Enneagon

Yeah, I'm lost. What is a "corrupted game"?

Having only a few skills total might make the game repetitive in a system focused around combat. However, I like the idea of skills being linked to equipment; having few skills total but a wide pool of skills to choose from lends itself well to strategizing. Having, say, each character learn two or three core skills by leveling but letting them learn unique skills through books and weapons sounds like a good balance. You should also be sure to be creative with your enemy types to give the player a reason to mix up their skills and figure out solutions to each challenge.

Hmm. Specifically: I pressed X to exit the achievements menu, at which point the screen went dark and the opening text started to crawl again. After that I wound up back in the throne room, able to move around and talk to people, but the screen remained black. Related, having to use the bestiary and achievements as an item on the party to view them seems like an unnecessary step. It's a small thing, but it does make the game feel mechanically unpolished. Which reminds me, it took me a while to realize that I had to use recipes in order to learn them. Surely they could just be learned as soon as they're picked up?

It's back! Didn't have so much time, but I ran through part of it to see what I could see. -Improvements! Perhaps because I knew where I was going this time, I ran through the castle in a fraction of the time. The twinkles were a little visually jarring at first, but they helped me progress much more smoothly and even led me to some things I'd missed the first time around. It was much more fun than having to check everything. They could use Direction Fix, though, as they keep changing sprites when viewed from different sides, and not everything (such as signs) needs a twinkle. -Related: Locked doors are still broken. They change sprites when viewed from above without a key. -The giver of the bestiary is way too easy to miss, tucked away in the back of the library. -I caught some new dialogue this time around! Enjoyable, and some seemed to hint at events later in the game, but again, there are a few too many NPCs who are willing to drop their entire life stories when all I want to do is quickly explore. Consider using self-switches so that NPCs only do their entire spiel once, and put a yes/no option in front of really long books and signs. -The town is still several times larger than it needs to be. Running through and picking all those plants seemed like much more tedium than it was worth, not least because it's still not stated how effective any given healing item is compared to others. It's for the same reason that I felt that I would never use recipes. The town also feels more mazelike, which is the opposite of what you want. And why are the item shops placed in the furthest possible corner from the entrance, behind several rows of fenced-off fields and locked houses? Everything is needlessly far away, and in between there's nothing to see and no reason to explore, unless for some reason I want to go to the trouble of picking eighty potatoes in a row. The entire farming mechanic seems unnecessary in a game like this. -Now that I think of it, the medal shop, kitchen, and even the church are pretty far away from the castle entrance as well. -Using the Goals item given with the bestiary resets and then crashes the game upon exiting it. So, that's the end of my review, I guess.

It's not an inherently bad idea, but you do have to know what you're doing. The 4th wall joke is the sepia-toned filter of interactive comedy; it's often overused by people who don't understand why it's funny. The example above would work just fine, so long as the game is full of things that the player can interact with. Even the tone of the joke is secondary to how it fits into the game mechanically. Let it come out naturally through gameplay and don't force it.

Well, there's the rub; I just don't see how you could make these mechanics integral to the game and not have story progression be affected. I agree that it sounds like a good concept on paper, and branching sidequests are usually a good thing, but basing progression on stat growth in a non-linear game seems like the most convoluted and game-breaking way of doing it. JRPGs don't have quite the same mechanical freedom as tabletop or action games in that it's not always possible to bluff or skill your way out of anything. If you don't have the right numbers at the right time, the game becomes unwinnable. And if you give players a chance to grind, know that they will: in the standard system there's nothing stopping a player from grinding ten levels until they can reach a quest that they weren't supposed to get to until much later, and it only takes a simple blunder to make them think that's what they're supposed to do. If you do go this route, it might be simpler to boil it down to: -a morality system -different outcomes based on who's in the party -collecting information -passive perks/items gained from other quests -heavy use of non-combat stats such as alchemy -eliminate stats altogether and just unlock quests through exploration and player choices

