Sinathir

Raising sim / survival game inspired by Princess Maker. · By QuentinWH

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my review of the game

A topic by Princess Ally created 68 days ago Views: 143 Replies: 5

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Princess Ally68 days ago

Well, I had a review of this game through the , but apparently reviews don't let you even copy and paste and my 'token' for the review ran out of time before I finished it, and I'm not re-typing the entire thing. I guess I'm just going to paste it here, then?

I think that the idea around this game is really fun and also really well executed, and I had a lot of fun playing it, especially since I am a big fan of resource management games. So, despite the fact that I only gave this a 3 star rating and have wrote somewhat lengthy criticisms, I think it's genuinely a good game that can become great in my eyes if it's problems are fixed.

Travel:

Being completely honest, the movement in this game can be really terrible most of the time. The character is very slow for how big the map is, and sprint increases your speed so little you can only barely notice any speed increase at all and it's basically impossible to even tell if it's even on. Perks like Traveler or Sprinter or can increase your movement - and Sprinter barely even does that - but it's they are of barely any practical use otherwise, essentially wasting a perk point to solve a problem caused by bad game design. You should, at the very least, make it much faster to travel around the island, but if you want to make things like travel perks actually useful, maybe do something like segment the island into different parts. Then, at the start of the week, you can take a shortcut to any of the areas of the island, but it takes a resource like food to get to any other areas, and travel perks could lower that cost or make it entirely free to go elsewhere. Then there would be some kind of resource-management to travel which could be alleviated with perks.

Dungeons:

So far I've only done the spider cave and the two kobold dungeons, but to me every single one of them have problems. The spider cave has far too many resources, especially since med kits can be sold for 200 each at the start of the game, which can make the game entirely unbalanced since you earn so much money from just that dungeon that you never even have to work. As well, you can easily avoid all of the spiders since they never run after you. The kobold dungeon in the cave at the start railroads you into killing all of the kobolds that you didn't even know were in there as soon as you enter and then gives you a mood penalty at the end. I would suggest at least some sign or something saying it's kobold territory, and maybe a dialogue choice to quickly leave without killing the kobolds. As for the second kobold dungeon near the stranger at the bridge, I think it the most well-balanced, although with enough luck points you can some items like some guns which are several times more valuable than they should be considering the value of the other items you can get.

People:

People are also a big reason for the game seeming pretty unbalanced. There are no requirements for being able to trade with someone, and almost any item that you could craft at lower skill levels can be easily bought from trading with someone, so if you have a lot of money it can render crafting skills mostly useless at most skill levels under 10-15. As well, adults are extremely powerful in battle compared to yourself at the beginning and the other children you can recruit, and Billy can even be a follower week 1 just by picking some potatoes for him. Adults are far to powerful for that kind of thing, and it really ends up with you just having a team of adults at your side handling the entire battle while you do basically nothing, not to mention the fact that they can help you with skills you don't know yet. There are also other problems, such as Helena's healing being something that is far too overpowered and removes injuries being anything serious at all no matter how much you get hurt.

Other small nitpicks:

- The control scheme is kind of unusual for a game like this, but there is no option to change controls

- A lot of negative perks aren't actually too debilitating, making it easy to gain perk points, while some positive perks are quite overpowered, such as Psychopath

- For some reason, the perk 'Second Wind' only ever worked once for me in a single battle despite saying it's supposed to work once every battle, and for the rest of my entire playthrough it never worked again.

- Skills can often be much less useful on their own, like how having a high science ability isn't very useful if you don't have other skills to gather materials you need. This, combined with the fact that you can already buy most items you would otherwise craft with your own skills means that training skills isn't often as useful as training stats.

I still want to say that despite my criticisms, I did still have fun with the game, I just think it needs some serious reworking in some areas.

QuentinWH68 days ago(+1)

Thanks for writing such a long review. It's the more negative and critical, yet constructive posts that help the game the most. I will try to justify some of my design decisions and explain why things are the way they are.

Travel:

Big theme of the game is "progression". That's probably the best word for it. You start the game as someone who is absolutely useles in pretty much every possible way (Unless you pick perks to remove specific weakness). This includes movement.

You base movement speed is super slow and "sprinting" without the "sprinter" perk is almost a joke. However, this changes as you play the game.

Your sprint speed increases with your agility stat. The higher it is, the faster you get. On top of that, gaining all major mutations will also make you faster. Not to mention you can buy / make speed potions that also make you much faster. There is also a quest that gives you a small motorcycle that will again increase your movement speed.

