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FrailSnake51 days ago (4 edits)

Yeah, some of the stuff like Jagan being worthless is intentional. Him and Head Doctor are meant to teach the player "This isn't Undertale. Feel free to do bad things."

The general approach I took to the game's difficulty is "If you can't do it as you are now, try something else." Which is why you get that and also the ability to fight over-leveled enemies.

I'm taking note of everything else though. Especially in regards to making Abe's motivations/goals more explicit. Thank you for your time and patience.

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bashindan51 days ago

My main suggestion would be that, while I understand doing a mystery is fun, starting with what actually goes down in the facility would make it more interesting. Growing up, being experimented on, changing gradually, and the downfall of the facility, even if through fragments that become clearer and more connected going forward, would increase the allure of starting this journey. 

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FrailSnake51 days ago (3 edits)

There are flashbacks that come in later areas to explain that stuff. But so far my fixes are
- A party member who's recruitment interrogates Abe's opinion on wolves (already implemented, but Norman replaced them in the demo version for various behind the scenes reasons)

- Various optional slice of life bits in the intro, like you suggested. Like talking to the clinic doctors, or returning the library book and having Penn chime in more. Just letting the player peel back the curtain a liiitttle bit more while getting them attached to Penn before he disappears. I already had this as an idea, but your feedback helped me further refine how I'm gonna go about it more specifically.

These are things that I will 100% sort out before I do the Kickstarter demo. Thank you so much for your feedback.

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bashindan51 days ago

Being able to explore the facility as a kid would justify all the rooms to me, so that feeling of "bloat" certainly would vanish. If past actions in the rooms could be seen as results in the future, it'd make these optional quests even more rewarding, even if just a visual change, or actually a locked door having a chest now.  

Dragging the player into the world and almost immediately showing the domino effects of choices certainly would give the intro spice.

(And if you could tutorialize the skill to fight overleveled enemies through something like fighting against an adult as a child, I'm sure that gimmick/design would enter the player's strategizing much easier. I'll admit, I didn't get that's what it was supposed to be and didn't use the skill right while I played.)

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FrailSnake51 days ago (2 edits)

The enemy "levels" are weird cause I added it last minute. The way they work is that everyone is statted to die in 5~ standard hits from a same level attacker.

This doesn't factor in weaknesses of course. Like, the Papa Beers are weak to Psy (Firm Shake and whatnot), making them easy targets to stunlock to death with Jagan's only skill, which is then in turn supposed to teach players about weaknesses and stuns. But calling them "Level 5," while honest, has the potential to scare players off trying to fight them.

I put levels in the name so the player would go "These Fish Men are insanely high-levelled, and so is this boss. Maybe I should go somewhere else instead."

One of the fixes I put in per your advice was changing a bit in the self-help manual to say "If you're having trouble: try something else." Which isn't a crazy change, but I hope it'll be enough of a push to make players consider taking on other locations if they're struggling with one.

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bashindan51 days ago

A single fight is doable, I think I even beat a fish and a wolf by myself in an attempt, but then I just had no HP to endure a battle by going forward, which is how it turned out into winning a battle, going to the couch, going to the save point, then resuming going forward.  There was a bear encounter that killed me instantly, so I assume I just got critted on and didn't notice that was the case. 

Other than the Fire enemies that actually were terrible even with a few recruits, the encounters worked once I had Norman (easy to recruit) and amy (easier to recruit once Norman joined), but going from encounter to encounter is what created too much friction, since every two steps required returning a whole lot, or trying to avoid enemies as much as possible to not lose HP and have to use one of the healing items I got. If you consider the path going west from norman, theres three fish encounters, two bears and two fire sprites. Randomly finding a boss after that, with all my HP and MP on the yellow, just felt tiresome. 

Individual encounters may not be that bad with a party, but the areas feel too crowded when you're getting little to no heals and check/save points. If there was a direction I could go that had people to talk to, minigames to do to earn money, I'd try doing that happily, but every direction I headed had enemy encounters testing me, and recruitables that demanded venturing such zones to afford the recruit.

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FrailSnake51 days ago (1 edit)

The beach is meant to be this high-level area that makes the player wanna retreat to the woods or the abandoned building.

There are ways I can definitely clue the player in more to that. Like, LISA The Painful had a big sign that said "TURN BACK" for its equivalent.

Did you ever get to see the woods? The middle path down the road. I designed it with the intention of being *the* place to do easy encounters if the other locations were giving players trouble.

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bashindan51 days ago (1 edit)

I went through it, released the guy at the end and nothing more happened, didn't find any further paths, and returned to the beach. However, I played it one more time now and went around the abandoned building a bit more after recruiting Boyle too.  There's doors you go through without a path back, or going forward and backwards taking you to different rooms. I presume it's an intentional shifting dungeon kind of place? Since there's no reactions from characters or mysterious SFX when it happens, I honestly can't tell if something intentional or not happened. I also sent all my team to 1HP with the vending machine (I thought I was dealing it damage and thought I had to mash to destroy it. Again, no reaction from the character and the screen flashed blue, so it didn't respond like damage.)

My exploration was then cut short because trying to jump from the top support thing towards the top of the waterfall has Abe jump down towards the middle waterfall. The only direction I haven't gone to is over there, but I can't reach it. Also, there are two different padlock exits that lead to the same place.  After exiting through the first one once, I expected the second one would lead to a different place...


Also, down here there are some many sentry camera enemy icons, but defeating one of them deletes them all. Bug or feature?

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FrailSnake51 days ago (4 edits)

Feature. And yeah, it's a shifting dungeon. I'm considering expanding it a little for the Kickstarter demo and putting a party member inside to really sell the whole thing and what it all means.

I'll put making the vending machine damage more obvious on my list. I thought I fixed that already, but I guess I forgot to save the change.

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bashindan51 days ago

Since the setting of the world isn't very clear at this point, it's hard to judge if a shifting dungeon was possible or not.  The warnings were pretty normal too, nothing that hinted at the

It's tangential, but I remembered/thought up some things I want to ask mostly because I live off information:

1) Between the default enemy icon being a wolf, healing items being wolf meat/sandwich and the cure for lycantropy, I could get an image. Between the fish people, Mother Hydra and mentions of Dagon, I see Innsmouth, a quite different image. Papa Beer, druids, the ghost things are a third world. If we go back to Head Doctor, there's a fourth, and I'd classify Premature Burial under the same category as Papa Beer since it's a punny enemy, but the graffiti's probably a fifth.  Did you create these in a flow state and didn't mind much how congruent they were, or there is a thread I can't see?

2) Are you going for Lovecraftian or just pop culture-ish things in the overall story/setting?

3) I liked the Moth Man encounter.  Addressed, set up and paid off. A bit of a jumpscare, even, with it being out the window, and then on your face when you leave. Though it could use dropping a prophecy just to feel less like it's just using a popular name without the contents of its character.

4) I actually forgot to mention in the original post and now that I've bitched so much I feel the need to build goodwill, but I like your art. That first CG of Penn waking you up Komaeda-style was actually very cute. I don't know if you're cooking it up or didn't want to do it, but having your art for character portraits in the menu would be very appreciated (the sprites arent ugly, but your art is cuter).

5) What books do you like?

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