Lovely! Very sweet exploration of storytelling through RPG mechanics. There's a part of me that would love to see more of these characters and the way their mechanical and narrative dynamics would interact in fights where more of them are present at once, but at the same time I appreciate the swiftness of the game's pace. A lot of why I struggle to get into SRPGs is that they often contain some amount of repetition when it comes to combat, and that repetition is more palpable than other types of RPG because the pace is significantly slowed when moving several characters. Daybreak Hearts had no such issue for me; it gets in, introduces some cool ideas with engaging push and pull, and then closes them out. Great work!
i'm gonna be so honest with you, i was planning a big finale where they all came together to beat up a bunch of claws. you can actually play the scrapped prototype for that fight if you boot up the special save you can find in the Daybreak Parts folder. i ended up cutting it from the main game because none of the versions i came up with felt right and, frankly, development was taking long enough as it was. you're not the only person who wants more though, even my co-creators want to keep going. but working on this for two years has burnt me out, so, rain check.
Oh, neat! I'll probably check it out - I can imagine that sort of setup being really challenging to get right for a few reasons but especially the mechanical density of it.
And yeah, I get wanting to just Be Done With the thing too, games are pretty all-consuming to develop in general but especially when in the lead role, haha. Wishing you a well-deserved rest!