick combat with simple but diverse mechanics
• 5 to 6 mini quest-lines
• A/B story-line
• Custom music and sound
• New Original Side View Battler for Final Boss Fight

Thanks for Playing!

I hoped to create something not too difficult to play but slightly challenging to solve and hopefully a bit of a surprise in conclusion with lots of laughs and nods to our favorite entertainments along the way. I truly hope you have fun and get some laughs! When you know all the answers, straight play-through is right at one hour. Figuring it out as you go may take up to two.

SCREENSHOTS

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CREDITS

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Getting by with a little help from our friends.

Credits

• Yanfly Engine Plugins
• Thalzon's MV Battlers
• Music and Sound at zapsplat.com

DOWNLOAD LINK

Spoiler

Bugfixes and Version
Current build available for download is Version 0.9.3. If you experience any of the following please download the new version:
• Restored animation missing from Slot Machine in Casino
• Removed riddle advice from Gate Keeper Guard and moved them to more appropriate NPC.
• Clarified number of rounds of combat needed to progress and what to expect next.

Play Online Version
https://webgamesetc.com/stsd/

Download Zipped EXE from Google Drive Shared Folder
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ENapb8M0wH5UyIntanpRBAqi-6RIqpjk?usp=sharing

 

[Wazzzyki]

Hi there!

I played your game and here is my review:

What I liked;
- The "option" of having that feature in to making fights easy was really convenient to have the player get that short game feeling.
- The town itself being that small, really made me thought of what would an actual town like that be in real life. The situation of Frank and Linda seems very understandable, what more in an actual setting? Seems funny yet also scary to me haha.
- The story being very simple and having each citizen play a "role" for the player to progress.

What I did not like;
- The repeating fights part, I know it was not that much of grind but I think having to keep on repeating steps that way could still be improved. Though my dislike might be coming from me not knowing whether I was fighting the correct "thing." Really took me until reaching the lightanium rod and the finding a lamp quest to keep on chatting with the guard for hints, only then I got the idea of where to look.
- Just some minor details like when you had to talk to the mayor, it seemed off to me that he passed through the player.
- Also encountered an error(?) when playing the slot machine. Forgot what the error was but it popped out that some animation was missing.

All in all, the game really fits that theme of being a short game that is revolved around playing in just one village or town. As what I have given, change the way the repeating fights should be given out? maybe have the mc monologue where he thinks he should go. The hints being given out as like a riddle was nice but it was given out just randomly, maybe have the hints correspond to what quest the player is doing currently?
Other than that, the game is good.

Thanks!

 

[webgamesetc]

Hello! Thanks for playing my game. It sounds like you had some fun (I hope) and I really appreciate your feedback. You specifically address things that I worked hard to balance and I find your observations very thoughtful.

Believe me, I kept reducing the rounds of combat necessary to get to the next questline! I can eliminate a few more to speed things up again, so I will do so.

The hints from the guard, the first thing he says is random and a riddle, but then the very next second thing he says is completely specific to where the player is in the progress. I did not consider that the first random portion would confuse from the second portion - this is an important observation! I think I will adjust his advice to be only the specific portion to the quest line and remove the random, riddle-like advice in the first sentence, and move those into one of the other "hint" sources.

I am very sorry you received a missing animation error. I pride myself in game testing my own game very extensively to make sure the user does not experience such issues. But I am learning that I can not trust the "exclude unused items" function on the deployment, there are too many times I am finding things are missing. I am working now to develop a process to remove unused assets manually, so that this does not occur.

Thanks again for playing my game and your great feedback. I appreciate your review. I will find some time very soon to make these adjustments and get new deployment files uploaded.

Thank YOU!

Thanks to @Wazzzyki the following has been updated!

Bugfixes and Version
New current build available for download is Version 0.9.3. If you experience any of the following please download the new version from the submission post:

• Restored animation missing from Slot Machine in Casino
• Removed riddle portion of advice from Gate Keeper Guard and moved them to more appropriate NPC.
• Clarified number of rounds of combat needed to progress and what to expect next.

 

[KV_Kingdom]

This is an enjoyable game, but it appears to still be in beta (due to the 0.93 version numbering), and as such it has some rough edges to smooth out. Even so, there are some cool ideas here that are worth exploring.

