Post by Arcanestomper in Learning Curve comments

Viewing post in Learning Curve comments

Alright after defeating the world tree sapling I have a few comments.

1. A lot of the time in combat I ended up defending in order to regain stamina. That would be fine until I got more than two actions. At which point I had to press defend a whole bunch of times and you only get stamina once per turn. That was a lot of unnecessary button presses. It would be good if there was a skill to regain stamina or a way to just defend and pass the entire turn.

2. In a similar vein spamming the buttons to do an action multiple times was painful. I mean literally painful. My hand hurts now. Some of the actions defaulted to the same button, like chopping menar wood, and even that was rough. But the ones where it exited the menu and you had to go back were even worse. And the ones where you had to navigate to a specific dialogue option were just terrible.

This was why the clock option to skip a loop was useless. Having to scroll down to the required choice each time, and read the time dialogue, and get back and scroll again, 15 times. Was just too much time and work. It was legitimately faster to just run down to the specific activity.

Let the clock just spend all 15 actions on the same action. There's almost no reason you'll want to train different actions in the same loop if you're doing the clock skip. Also let the classes be really impactful. They didn't seem to offer much training.

3. Some of the actions had a little bit of dialogue when you got to the point where they no longer offered training. Given the button spamming nature of it I missed most of these as they flashed up on the screen. Please have them repeat both so people can read them if they miss them. And so they don't waste time if they come back to the action later and forget they already finished it.

4. Some method of seeing how much experience we have in each skill would be nice. I've seen that sort of thing in rpg maker before so I'm pretty sure there's a plugin for it.

All that said I liked it. I think you have a good basis for a game here. I'm looking forward to your updates.

BCBCC9 days ago

Thanks for playing and thanks for your feedback - I'll address what I can here.

1) A skill to regain stamina is a good idea... ;)

2) Sorry about your hand. If there are specific interactions that are very annoying, please let me know via the bug report link. I'm terms of the overall grindiness of the game, I understand not everyone likes it but grindiness is the point, not an unfortunate side effect. I'm definitely willing to add or alter some quality of life improvements such as the clock time skip, but it's still going to be grindy.

3) This is also something I've been eliciting specific feedback on so I can try to make changes. I think I can add a forced time (that is, you can't immediately skip) to the training cap messages, I think that would help.

4) You can see what level the skill is (menu - items - skills), but I'm intentionally not showing you how close you are to the next level. I don't know how other RPGmaker games do things, my skill system is my own cobbled together mess. Again I know how I could share more detail, but at least for now I've chosen not to.

Arcanestomper9 days ago (1 edit)

There are too many painful points to list them all. If you absolutely insist that the player need to do it manually, then at least give each skill its own dedicated training spot.

I will list four examples.

First the menar tree that you can't cut down. This is good because you can just spam the action key. There's no unnecessary dialogue. You don't stop training until you want to.

Second the crystal ball in the reliquary. It has two options, mana control and starsight. You can't spam the action button if you want to do starsight because it defaults to mana control. So you have to navigate the menu and push enter each time. Which takes longer even if you do it right, and if you do it wrong, well that's a wasted action.

Third reading the books in the office. You select the book from the list, and then it takes you to a continue or leave menu instead of back to the full book list. This lets you spam the action button. This is much better. If you're going to have spots that can train more than one thing do it like this please.

Fourth woodworking with menar wood. Mr. Harris exclaims "Where did you get that!" and then pauses every single time before it gets to the menu to actually do something. There is admittedly not a lot of menar wood so you can't really spam it. But you can still do it several times in a loop so it gets annoying. It's also weird. Why is he questioning me about Menar wood when he literally just said that. Maybe only have him do it the first time each loop.

In summary, I don't mind the grind so much as all the unnecessary button presses and waiting. Lets us just mash the action key if we want to train something. Training the different magic things is also painful because even though you can just hit the action button it has several lines of dialogue each time.

BCBCC9 days ago(+1)

Totally makes sense, thanks for giving specific examples, I can try to improve those. If you use the bug report form it makes it less likely that I'll forget about it.

ccx24 days ago

A lot of it would be alleviated if the game would remember where the cursor was in a fight/dialog menu. This would allow, for example, spamming Starsight in the church, make the clock more useful, combat training less of a pain...

There should be a RPG Maker plugin for that, too.

Also, different actions should give different experience levels. Sure, I can train blacksmithing twice in the academy, or I can do it 60+ times at the blacksmith and get 30 times as much experience.

BCBCC3 days ago

As you said, this is an RPGmaker limitation - I haven't seen a plugin for that specifically and I'm not sure if it's possible.

As for different actions giving different amounts of experience, they do! Taking a class in the academy spends more time and also gives you more experience than a single action of training it yourself that takes 1 unit of time. More differentiation will happen in future updates (e.g. new things you can craft but you have to learn at the academy)

itch.io

Viewing post in Learning Curve comments