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Return to the golden age of RPGs

A topic by Kovari Legends created May 10, 2023 Views: 251 Replies: 8

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Return to the nostalgic golden age of RPGs in Kovari Legends where finding magical Firanite and mastering Sword Techniques is as important as exploring the massive gameworld, solving puzzles, and collecting and combining items.

Demo of Kovari Forest is now live on itch! Explore the forest, find treasure chests and herbs, optimize your Firanite, memorize your Sword Techniques, and engage in multiple battles on your way to finding Paul.

Kovari Legends is a classic JRPG, with plenty of action elements, and NON-random battles of turn-based combat. There is a massive beautiful low-poly isometric game world to explore; with plenty of treasures, NPC’s, enemies, puzzles, and other secrets! The party has customizable gear and magic, as well as class specific abilities to learn. There are plenty of consumables to find, buy, AND create, tools to equip, books to collect, and maps to explore (and stamp!) Enemies appear in the game world, and when battle begins, they will use their strength, magic, and advanced AI to attempt to terminate your party! The story is an epic adventure based on THREE novels that has everything from kings to mages, love to betrayal, heroic feats to mass murder. And lastly, the music. Is it even an RPG without a thoughtful, beautiful, and epic soundtrack?

No Time To PlayModerator357 days ago

Sounds great, but don't you have a screenshot for your post like the rules say?

Kovari Legends357 days ago

Thank you so much for pointing that out! I don't know how I missed that!

Hugues Ross357 days ago (1 edit)

I ran into a softlock during a fight, while I was messing around with the various skills. This happened after casting the ice spell… it’s not a 100% repro though, as it didn’t happen the first time:

I also have some crits, but I don’t critique other people’s work without permission. If you’re interested in hearing that, let me know.

Kovari Legends357 days ago

I'm looking into it now. I'm assuming it was Ice I with Reagan, but then her turn never ended...
And yeah, I'm def interested in any feedback and critiques!

Hugues Ross357 days ago

Yeah, that describes what happened to me pretty well! I’ll try to write up some more general feedback a little later

Kovari Legends353 days ago

By the way, I'm pretty sure I narrowed down to something with disabling the mouse on a WebGL build (although I could not reproduce it either, and have never had this on the PC build). Unity's handling of the mouse in UI (for this game the pause and battle menus) has some very "unintended" side effects. The default is to disable the mouse completely, which works perfectly fine on the PC build, but seems to NOT work perfectly fine on the WebGL build. I may look for a work around for this, but the important thing is that the final build on Steam does NOT have this issue :)

Hugues Ross354 days ago

Sorry about the long delay, I had some stuff come up and completely forgot to check back in…

So, some thoughts from the demo:

Initially I had a bunch of critique about the lack of prompts, controls, etc in the game. Then I noticed that there’s a manual so now here’s just this one crit instead: It’s too much. I’m assuming that this is just because it’s a demo, and the final game will space out the mechanics, but 25 pages of instructions is a daunting proposition for any new player. That doesn’t mean you have to simplify the game, just that you have to keep that in mind and be careful with how you present what’s there.
Movement feels off right now for two reasons–first, it’s just too slow. It feels like I have to hold down a direction and wait for a long time before I really get anywhere, and in a genre that has increasingly moved towards ‘run is on by default’ I think you could do with just letting the player move at ‘sprint speed’ all the time. But there’s a second factor that I think is more subtle, and it’s the momentum. Movement feels slower because the player takes a second or so to get up to speed, and it feels slightly slippery when trying to turn or stop for the same reason as well. I think you could probably remove that entirely, and maybe repurpose it for an icy area later.
The area you start out in has really poor value contrast, which imo makes it a little tough to see where you can walk. Judging by the trailer it might just be that area, but I think if you better visually differentiate ‘layers’ of ground it could help a lot. To show what I mean, here’s a quick color edit I did of a screenshot:
I feel like right now, the character art is falling into the uncanny valley. I’m still not very good at analyzing these kinds of things, but my best guess is that it’s the level of detail on the faces. You’ve got something that feels kinda halfway between a chibi anime look and a more realistic (but still stylized) human design, and I think pushing more towards either end would help alleviate that.

Hope that isn’t too much, and the feedback helps!

Kovari Legends353 days ago

First, wow, thank you for taking the time to provide detailed feedback, (you are literally the first person that has provided ANY feedback, so this is GREATLY appreciated!!)

"Too much": This makes total sense. In the "actual" game, you would start with basically none of these mechanics (Level 1), and slowly add them / build up. In the demo, the player(s) are Level 54, so they already have higher magic, timed attacks, sword techniques, and items to combine / make tea. It initially made sense to me to make the demo at ~Level 50 (out of 100) so I could show all of the mechanics that exist (and that they are functioning.) I guess while I was writing the manual and walkthrough, and it got to 56 pages, that should have been a clue! In the "actual" demo (Steam, website) there are 5 areas, and the mechanics build slightly, but it is still a lot. I think I should make a demo that is closer to the beginning of the game, and only introduce a few "advanced / high level" mechanics. What are your thoughts on this?
Movement: Yes, yes, and yes. I have gone back and forth a ton on this. I have increased the speed a lot from it's initial value, and maybe need to do more! The momentum is trickier. I also "feel" what you are saying, but there is actually no code that is specifically doing that. It may be the "camera follow" code, or just the physics I am using for the controls, but I will definitely make changes so they are more "tight / crisp / responsive". I also feel like the camera lag (which is somewhat purposeful for a "theater" type affect) should be changed so it stays "tighter" on the character...
Area color palette: You are correct for this area. Unfortunately itch's file size limitation meant I could only upload one area (instead of all 5 in the actual demo). This forest was meant to be "dark, harder to see / "low contrast", compared to the village, swamp, and grove. (The dungeon is even lower contrast!) I basically tried to make "dark forest" so it contrasted with "bright non-forest", but choosing this for the ONE area on itch was not the best choice. Also, in future forest's, I'll make the color palette have more contrast so the effect is not SO drastic. I'm glad you brought this one up, because it was def something I was really unsure about!
Character style / face: All I can say is, "I know". Starting this (huge) project as a solo developer, I knew there was always going to be finite time for every aspect. I also knew I am BY FAR no artist, and do not have much artistic ability! When it was time for character design, I spent as much time as I could on the low-poly body, and of course the faces. I know in a the character-driven RPG genre, this is VERY important. But I probably just lack the artistic skill to make them have more "detail" and "character". As I work towards releasing my first chapter, I will continue to refine the character face details and try to make them better :)

Overall, thank you so much for playing AND taking the time to provide all of this feedback!!

-Mike