The Good
- The town fits on a single screen, so you can always see where everything is.
- Paths are not blocked (unless intended, like the house to the left of the starting point), and are easy to navigate.
- No lengthy text dump at the start. Yay!
- I like the window skin. It's a subtle-yet-unique texture.
- The dialog is silly and full of in-jokes. I do appreciate that some are explained for those who may not get it.
- It's not every day I see a photorealistic (or nearly real) face graphic in a RM game. +1 for novelty! It doesn't fit the overall art style, but it's still unique and turned my head.
- You can talk to people just by touching them, rather than having to press the action button. It is a unique touch, and I like it!
- There are a lot of custom assets in this game, including attack animations and battle backgrounds (the latter is something many devs forget about; I appreciated the attention to detail here).
- I liked that the skills clearly describe what they do.
- Battles aren't too hard, but require that you are mindful of your health and other resources.
- Including life bars for the enemies is a subtle touch that makes it easier to see how effective your attacks are.
- Making the items to purchase in the general shop things that you can see on screen and have to walk to to purchase is unique.
- I appreciate that the gardening kid and other resulting plot-points are highlighted by a balloon to show you where to go next.
- I like that there are some places you can go to get hints from if you can't figure out what to do next.
- The "grind here for x number of battles" system is a neat idea.

The Bad
- Most of the houses are bunched up right next to each other, making it hard to discern where the doors are (especially for the weapon smith). It's hard to glance at it and know where things are. Adding space to the middle and pushing the houses to the sides would work better.
- It's hard to see the player character in the beginning. Starting the player in the center of the screen with some space around him would make it easier to figure out who you are.
- The lack of an overworld background tune makes exploring less interesting. The music is part of what draws me to games. Since the town is so small, you wouldn't even need a separate tune for the houses; just one overall tune would be nice.
- I suggest removing the insta-kill/suicide skills in future releases. I successfully avoided them during my playthrough, but it was annoying to see in the skill menu.
- Waterfall is OP and breaks your type system. Gotta balance that!
- Is it "armor" or "armour?" (And one time, it was "armur;" see screenshot) Inconsistent spelling annoys me.

Spoiler: Armur

- The pictures displaying the history of the town is a cool presentation, but I would like to have control over when they go away. Maybe consider adding a blank text box?
- The touch-to-interact mechanic works well for interacting with people because they have text boxes to stop the player from constantly pressing in one direction; not so with the chicken! You get an ear-destroying "BBBBOOOOOOOOOOCCCCCKKKKKKK" if you touch her because there's nothing to stop the event from triggering repeatedly. Maybe add a "wait" command to the interaction?
- One of this games biggest drawbacks is its ability to signal to the player what they need to do next. The items hovering over various parts of the map is a great idea, but the fact that they persist after they are no longer relevant makes things confusing. If I were to change something, In the case of grinding enemies, I would add a message to the related NPC so the player would know how much more they need to do a particular task (for instance, when you're gardening, talking to the girl would show you how many more of a certain crop you need to "harvest" before you reach your target). In the case of the item shop, it would be good to make the items appear as you unlock them so it's clearer what is for sale, and what is still to come or is decoration. Also, if there's a benefit to dropping off more of a certain crop, make it clear what that benefit is somehow (again, you could have the shopkeeper show your progress toward a goal), or remove the drop point once the drop off is no longer relevant.
- Guidance gets progressively worse as the game progresses. I had no idea what I needed to do after I handed the lantern to Smitty.
- The respawn timer for essential things doesn't make much sense. I can see what you're going for, but it just slows down the player's progress. Explore some different mechanics to find one that works better for this game.
- The "!" balloon occasionally triggers on the general store before entering.
- It is possible to consume the lightanium rod before it is converted to a fishing pole.

General suggested improvements
- Action sequences in battles would make this game look even nicer.
- Give skill descriptions a consistent format so it's easier to find what information you're looking for at a glance. For example, some skills showed the amount of TP gained on the first line, some are on the second line. If they were in one place, it would be easier to compare skills and see their relative advantages/drawbacks.

Conclusion
I can see this becoming an enjoyable little game once it gets a little more polish. I would prioritize providing the player with additional guidance, since that was my primary annoyance with this game.

 

[webgamesetc]

@KV_Kingdom Thanks for playing my game! I sincerely appreciate it, and it sounds like you had some fun with the dialog and humor aspects, which are a big deal for me.