I decided to make your starting speed so slow for two reasons. One is the "progression" theme, where your starting speed is incredibly low, but can get about twice as high towards the endgame. To me, this makes the game more satisfying since I can actualy see the results of my numbers getting bigger and makes the difference between starting character and endgame character much bigger. Second reason is exploration. Since the player is so slow, he will spend more time traveling through maps and thus make it harder to miss certain details. It forces the player to explore the maps more because they want to find shortcuts / optimal ways to travel.

The negative is that this lasts only for a little while. the slower movement speed will get boring and tedious towards the midgame. You already explored all the maps and found all items and shortcuts but you still move quite slow. The solution for that is the fast travel system alrady in game.

Your review makes it look like you missed the fast travel system, since it pretty much does what you suggested.

There is a board in front of your hideout and there is another one in Riverstone. Interacting with them will let you fast travel between them, but you have to pay with food every time. There is also a player waypoint system. You can create your own fast travel points from the radial menu and travel to them at any point in the game (as long as you are in an outdoor area).

All these tools make traveling much less of a chore in my opinion. You will get more fast travel waypoints as you play and combining them with other shortcuts you opened and board fast travel will let you reach pretty much all major areas very quickly. When I play, I quickly create a network of fast travel points at important locations so I can spend less time walking, I open all the rope shortcuts I can and use them too. And as I play longer, I get access to speed potions and the motorcycle, which makes traveling even faster.

Also, sprinting has one other important use. It lets you run away from chasing enemies. If you get it high enough, you can pretty much zoom past all the abominations in the caves without them catching you. Get a speed potion and the bloodstone quest becomes much easier.

Dungeons:

Right of the bat, I agree that all dungeons are horribly balanced. There is no denying it.

The first kobold "dungeon" is a relic from the extremely early days and I will be changing it completely in the future. As you said, the way it railroads you and pretty much kills you if you enter it unprepared is pretty lame. Doubly so since it is right in front of your hideout and I bet most players died to the scavenger, reloaded the game, entered the cave, died again, turned the game off and never played it again. By the way, I'm not sure if you are aware, but you can befriend the kobolds in that cave and get a companion. Don't enter it for the first few game weeks and new NPC will appear near your hideout and give you a simple quest.

Spider dungeon will get a slight rework. I will be giving it the same luck system the other kobold cave has. Loot pool of both these locations will get rebalanced to be less overpowered. One way I want to spice the spider mine is to add a few enemies with "eyes" so that dodging them and ninja looting the entire place will be slightly harder.

And same goes for the small kobold dungeon. Right now, it gives you way too many good resourcess that can be sold for quite a lot and requires pretty much no efford to go through.

People:

I find the fact that NPCs sell all the basic stuff a good thing, but the game right now is not big enough to make it really shine. The game is pretty limited right now and your max skill level is roughly 50, since there are no recipes for most skills after that. As the game gets bigger, this soft cap will get pushed up and reach roughly 500 in the final version. Right now, you can pretty much max all skills in a year, but later versions will force you pick one or two and stick with them. The fact that close to half of your skill levels are not really useful right now is a problem, but this will get naturaly solved as the game progresses.

NPC shops also shows you what the skills will do if you stick to them. The blacksmith sells tools and weapons, so naturaly you realize that you will be able to make these if you train with him. Farmer sells vegetables so you have a rough idea what the farming skill will let you produce. Inn sells some basic food so again, you have a rough idea what the cooking skill does. And (in future versions) even if you have no intention to raise some of those skills, you can still get the basic items and not be locked out of the basic content other skills offer.

Without the inn selling food, you would be forced to learn farming and cooking. It is still a good idea to learn those skills, since they will make your life much easier, but it is not mandatory if you want to just survive. Same goes for crafting, smithing, survival and so on. I want the game to alow you to "try" what these skills are about without having to commit to them from the star. The first year of the game is supposed to show you what all skills focus on and let you use some basic items from skills you don't even have yet, just so you can decide with which skill you want to stick with.

All in all, what you are saying is true. The game is rather short and having NPCs sell pretty much everything you can learn and craft is a bummer and makes those skills less useful. This will however change as I add more skill levels and recipes, all of which will be absent from NPC trade inventories and make sticking with a skill more rewarding.

