Post by A Friendly Irin in Big Blade comments

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The beginning of the game is very unclear and unintuitive. Cirrus says to make potions before heading out, but we don't start with any ingredients.

I tried to fight the closest monster, which was a Shelby. I exhausted all my MP trying to kill it and couldn't. Then I tried to fight a Gelly Fish and died even faster. Then I tried to fight an Alacrabster, which I also couldn't kill despite exhausting all my MP. I tried again using Meditate to recover my MP, got lucky with it wasting most of its turns dancing, and just barely won. Then I tried fighting a Gelly Fish with a Crystal Cloak and Soul Balm, but still died. Grabbed some yellow flowers to make a medium potion, which allowed me to just barely eke out a win... and I got no drops. It took two more kills to get the Gelly Brains I needed to upgrade my sword. Then I tried to kill an Emberwing, failed, tried to kill a Shelby, failed, tried to kill a Shelby again, and succeeded after using up all my potions only to discover I couldn't use its drops for anything. This was a very frustrating experience. The game would benefit from a tutorial section and a clear indicator of monster strength, especially since you can't flee battles.

It's odd that you can just sneak around enemies to grab endgame-tier resources right off the bat. I assume that won't be the case in the final version.

RNG is really painful in this. Enemy attacks usually take off between a quarter to a third of your health, so a single miss can completely shift the tide of battle. I also found myself frequently wasting my buff items, either because enemies used the wrong type of attack while I had defensive buffs or because I missed my attack while I had an attack buff. If enemies had a consistent attack pattern I could use them more intelligently, but as it is, using my hard-won resources feels like a crapshoot.

Plexicrafts285 days ago

First off, thanks a ton for playing this and giving such great feedback again Irin. I always appreciate the detail you go into :)

I definitely agree the game would benefit from a tutorial section. I’ll likely add that you should look for some white flowers to make said potions. I was hoping since so little is in the game currently, it would be easily found out with some experimentation but I can see it being frustrating.

(You should be able to escape from every battle in the game by hitting “cancel” when first entering a fight then selecting “escape”).

I agree it’s odd you can kinda scoop up late game resources essentially for free, I may make this a bit harder to do with monsters that chase or block off paths but I kinda like that if you just let em be, you can explore anywhere really so I haven’t decided the best way yet (potentially granting the recipes that use them when a certain monster is killed on each tier for example).

RNG and misses in general definitely suck especially when it’s a 1v1 fight, I’ll likely further tune evasion / hit rate and make player buffs last 5 turns to mitigate that potential to waste turns and resources.
A consistent attack pattern is definitely something I’m thinking through, it just didn’t make the build in the time I gave myself for it. Still thinking through how complex it should be.

I had actually devoted about a quarter of my total time to playtesting but the next time I do a challenge like this, I may do an even small scoped idea and just test more.

Thanks for slogging through, did you manage to make any armor or beat any further monster?

A Friendly Irin285 days ago

I stopped playing after beating the Shelby. I only managed to make the two basic armors.

(You should be able to escape from every battle in the game by hitting “cancel” when first entering a fight then selecting “escape”).

Oh right, I forgot that's standard for RPG Maker. It's not very intuitive though. It would probably be wise to include some control instructions, on the game page if not in the game itself.

By the way, are you planning on adding additional party members? I was unclear how I was supposed to use a Bell Salve when sleep locks my only character.

Plexicrafts285 days ago

Good catch on the Bell Salve, it's sort of a red herring atm since you only have one character. I may keep it as one and change sleep or add more but I'm not sure atm.

Also... there was a bug that prevented you from being able to make helmets which would have smoothed progression out a bit (and make some monster drops less useless).

I just pushed that build now.

Currently play testing more and I think the smaller monsters probably need their HP cut in half and it'll be smoother over all.

itch.io

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