To be honest, it sounds more complicated than it's worth. With a limited number of playable characters and/or some carefully designed ability trees, you could potentially use it to create branching paths based on play style; 50 STR to move a boulder, 40 INT to unlock new dialogue options, Fallout-style fare. (In fact, thinking about it, playing the original Fallout would be a fantastic reference point for this.) But if you use this to try to tell a linear story, then, as you've noted, you're going to immediately run into problems. Keeping the gameplay level with a player's stat growth is hard enough when you're there to micromanage as the DM, and would become a nightmare if you can't judge how powerful a player will be at any one point in the game. It's for this reason that a game like this kind of has to be open-ended, letting players choose from multiple ways of solving problems and letting them explore at their own pace, never hitting them with a roadblock where they MUST take a certain option to progress the story. It's an interesting mechanical challenge, and I don't want to say it can't work, but I think you'll have a hard time mixing mechanics that emphasize player freedom with linear, story-driven gameplay.

It does sound simple; if (input) > 28 then 28. Are you using a special input screen? What specifically are you trying to do?

If the birds are more "spirit of the air" things, make them strong against wind and weak against earth. If they're more "literally, they're just birds" things, reverse it.

This here is the part that's bugging me. Things like this can make it unreasonably difficult for the player to get the build they want, and can lead to an exercise in frustration as the player tries to figure out the game's primary mechanic. This is the reason the game needs to be replayable to encourage experimentation. What kinds of events did you have in mind that would cause a branching evolution? Plot elements run asynchronously to players leveling up, which makes it possible to miss things, though that could be a kind of challenge; "Defeat Boss 2 before reaching level 20 to unlock Variant A," for instance. EDIT: Also, 2-4 branches per evolution, and as many as 6 evolution stages? Are these all independent branches? Because that is a HUGE number of possible results, and I doubt you want to design several hundred different monsters just to fill out every possible choice.

Awesome, Dragon Warrior! I loved the first two when I was growing up. I was more than happy to try this out for you, and sort of kind of happy with the result. Here are my thoughts as I went through it. -As soon as that castle music starts: Aw yeah, that's a good nostalgia bomb. Shame it doesn't loop properly. -That is not a flattering look for your main character. I recommend a revision. -There are a lot of awkward phrasings, run-on sentences, and general errors in the text. Here are just a few I picked up: And that was when I gave up. A number seem to be caused by words getting cut off due to a text box script; I've had the same problem. Always make sure to check your text boxes in-game as well as in the editor. -On a technical level, the game looks quite impressive! Definitely a good first impression. -This castle is... huge. Intimidatingly huge. Yes, the fact that the castle in the original game was so big was part of the fun, but this... this is too much. According to the save file, it took me nearly half an hour of exploration before I finally made it out to the world map. It quickly became difficult to find anything or remember where I was going, and I'm not looking forward to going back in there the next time I need to find something. It definitely looks good, and I had fun doing it, but in terms of gameplay you've got at least two castles worth of content in there and I was getting impatient for the story to start. (For instance: Why do you need two libraries? The whole section on spell effects could be moved to a different part of the game, since none of that will be relevant until I've leveled up some more anyway.) This is made all the more difficult by... -Checking everything quickly becomes a chore in a game with this much detail. Close to every room has closets, shelves, bookshelves, chests, tables, and so on, with no indication of whether any particular thing is something I can interact with or just background detail. (The libraries are especially frustrating in this regard, because they're filled wall-to-wall with books, some of which have important information, some of which have flavor text, and some of which have nothing at all.) I recommend visually distinguishing searchable objects in some way, limiting them to a few types or adding sparkly effects or something, so that when I come across them my reaction is an excited "Ooh! Maybe I'll find a treasure!" and not an "Ugh, now I have to search this entire room as well." -Same for all the NPCs. There are so many and they're so spread out, it's very easy to completely miss someone important. There's a reason the Final Fantasy series always puts all the tutorial NPCs in a single room. -So far, once you get past the occasional errors, the writing and flavor text in this game is pretty good. I'm going to repeat the sentiment that it needs to be more spread out, though, and not have several dozen NPCs in the same area. I'd also like a "Would you like to read this? Y/N" option whenever I find something that takes a long time to read. -I have no idea what Crystal Invaders is doing in this game. I'm not complaining, mind. -Be sure to use Direction Fix on your doors. They currently change sprites when viewed from above. Direction Fix would also help for characters in beds, at desks, or conversing with one another. -The save screen is glitched. "Tera's Artifacts" overlaps with a number that I don't know the meaning of. -THIS TOWN IS TOO BIG. It takes ages to traverse and longer to find anything. Several doors are missing or lead to the wrong building. Also, two of the bridges into town are sideways. (They also merge with land, instead of the water. Shift-clicking is your friend.) -The mysterious hooded figure's speech went on for too long and was too self-depreciating. The game has several meta references already, but to refer to the game itself as stereotypical crossed the line and took me out of the experiences. For that matter, a lot of NPCs talk for much longer than they need to. Some of them are fun, but trying to talk to all of them becomes a drag. If necessary, use self-switches so that a person only gives a long speech once and then delivers only a single line each subsequent time after. -Also, the exit to the south side is incomplete. -There's no indication of what items do, or how they vary. Are tomatoes better healers than potatoes? Do they heal HP or MP? Does anything in this game heal MP? -Battle is... okay. Personally, I'm not a fan of Yanfly's Ace Engine; I find that the text moves faster than I can follow it, and there's too much visual focus toward the bottom of the screen. The teeny-tiny, low-centered enemy sprites don't help. Mara's Auto attack being a spell may save time in the short term, but it means she has no MP left when I actually need it, since I haven't figured out how to cure MP yet. Given the importance of TP, I'd recommend that you standardize it across all battles instead of starting with a random amount. -Most of the flavor text for the game has been pretty good, so it's disappointing that the after-battle text is just stock phrases. I'd really like to see some more personality there. -Grinding takes too long. At 18G a battle, putting up a 350G price wall - EACH - at the start of the game gets frustrating quickly. Do we really need all three characters right away? And with the current layout, trying to find a place to heal and spend that money takes much too long. An inn should be a quick in-and-out business. I didn't make it to the end of the demo, as the promised hour was up, I was tired of grinding, and I still had no idea where I was supposed to go. Overall impressions: I highly recommend making your maps MUCH smaller and MUCH easier to navigate. Consider dividing the castle up into different parts of the game and don't feel the need to front-load everything at once. Use a small number of easy-to-understand items and keep the combat simple initially - I suggest starting out with only one or two characters. It may be a lot of fun to design huge and complicated things, but when it comes to making gameplay fun, always go with what is most efficient. Or, the short short version: Fun in places, far too slow-paced.