Your review is spot on and I agree with 99.9999% of it! I just want to address and explain my efforts on a couple observations

It is super rough! However, unlike many of the No Travel Game Jam entries that I played (games that have been referenced here in the forums well before the No Travel Game Jam was announced) this game was made completely inside the last few weeks of April, exclusively for and because of the No Travel Game Jam announcement - I really kicked-in in Ernest April 17th - and unlike many of the game entries that I played, I did not use plugins to achieve my mechanics. I coded all the casino games from scratch in a two-day period in the third week of April, as a non-specific example. So, YES! This game was pushed live at the last minute, hot off the press, with me game-testing as I developed. It is, embarrassingly, not ready for prime time.

I'm sorry about the chicken, I swear I turned his volume down as it was... He was to have his own questline, I just simply ran out of time. I should have just gone back and turned him off.

All your bug reports are absolutely on point. To my horror I discovered that I'd gone from spelling armour to armor half-way through and had go back to manually spell check - what a nightmare. Spelling is simply my worst attribute; the greatest godsend of the technology age for me has been automatic spellcheck. RPG Maker, for obvious reasons, has none.

"The respawn timer for essential things doesn't make much sense. " I'd like to try to take a moment to make sense of that. The timer provides two functions: it makes it not as easy to grind a particular drop for purposes of OP. As an example, you can't just sit and grind Grapes and then go to all the other battles with a stack of 50% MP replenishing Grapes, because you have to wait on them. It's not as convenient to just load up on something that makes everything else too easy. The second thing it does is, it forces you to go do other things while waiting for the timer to come around. You can't just blow through the three rounds of fishing one right after the other, so you go and do a round of mining to let the timer reset, and while you're there, you sell the shiny scales that you picked up while fishing, and that triggers the next step in a concurrent questline. And this is important, because you have to be progressing in a couple of questlines at the same time to advance the objective, and I wanted to force the back and forth on that. If you just sit and do the one thing over and over right in a row because you can, you don't go back and forth to other tasks that trigger other steps in tandem. And, the timers are only 20 to 30 seconds. An eternity in game time if you're just sitting there looking at it, but if you go do ONE other thing, the timer is reset before you're finished. There really is no delay at all if you just take turns doing the couple of other things that need done at the same time. And this really is the quickest way to move through the whole game and trigger the few things that I deliberately don't explain very well to keep them a surprise.

Again, I love your review, everything you said was fair and spot on. And from a player's perspective, if the best intentions just aren't working, then we as developers have got to engineer a better solution, so I really appreciate your feedback. I had just published my very first demo in the Completed Games forum when I saw the No Travel Game Jam announcement, so if you have any inclination at all, I would love to hear your feedback on my first demo, The Wizard Of Ooze. It was built as a proof of concept as a template for games going forward, so your observations would be highly valued.

Thanks again, I really do appreciate it.

 

[KV_Kingdom]

This game was pushed live at the last minute, hot off the press, with me game-testing as I developed. It is, embarrassingly, not ready for prime time.

As a fellow developer who published a game before it was ready in order to meet a deadline, I can totally relate! I started a project at the beginning of April, then I got inspired to produce "Stuck In A Wall" about a week in, got stuck and switched to another project in the 3rd week, then circled back to "Stuck In A Wall" the weekend before the due date. As you may recall, it wasn't perfect initially, either. I've found that the cycle after releasing a game is feedback - fix - feedback - fix ad infinitum until you give up or people stop complaining.

To my horror I discovered that I'd gone from spelling armour to armor half-way through and had go back to manually spell check - what a nightmare.

Wish list items for the next iteration of RPG Maker: a spell check you can toggle on/off in text fields and a quick search-and-replace a la Microsoft Office's "Replace" & "Replace All" tools. I can't tell you how many times I've scoured my text boxes, playtested repeatedly, and then some other person tests the game and points out a dozen typos that I somehow missed! It's especially annoying if certain issues happen across multiple similar events, but those events don't lend themselves to common events for some reason.