Adults in battle:
I admit the combat is very unbalanced right now. Some thing are underdeveloped, some are outdated and were not touched in several versions. However, the idea of adults being strong is on purpose. Again, it's the whole "progression" thing. You start the game with 10hp and the first follower you get is an old farmer who has 250hp. It shows the contrast between you and other people and shows how weak an useless you are compared to ordinary adults who are not even trained warriors. And it makes the moment you finaly get you HP above 250 that much better. You were just a child getting bullied by overgrown chicken and kobolds and you had to rely on old huntress and a farmer to protect you. And after some time, you got stronger and you don't even need them now when you go exploring. And if you take them with you, then you are the one protecting them.

Right now, it is unbalanced in a way that you can recruit the strongest NPCs way too quickly. That's what I'm working on with the favor system. For example, Olaf will now require 30 relationship to follow you. Billy will still follow you pretty much from the start, but everyone else will take more time to persuade. On top of that, I plan to add "quirks" to all NPCs. For example, Roman will ask you for a beer after every battle and will leave you if you run out. Marcus will refuse to enter caves, Olaf will be scared of spiders and his stats will be drasticaly reduced when fighting them and so on.

Not only will this give NPCs more personality, but it will also force you to actualy pick proper people for what you have in mind instead of always taking Zach, Helena and Valdemar.

The rest:

Helena and her healing is overpowered, I agree. I will be making her healing abilities weaker but I also want to add some other mechanic to make it more interesting. Like if you make her heal you too often, she will get upset or maybe she will feel weak the next day and won't follow you.

Sadly, control scheme is not something that I can easily change. RPGMXP is really old and limited in many ways and the only way to change controls right now is by pressing F1 while in game. And even then the options there are fairly limited. I will be working on improved control scheme and even rebindable keys at some point. But the controls right now are not so bad once you get used to them. The entire game can be controled pretty much by one hand if you have full sized keyboard (Arrows for movement, enter for confirm, num 0 for back, PGup/PGdown for menu navigation and other actions and shift for some other actions. All nicely together).

Perks are not very balanced and will get more attention for sure. As you said, some are free points. However, psychopath is not that great in the long run. Without it, the negatives you get for killing humanoids or abominations will turn into bonuses as time goes on so your mood will actualy increase when you fight. With psychopath trait, you will always stay at 0 mood bonuses.

You are right. Second wind was bugged. I fixed it for the next version.

Skills being less useful is something I talked about above. Just want to add that I will be adding more uses to skills so they are not just a recipe gates.

I'm really happy that you played the game and liked it enough to write all these observations and suggestions. Don't be afraid to write again if you have any more suggestions or bugs. I will definitely read them.

Thanks.

Princess Ally67 days ago (3 edits)

Thank you for responding, and so quickly at that! Sorry if my review felt overly negative, but I've never really been able to pinpoint what positive aspects I see about some games, so with reviews I usually just give criticisms while still saying I liked it. I should have given it higher than 3 stars though since most of the issues stem from it just being in early development (which I did change my review to 4 stars now, btw). I have actually played the game quite a bit, but I kind of have a weird habit of mostly just replaying the start of games like this a lot, so I haven't actually gotten further than the 4th week despite probably having around 20 hours in it, so that's why I haven't seen some of the later content.

Anyways, sorry If I make these too long, but I wanted to respond to some of the things you said as well as give some of my own ideas if you don't mind.

Travel:

I somehow completely forgot to mention fast travel in my review, but I didn't really like it overall. I really like practicality in my games, so spending 2 food every time I fast travel when I could just (slowly) walk there basically just means I wont use it at all and even if I do I will feel very annoyed about it. Also, some places, such as the alchemist's cabin, still take quite a while to travel to even with the fast travel. Since there isn't any resource management issues related to movement or time limits, I don't really see any reason for fast travel to cost anything when using it. If you really want to limit fast travel, maybe just make you only able to use it after having discovered the area for at least 5 weeks or something. As a final minor nitpick, it's sometimes quite annoying that it only unlocks after interacting with the sign rather than something like it unlocking when you first arrive at the area, since even when I did want to use it I realized I'd forgotten to interact with the sign and couldn't travel things.

As for things like actual run speed, I guess it would probably be more manageable if fast travel was better, especially since with 'scheduling' you wont need to walk all the way to meet someone if you want to train with them. However, there is also the issue of random events, which you need to explore the entire island for every week to find them. Though, also, I think that could be easily remedied if you made a chat option with people for 'recent events' or something, and they'll tell you clues to where the random events would be so you don't have to scour the entire island for them. For other uses of running, like running for enemies, I still think that the sprint perk needs to be much faster to be actually useful, and there really aren't too many times where being able to run fast would be incredibly helpful in dealing with those situations, so I guess you need to add more hard enemies that guard things or similar situations if you want it to actually be useful.

