(Contains Spoilers) After Making This Game

日本語の「ひとり反省会」と内容はほぼ同じです。

This is the English version of the dev-log "ひとり反省会".

It's more than one month since this game's release. Now I wrote some of my thoughts and is going to leave them here.

What I Have Made, What I Have Failed To Make

Temple of Trials is actually the sixth (if I remember correctly) project of mine, excluding something I tried to make with a software in the old RPG Tkool series decades ago. Most of them were abandoned before completion though.

• First and second: Two projects were abandoned before Untitled could be properly made.
• Third: Untitled TF RPG is somehow completed and released, then translated later.
• Fourth: Development of a project based on the idea of "hire adventurers and go adventuring, fire them if they get TF'd and become useless" had started and then soon canceled because it seemed impossible to generate an endless supply of adventurers.
• Fifth: An RPG similar to Untitled had been worked on but eventually abandoned because of technical difficulties and a sheer amount of required work.
  • (edit:) The RPG was titled "Untitled TF RPG 2" [無題のTFRPG２] and it's written on the title-bar of the game window, in case you have seen screenshots of an unreleased game in my old Tweets. Yes, it's abandoned!
• Sixth: This game, Temple of Trials, was made mainly as a programming practice for Untitled 2 and now released.

...Reading above, you might think, "Hey TailBreeze, now that Temple of Trials is done, start making Untitled 2 already!" It's a valid argument, but I need some time away from game-making to play some games I bought this summer... and I might revisit the "hire, TF, fire" idea next...

I Stole Someone Else's Idea (Again)

Some readers here might already know my Untitled was a ripoff follower of konoe's Estra's Labyrinth Cave. Then Temple of Trial's idea of "a personality test that leads to TF" is mostly taken from: Job Diagnosis, another game by konoe. In order to avoid making an inferior copy, I did:

• More endings.
• An epilogue for each ending.
• More RPG-like gameplay. And game-over scenes because I could.

I'm satisfied with how these "improvements" turned out.

”I'm Making A Game, Not 'Play' Buttons For Fetish Scenes!"

I wanted to take Job Diagnosis and make something better, as I mentioned above. But that was not the only goal of mine in this game. Here's something else I did: make some efforts on non-fetish parts. Because I believe it makes the fetish parts better.

• React to the player's actions as much as possible. Not every event needs dozens of variations, but it should at least try to make events feel consistent even with changes in situations a player may deliberately make. Examples include:
  • Enemies will not randomly use a TF-inflicting skill if you are already TF'd.
  • If you're TF'd in an event battle and lose, the following event may change accordingly.
  • The final boss will wait until you unleash a "charged attack" if you somehow start charging it up.
• Adjust the difficulty. Too difficult and players might be unable to reach fetish scenes. Too easy and a game would become tasteless. I tweaked the game's difficulty with many playthroughs of debugging, so maybe the game is of the right difficulty, ...or maybe difficult enough to challenge an experienced player.
  • As a part of the game-balancing act, some event battles secretly adjust monsters' stats based on those of the protagonist... I think it was so subtle that nobody noticed.
• Make the gameplay enjoyable in general, even outside fetishes. Since this manner of fetish game has many fetish scenes, a player will inevitably encounter some scenes they don't like. Even then, ideally, a fetish game should keep them interested with its gameplay. I'm not sure how well my game did it, but at least I tried.

Final Disappointing Thing.txt

The first released version had a file named "Final Hidden Thing.txt". This was treated as a heavy spoiler just because it required the player to do at least two playthroughs and actions which normally won't be taken. This treatment led many players to expect something fitting for this game's true climax, only to be disappointed by the result: the usual Game Over screen.

I'm very sorry for it. Really. But I couldn't come up with a better solution, so rather than making a proper climax scene, I just merged the file with "Game Over List" and treated the game-over in a less ominous manner. At least, fewer players will be disappointed, I think.

Something I Secretly Regret

This game's story, outside the endings, is basically "an event sometimes seen at the beginning of an RPG, a personality test to determine the protagonist's stats and class". This game has 12 results (excluding game-overs), a bit less than the famous Pokémon Mystery Dungeon (13 or 16 depending on installment) but not too underwhelming... if these 12 results were functioning properly.

I think almost every player ended up becoming either an Orc or a Werewolf in the first ending, which means this test effectively has only two results - because the rest of the results required the player to:

• Spam actions which are rarely used in a typical playthrough, or never take an action that most players would do frequently. (4 results)
• Out of the two Trials, take the more difficult one for the protagonist, and leave the other. (2 results)
• Win no battle outside the mandatory mid-boss and either of the Trials. (1 result)
• Defeat all the bosses, including those tougher than the two Trials. (1 result)
• Train the protagonist, who is apparently a swordsman, as a wizard. (3 results, with 1 overlapping with "more difficult Trial")

... So, there's some room for improvement in the "personality test into TF" plot. Feel free to explore this idea, and if you manage to make a game based on it, perhaps consider sharing it with me. (Because I'm not planning to do it myself anytime soon.)

TailBreeze