Regarding the respawn timer: I see, you're trying to get the player to bounce between objectives. This comes back to the issue with providing the player with goal guidance: I was never quite sure what my objectives were or how close I was to reaching them. The goals are laid out in text interactions with the various related NPC's, but after that, it's not always clear what goals are in play or close the player is to achieving them. Here are a few ways you could handle this:

• A HUD that displays the various objectives and your progress
• A plugin that modifies the menu screen to display the objectives and progress (I'm specifically thinking of Yanfly's MainMenuVar plugin)
• A quest log
• Have the NPC's tell you what your progress is on an objective (I remember that the gardening girl does something like this)

The other challenge here is getting the player into a situation where two concurrent objectives are active; just because it's possible doesn't mean that the player will realize that they can wander off and start another objective! A HUD that displays an empty space when no objective is active could help with this, but there are other possible solutions, too. All that said, it's a lesser issue compared to displaying what the player's objectives are in the first place.

if you have any inclination at all, I would love to hear your feedback on my first demo, The Wizard Of Ooze.

I've added it to my "to be played" queue and will check it out soon!

 

[hiddenone]

I gave your game a try, it had some interesting ideas but definitely suffered from the time limit.

Spoiler: Feedback

⦁ Having the little backstory blurb on the title screen is a good idea, though it's a shame that you don't have any intro cutscene to the game... I guess I'll just wander around and see what happens

⦁ Be careful when punishing players for talking to NPCs (like the man in the church who increases your Bad Reputation), because that's teaching the player that they're not supposed to talk to NPCs! You could give the player the option to talk to the character or leave him alone, which gives control to the player without teaching them bad habits

⦁ The message boxes don't use the full space well, you could probably shrink them and get rid of that empty space on the right

⦁ The interior mapping is odd, the rooms are missing walls most of the time, or have only walls instead of ceiling tiles. While there aren't any rules against it, your method does look odd to someone used to the default tiles

⦁ The skill One Punch Kill can be used in the menu, which just wastes the player's MP. Make sure battle skills are set to be used in battles only!

⦁ If you leave in a dev skill like One Punch Kill, you can expect players to use it. A semi-easy fix would be to have the Dev class with all those skills and then the normal class that you switch to before deploying the game

⦁ Seeing the whole town on the screen is nice, and fits the idea of a 'small town'

⦁ There's something weird with the fishing poles. The item description says that someone can make the branches into poles, but I can use the item on myself and that apparently gives me the fishing pole without doing anything else

⦁ Why isn't there an option to sell 'all my oranges'?

⦁ Okay, I'm stopping here. I've lost what I'm supposed to be doing, and with no idea of how much longer the game is I don't want to keep running around trying to figure out what to do next. It's not a bad game at all, but could do with some more polishing

Overall, I really do like the ideas behind this game, but the rushed feeling of parts of it make it hard to love. Hopefully if you decide to come back to this game you can add in some of the awesome suggestions people above have made and give everything some needed polish. Good luck with your projects!

 

[webgamesetc]

Hi Hiddenone! I like your puppy on your head!~

Thanks very much for giving my game a go and taking such careful and thoughtful review notes. I really do appreciate it!

Spoiler

• It's interesting to note that some people were appreciative of not having a lot of backstory or "text-dump" (I heard them call it) to start off with, while some people felt lost not having cut-scenes or introductions. I think going forward with projects I will have both options and first thing offer the choice to the user. Thanks for letting me know how you felt!

• In the game there's actually a reason and in some cases a benefit to building a "bad reputation". Thanks for illustrating that it may seem like a negative, something someone might feel like they screwed up or weren't warned. I'll file that under, "there's no such thing as too much information". You needed to know that Bad Reputation might come in handy just like Popularity and Good Reputation.

• I did not realize that message box width could be shrunk smaller than the default game screen width until a couple people mentioned it and I saw it! This is something new for my list of things to learn and integrate going forward. I wonder if I can change the width dynamically based on the amount of content in a particular text box or if I have to choose one width size and stick with it?...

• Touchfuzzy was also not enthusiastic about my "miss-use" and "improvisation" of default tiles. My only defense: newness. This was the first time doing houses and town maps and I just didn't know about the nature of some of those tiles or how to bring in what I didn't have. But I've already learned a lot in tutorials and understand now about A tiles that even function differently. Although, I can't promise not to continue to use some tiles unconventionally, I can promise that my maps will get better than this!