What's bugging me is that the buildings are too tall. Those sharply-slanted roofs don't look natural on buildings that wide, especially the curved building; at the top left you can see that it doesn't line up like it should. Try to find flatter roofs or a different layout. A brighter colour palette would work as well. There's a general rule in mapmaking that a space should never be any bigger than it has to be. If bigness is your aesthetic, that's fine, but as is you've left a lot of unnecessary empty space for the player to walk through. Make things compact to save on travel time and add more detail to fill up empty space.

Yep, that sounds like fun. You'd have to take care that the different branches are balanced, and that the player is given enough information to meaningfully choose evolutions. Replayability would be a bonus, especially if you want the player to seek out variant evolutions for reasons other than pure novelty.

I think it would be relatively easy to structure a story such that the game doesn't need a world map to begin with. There's no reason you can't set a game in just one centralized location, or have some sort of mandatory transportation system; just set it in a giant fortress, or an irradiated wasteland that can only be traversed via subway, or whatever suits your needs. Your creativity is your only limit. Thinking about it, RPGs often don't make use of hub worlds, which are basically an inversion of world maps anyway. Perhaps there's potential for material there. Connecting areas via paths can have positives and negatives. What it reminds me of most is the Fable series, which had a similar mechanic. It could turn every exploration into an adventure or a chance to meet new NPCs, but, especially in the latter games, once the initial exploration is done it can actually serve to make your game world feel smaller. Something like Pokemon, on the other hand, connects towns with paths that creates a large world but still lets the player feel like they've explored every inch of it - and several of them can be completed non-linearly, too. Create a map that works for you, decide how often you want players to return to each place, and keep exploration fun.

It sounds very stereotypical. Defeating an ancient evil with some legendary objects has been so overdone that it barely registers as a plot any more. The individual chapters sound interesting and quite ambitious, but the main meat of the story currently doesn't have a hook. What's the central idea that makes this story stand out from the others? What is the game about?