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Magica Cycle: Tempt Not the Blade's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Gameplay | #1 | 3.818 | 3.818 |
Creativity | #1 | 4.364 | 4.364 |
Overall | #1 | 4.200 | 4.200 |
Story | #1 | 4.091 | 4.091 |
Presentation | #2 | 4.182 | 4.182 |
Theme | #4 | 4.545 | 4.545 |
Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How did you choose to implement the Theme: Tavern Stories in your game?
The story takes place in a Tavern where the characters tell one another of their week.
Did you implement any of the optional Bonus Challenges, and if so, which ones?
I implemented 2, there is a shared theme in the stories of soldiers and there are 2 jokes about the Liar revealed, one is a meta joke, since a game over means they somehow didn't tell the story right.
Does your game contain AI-generated assets?
No
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Comments
I'm impressed with the custom art, but I want to share my perspective as a writer. Based just on this game, I could tell you have a passion for writing. Not in the sense of being a prolific writer necessarily but rather in that you invest a good amount of effort into what you write. For example, you seem to enjoy developing dramatic dialogues, kind of like a play. There's setup, tension, and payoff. In contrast, if you just saw writing as nothing more than grease to move the player from one battle to the next (or one map to the next), it'd be easy to phone it in.
My suggestions:
Proofread, proofread, proofread. And have others proofread, too. A typo here and there won't be fatal, but the more you catch, the better the polish. You may even find ways to phrase things better on the second, third, fourth, and subsequent reads. My game was also text-heavy, so I wrote out the scenes in a separate document before copying them over to RPG Maker. The flexibility of a separate document for writing is absolutely worth the initial effort of copying the text over. However, even after copying, you'll still need to proofread it several more times in-engine. For example, I noticed a few places in your game where the text would get cut off by the window. I had a plugin that automatically does word wrapping, but even then I had to look for messages that would go beyond the number of lines in a single dialog box. In my opinion, no matter the medium of the art, the details matter at least as much as the big picture.
At times (especially at the beginning) it was difficult to tell who was who. I understand that this is a sequel, so those who have played your previous game may not have the same problem, but I think even returning players would appreciate a quick refresher. I'm not saying you need to give us a full bio for each character. At a minimum, I'd like to be able to put a face to the name. If you don't want to literally add a face in the dialog box, I'll suggest to you something we did for our game. With the original version of our game, people complained it was hard to tell who was talking. So we added little icons (of the SV battle sprite heads) next to the speaker's name in the dialog box. All you have to do is add the icons to the IconSet sheet and then type in the text code \I[n] (where n is the index of the icon on the sheet) next to the name in the dialog box. I did this for every dialog box spoken by one of the four main characters. It's a little tedious, but I used AutoHotkey to speed up the process. And I think it paid off pretty well! It's a small detail that goes a long way to remove an obstacle that might keep a player from appreciating your writing.
Keep up the good work!
Thank you very much for the feedback. The thing about not knowing who was who initially seems so obvious in retrospect but I never thought of it until you pointed it out.
I have no excuse for the proofreading, I rush a lot near the end and putting the text into the game is one of the last things I usually do.
Im hoping to put more time into polishing the game this next go round by doing more pre-production. The last few times I did most of the work in the last 2 days of the jam and im hoping to avoid that by planning better. I also have the advantage that a lot of the more basic stuff like trees and grass are already done. Unfortunately, one of my other goals is also to finally give the party sideview battlers and to make battle backgrouns. I may have doomed myself already.
I am especially happy that my love of writing came through at least. I am a huge fan of the Appendix N: Inspirational Reading from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons which is filled with a lot of pulp authors; my favorite being Micheal Moorcock. I tried my best to emulate some of the pacing you'd see in one of those pulp short stories.
Again, thank you for the feedback, and the idea to use the sideview battler heads is a good one too.
Regarding battle backgrounds, a solid black background would work as a placeholder given the asset pack you used. It’s a small effort that would have gone a long way to keep the player focused on the battle itself, rather than be distracted by the black boxes.
As for the SV battler head idea, I just want to emphasize that that’s just an alternative when there’s some reason for not showing a face. Faces are generally better because they can be more expressive. In our game, the reason we don’t add faces to dialog boxes (during VN segments) is because we already have busts and didn’t want to divide the player’s attention. There could be other reasons for not adding faces, including if you just haven’t made them yet. And there are other alternatives you could do to help identify the speaker, like a tail from the dialog box to the character (may require a plugin). Just giving you some options because the more tools you have in your toolbox, the better you can adapt to whatever challenges or limitations you have in your next game.
I know actual faces would be better, but currently don't have any made and ive never tried so i know it'd probably take a while before I can do it reliably. Im pretty new to doing any kind of art, so, while id like to do faces, I've got to keep time in mind. I REALLY want to do it, but I have making the sideview battlers as a higher priority.
Did you make the art yourself?
yep, i did use a few of the stock rpg maker assets (the treasure chests, purple minotaur, and torches) where i ran out of time, but other than that i made all the pixel art.
Edit: i forgot to add that i didnt make the enemies either that was Willibab's Mythic Monsters 1 asset pack
Did you think it was A.i.?
Absolutely an improvement from the old one. The combat got even better, and i never would have thought just adding a row system would make the game so much better. The new characters are also great, and Laura gets a medal for "most improved". Sabbathiel is probably my favorite, the widowmaker skill is so much fun to work with.
The story is more interesting as well, though i kinda wish each story got expanded. Especially the first story which had some interesting ideas that could carry a longer story. The third story seems loke its going to be continued at least, so ill reserve judgement for that.
All in all, this was a great game, and a great sequel too.