Dungeons:

You seem to still be working on dungeons so not much else to say about them. I have noticed that there aren't anything like traps or such in the current dungeons, though, so maybe add a few?

People:

I still think you shouldn't be able to recruit billy on the first day, to be honest. I think that the sense of progression should have some amount of time where the enemies feel way to harsh for you - then, you are able to get some help from the adults and are able to slowly progress your character while they do most of the fighting. However, eventually, you will need to build up your character more and the adults should start to feel like a crutch. I think a situation like this would be best:

The first few weeks, you should only be able to recruit the kids, and adults won't help you with any of the enemies. This makes it so the only enemy you can really handle at the start are the chickens. However, maybe some subtle or not-so-subtle hints will tell you that adults will be a big help if you manage to get their relationship up, and so once you do you get a big boost to your combat power. The player character is still weak, but you can start taking on bigger threats and actually earning some weapon XP with the help of the adults (coincidentally at the time where you probably have enough money to have a lot more choice in what weapon you want to use, so you wont feel as locked into a certain weapon type). However, perhaps the adults can't help you every day, or start to help you out less, or maybe what you have to pay to get their help becomes too expensive, so that even though it felt nice to have their help at the start, over-reliance on them becomes unpractical, pushing you to begin working more on getting your character stronger. I also think it would be nice if you can also train the other children to become stronger, and they might become something of a more reliable party you can use much more consistently than the adults but will require some investment to get them as powerful as you are.

Currently, the situation with adults feel more like you are just collecting adults like pokemon to use while the player character sits back and tries not to die so you don't lose wellness (which, by the way, wasn't very obvious was happening, maybe make something like "-3 wellness" appear over your character when you die). This is pretty bad for early game, and something like becoming so powerful that you don't need adults feels unrealistic since you are a child, unless you want to spend half of the game relying on adults.

The only other comment I have about people is that I think shops should be unlocked later or only after getting a lot of favor with someone. Even if it's nice to be able to access some things from paths you didn't go down I think it sort of ruins the progression feeling at the beginning of the game if you can just buy all of the things you can currently make, especially since skills take so long to train.

Other:

-Winning a battle gives XP to both weapon skills of the weapons you have equipped, while dealing damage gives XP to only one of them. When winning a battle, if you gained 27 XP to both weapons, it only counts as 27 XP towards the cap, while if you did 27 XP worth of damage that extra XP will only go to one weapon type while still adding 27XP to the cap, which counterintuitively makes not doing any damage in battles the best way to gain XP, since you train both weapons at once.

-There is no way to retrieve a rope after putting it down, which can be kind of annoying if you don't know where to get another rope after your first one *cough cough (me)

-Alchemy was kind of confusing when I tried it, but as far as I can tell there's no good way of doing something like increasing your wellness or integrity through it, which I kind of though was one of the main points of being an alchemist? I feel like it would fit, at least, since the only other way is by being a really good cook but you can only eat once a day (or twice with perks).

-There is a graphical glitch (which you are probably already aware of) where when you walk behind something like the top of a hill the character's feet will pop up from under the tile you are walking under which can look a little weird

-The current version of scheduling crashes your game on the first week, though you also probably already knew about that

Anyways, thank you for reading my comments! I'm not sure exactly how helpful my suggestions will be, but I did really like the game so I guess I just wanted to write about it some.

QuentinWH67 days ago (2 edits)

No problem at all. Negative reviews that areconstructive and not just "your game bad" are good. They make me think about the game game more and help me make it better. Positive comments are nice too, but they don't help as much since they are usualy shorter and less in depth. They make me feel happy though and that counts.

Fast travel costs food because I wanted to limit it at the start of the game so that new players have to explore the early maps a bit before they just teleport everywhere, so the way you feel about it is intentional. This goes away however once progress in the game and food stops becoming an issue. You will think twice about teleporting if you have only 10 food left, but not think about the cost at all once you have 300 food. I usualy put a custom travel point in the swamp to make getting there faster. Unlocking the signpost when you enter the village is a good idea, since I also forget to unlock it from time to time.

