enjoyed playing this a lot, it's simple but effective and really polished
the visuals and audio are perfect, and gameplay feels responsive and satisfying
i didn't get to finish it (i can't figure out how to read the note in the basement and get past the locked gate), but even without seeing the ending it was a pleasurable experience
Hi! Thanks so much for trying it out!
So the note in the basement of the school is not necessary to complete the game but it DOES lead you to a key that unlocks the very door you couldn’t get past. Because of this bug, lemme give you a hint:
Search the Principal’s Office in the school (same for anyone else who encounters this – it will be fixed after the jam judging is over!).
thank you, that worked!
some other small things i forgot to note, thank you for including wasd + space as an option for movement (i have hand issues so using arrow keys + z is awkward for me)
and i know you used your own previously made assets, but good on you for editing the ui as well, i don't see that often and it's such a small edit that brings the whole thing together, even when it's just color shifted to match the palette
Thanks for the follow-up! I’m so glad you were able to progress. Did you finish? Both endings?
Thank you for the note about the UI. We weren’t able to make our custom menu all that relevant for this particular game but it was fun to try and do something different. Thanks to Manuel, we were able to find a plugin that worked for us and make some other small changes to the start screen, etc. That was all his area.
You may know this but so far the only theme I have that includes UI, which is really just a reskin of the default RPGMMZ UI assets, is the Retro Dead City theme. I think I should probably add similar assets to the other two themes I sell, right? A while back, a lot of asset sellers started doing UI elements all at once so it seems like something we might have collectively overlooked but that helps new creators immensely!
i read in previous comments that currently you get the same text for both endings so i didn't know which one i got to go back for the other, because i forgot to count how many memories i found
i may try again after the jam when you update
the ui turned out pretty good considering you had a time limit and i don't know what your vision would've been otherwise to compare it to! i think adding reskins into the packs is an easy enough thing to do and would at least let the new creators know that changing the ui is something you can do if they haven't thought about it, might prompt them to do something even more custom
ui is kinda neglected in game making in general so whenever i see any thought put into it at all, i immediately respect the work more
good luck on your things in general !
Hi again! For clarity, in case anyone is not sure what ending they’ve got and doesn’t mind spoilers, I’ll include here (deep in our convo ahahaha) a little guidance.
**SPOILER WARNING for anyone reading this who has not played through the game and wants it to be spoiler-free when they do! **
The four flashbacks are: 1 in school, 1 in diner, 1 on roof of gas station, and 1 in the house. If you’ve seen flashbacks in all 4 of these locations, there is a particular ending you get. Most would call it the “good” ending. The other ending occurs if you have missed 1 or more flashbacks and most would think of it as a “bad” ending. Haha.
There is one additional secret in the game, a bunker you can access, but it’s got nothing to do w/ the ending or flashbacks.
Good points btw about the UI and the benefits of incl. that as part of general asset packs. For Dead City, we did want to make more use of the custom item menu and generally have a more point+click approach to items in the game itself. Didn’t really feel necessary in the end so we cut it down to what is there.
You are absolutely right that UI/X is underrated as a part of game design. Totally true. I think a big part of the problem is that UI is different from UX (this is poorly understood) and UI artists often are specialists at a particular kind of artistic expression/utility that doesn’t necessarily overlap w/ other forms of game art. And is often less fun for those of us who like drawing creatures, characters, etc. Then UX itself isn’t necessarily part of the expertise of a UI artist so there’s a lot of collaboration that has to be done (or one genius who gets it right and has a vision). At least that’s my take on it.
BUT pixel art actually does overlap beautifully w/ UI art and I think that somehow occurred to a bunch of asset sellers like me all at once a while ago and they all started adding it in.
Where I kinda fall in this is that I was challenged/asked (haha) to make RDC a pack that includes all the elements someone would need to start making an RPGmaker game (sprites, portraits, tiles, battlers and UI) w/o having to buy multiple packs or wait for me to get around to doing more extensive UI stuff.
So I did that and it was fairly painless, espec. if just a reskin, and now I am seeing, partly thanks to feedback like yours, that even if it is a separate pack, it ought to be a thing in every theme I do. So that means UI reskins for RCC and NR will be added eventually or rolled into existing packs.
Anyways. Thanks so much for your time and support. Good luck to you as well!