• One of the things easy for me to overlook is that property that allows use in combat and in normal screen. That's one I'm gonna have to work harder to make sure on each one I've marked it properly. In a normal game progression where I would have played it and others would have tested it a lot more before "release" that surely would have been caught and fixed, but as you noticed I did it on items as well - I acknowledge it's a property value that is slipping by me.

• The "reprimand" in the description was mean to be tongue-in-cheek. I did leave it in for people to use, I knew all of the game play would be for the Game Jam and for purposes of speeding up reviews and making things go quicker I left it in there so people could opt to blow through repetitive combat. You know this because.... I charge Mana for it! When it is a Dev tool, it doesn't cost Mana, for obvious reasons... and I do take it out.

• That was the point of the compact design! Which was the point of the game jam... which I was very diligent to follow...

• Again with me not quite getting item usage properties correctly right off the bat... I'll be better going forward, I promise!

• That's a good question, because I thought you could sell all your oranges!~ I'll have to go investigate.

• Thanks for making it as far as you did! Your observations are spot on and include specific details not yet mentioned. I really do appreciate your time and effort.

Thanks again for playing my game and putting together such a thoughtful review. I may come back and redo Small Town some day, as I like the story and characters quite a bit. But I think it's more likely, being my first Game Jam, that I'm gonna take all the best bits forward into other projects, and learn from my mistakes with this game going forward into other Jams and quick projects. Thanks again, and have fun playing!

 

[ADMtn]

Hi,

Overall, I thought it was a nice, low-stress game. It was satisfying to make progress from one goal to the next.

Pros:

Spoiler

• One-hit kill ability to save time was greatly appreciated (the old school turn-based combat system, while nice at times, does get stale--so I loved being able to rush through a comedic/light-hearted game with one spell).
• Decent difficulty curve (when using the one-hit-kill strategy, anyway; I'm not sure how it would be to actually try to win without it). Since I relied on the one-hit kill, the difficulty depended on the character's speed/agility. The only mobs that caused trouble were the fishing guys (one of them kept silencing me before I could use my one-hit kill spell--but eventually I leveled up enough that I attacked first and mopped the floor with him repeatedly. Felt nice to hit that milestone.
• I enjoy most of the silliness and how the game doesn't take itself seriously (without too many meta jokes about being a JRPG, if any).
• The soldier giving hints was useful.

Cons:

Spoiler

• Speaking of the soldier and his hints, I didn't realize he told you almost exactly what to do for a while so I didn't utilize him right away. Spent more than than I'd have preferred running around killing the same mobs repeatedly trying to progress like an idiot. Could be my own fault, obviously, but perhaps the soldier could broadcast how awesome his hints are more overtly.
• Map was economical, but a bit too congested for my taste. There were some places that were hard to get to (e.g., the tiny house to sleep). Obviously, certain places were blocked on purpose (the mines) but I think the rest of the buildings should've had more efficient paths.
• The well was hard to spot, kind of. Could be my fault, but it was partially obstructed. I guess it was part of the challenge, but it was not an enjoyable part for me. Maybe more of the characters could mention the well in passing--like the fisherman, after you get done with his quests, could say that he used to fish in the well but it dried up? That doesn't make a lot of sense, I guess, but it'd work well enough in a comedic game like this.
• I also thought it was a bit odd that the mayor ran through the character to sit in the far chair. I would have the player character sit in the far chair so the mayor could sit quickly without having to go to the other side.

Anyway, your game was fun. I don't regret spending the time playing it. Haha.

 

[webgamesetc]

Anyway, your game was fun. I don't regret spending the time playing it. Haha.

That's great! I'm glad to hear it.

Spoiler

I'm glad the one-punch kill facilitated your play through, that's exactly why I left it.

That's an interesting thought on the soldier; his functionality has evolved over versions and feedback as a hint giver. I could "exclamation mark" him in with each step of progress. This would remedy a large portion of feedback regarding players not certain what to do next.

The map and the well have not played out to the best of everyone's experience. If I remodeled the game again a lot of it would be to fix the mapping. Certainly a learning event for me.

I thought that was a clever way to handle the speed differences between the Mayor and the Hero sitting down together and a number of people have mentioned being put off by it. I shan't be using that solution ever again.

Thanks very much for playing my game. As a game jam game folks are kind of obligated to play it, so I tried to make it entertaining. I'm glad you enjoyed it.