The random events are a whole new topic that bleeds into other parts of the game. The game has a real problem with the amount of stuff you can do each week, which makes playtime baloon out of control if you decide to play optimaly. I fixed it partialy with the activity limits, but there is still more I could do. The hints for these events you talked about were in the game at one point, but I removed them for some reason. I will work on them again and see how it works out. By the way, the event locations are not random. They cycle each week in a pattern. As you play, you will memorise this pattern and be able to find the event quickly.

Sprinting perk is there to give you a head start and while it technicaly becomes useless in the late game, since you will reach the top speed by other means even without the perk, it makes early game faster and more pleasant. Sprinting has only two purposes. Travel faster and avoid enemies. It fulfils the first purpose nicely, but fails at the second one a bit since there are not enough enemies around and because you always have a full party with you so you don't have a reason to run away in most cases. Besides, there is a way to reset your perks later in the game so you are not really stuck with bad perks forever.

Traps for dungeons are something I will be adding for sure.

Billy is really stong compared to you, but he is still one of the weakest companions you can get. Abominations in the caves will destroy him and stronger enemis like wild pigs and the bear will also beat him up. There will be some limitations to NPC recruitment, some NPCs will refuse to follow you at certain times because they have other things to do for example, and some NPCs will leave after certain amount of fights. I want to make Billy weaker in that kind of way instead of just lowering his stats. He will still help you and he will still be rather strong, but you won't be able to clear the entire map with him right at the start. But I still want Billy to follow you pretty much right from the start just so you can see how weak you are without him and how strong you got once you can start exploring alone.

Kids are the only NPCs (except for Billy) that follow you right from the start. They are also the only NPCs that actualy get stronger over time. The way this is done is not great, but the idea is there. Their stats get higher by simply passing time and you have no inpunt on their stat growth. I would like to change that at some point.

Seeing wellness loss is something I will be adding. Wellness as a whole is still not very well explained or shown to the player and needs more work in that department.

Shops getting unlocked later is also an option and I think I will be doing that for some of the NPCs. This a problem though mainly because the games economy is borked. Once I get it in the shape, it will work fine. You won't be able to buy everything from the start since you won't have enough money to do that.

It is possible that battle XP is bugged, but it "should" work slightly differently from what you said. If you hit an enemy, the amount of damage you dealt gets directly transfered to that weapon XP bar, 1:1. If NPC hits the enemy, you get XP to both equiped weapon types, but the amount is 1:10, meaning you get much less XP from a single fight if you don't deal any damage. The fact that it doesn't count the second weapon skill gain towards the cap is a bug and will get fixed. The reson this works like it does is so even weak characters who can't even hit anything can still progress their skills a little, but actualy going out alone and killing things by your self should still be much more rewarding and faster. Billy is strong and kills most overworld threats without problem, but you still gain less XP when you have him kill everything, so you still want to get strong and stop relying on him, just so you can kill the enemies your self and get more XP.

Alchemy is not in ideal spot. The UI is pretty bad for one and the recipes you can get are not that useful for the most part. It has some nice things, like addiction removal potion, speed potions and mutagens, but it needs more. Wellness potion would be a good addition. Another way to raise wellness is exercising in your hideout.

Graphics as a whole are still placeholders so I don't bother much with fixing minor glitches like that because I will be reworking them at a certain point in the future. I already made original graphics for some dungeons though.

Scheduling in 0.38.3 has some issues. I fixed them for the full release. Previous versions should work normaly though.

EDIT.: I downloaded the 0.38.3 version and scheduling didn't crash for me. Could you please tell me more about that crash? Did you skip the tutorial? can you post a picture of the schedule that crashed the game and a image of the error code?

Again, thanks for writing all this.

Princess Ally67 days ago (1 edit)

Huh. It used to happen consistently across multiple different starts I had, but for some reason it doesn't crash now on the first day, no matter what schedule I seem to make. I wish I had taken a picture of the error image when it did crash those few times, but whatever.

I did, however, find another glitch where, if at the start of the game (if you skipped the intro/tutorial), you leave camp and then immediately come back before the message that your character says at the start of the day, it lags a bunch and then your character freezes where you can't do anything. It's a minor glitch compared to the one that causes the game to crash, but I still can't figure out what caused that one, so whatever.

QuentinWH67 days ago

I found the starting glitch few days ago and fixed it. Thanks for reporting it though.

As for the schedule crash, I fixed some crashes some time ago, but I want to make sure the one you were having is not something different. If encounter it again, then please report it.

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Sinathir

my review of the game