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TheRepeat80 days ago

stream of consciousness thoughts:

  • immediately enjoying the title screen. high quality
  • playing on normal mode
  • lots of spelling/grammar mistakes here. "An assesination attemp? ... This is unaceptable!"
  • The note the assassin had on him is hilarious. "Kill the governor. Cause chaos. Run away." Like it's a grocery list lol
  • Trevor Simons? Is this an isekai?
  • Weird issue, but something's going on with the conversation backlog. It runs at double speed for some reason. 2 things are rendering it it seems
  • music doesn't loop :(
  • walk maps! with recruitment choices! very cool
  • aoe stuff!! :D Sick healing staff
  • the map command menu is super cool
  • found the hidden gold in the cave
  • sucks that once you pick your 8th unit the map immediately ends without you getting to see their items/shop for them
  • went with Julius (general) Moore (bishop) Sierra (wyvern) Agnim (necromancer) Jean (mage knt) Albert (serpent knt) and Yua (free knt). spent a good half hour exploring the town. pretty neat
  • takes several turns just to get to the combat... do not like this
  • draw back+canto is pretty buggy
  • rocknroll's animation is cool
  • the silver lance sprite is HILARIOUS it's amazing to see Yua running across the screen carrying that giant thing
  • agnim doesn't count as a spellcaster so the mage-effective bow isn't good against him, strange
  • I am so grateful you have my player-only-battle plugin, it's so nice :) plus my warning markers plugin!
  • jean is pretty much soloing the north side with staff help from trevor
  • yua and moore are dead weight. should've brought better units. moore's supposed "support role" is nonexistent and yua's stats are bad. 
  • moore gets a big aoe healing staff (never need to heal that many units at once) and a sleep staff with fixed 46% accuracy. It missed almost every single time, but even if it didn't, it still wouldn't have been that good. sure the sleep is permanent but it only lasts for 1 attack, so it's not even great for whaling on the final boss. Maybe if it was a giant aoe SLEEP staff instead of healing it'd be alright
  • yua's pretty decent one on one but enemies only come in huge clumps with overlapping ranges and a variety of weapons so she can't contribute at all without dying
  • is there a fucking amogus made by the forest in the northwest
  • supposedly sierra is a basic class but she can't use the Class Badge? who can I use this on
  • the change in map music after defeating amos is welcome
  • the victory conditions didn't update after beating amos
  • whoolllllle lotta walking once the monsters are in the picture
  • vampire lord sprite is pretty sweet
  • why did you bother making weapons like, "effective armor" and "effective machine" if those enemy types never appear
  • attacking the final boss gave me an error, "unable to allocate enough memory to play audio". It didn't crash but might wanna look into that
  • I had trevor on the wrong side of the map with the light sword but eventually I was able to shove/swap/draw back him south to the boss, where he 2 shot him.
  • rip to yua and julius, didn't reset for em
  • having speeches from each unit you picked is a nice touch
  • a ton of bad guys spawned pretty much right on top of trevor tho. not a nice touch
  • mainly i'm just pretty bummed this is still going. REALLY wanted it to be over after the dark mage guy, this is sooo long
  • the nuclear staff is garbage wtf? mag+1 healing to units within 7 tiles? THIS is a boss drop?
  • the memory error is popping up all the time now, like on phase change, on any attack, etc. thinking I'm going to drop this soon.
  • yeah shockingly one of the many enemies that spawned on top of trevor got to kill him and I game overed. I'm gonna call it here. Final playtime just over an hour and a half

Closing thoughts:

The noncombat concepts of this game are pretty sweet. First you go around the city, learning about goings-on and its people, and select your small team from a diverse selection of units. The selection you have of weapons and items is pretty awesome. Most affect your stats and many have special effectiveness. I love when an srpg has a diverse arsenal and this game delivers. There's also a dense amount of detail on each unit, since all of them have several skills and several weapon types. The exploration phase at the start of the game where you build your team is the best part.

The actual gameplay is not as good. Frankly, I did not like anything about it. Huge clumps of enemies charge headfirst at you, starting dozens of tiles away from yours and leading to several turns of downtime. Your bulkiest units are able to tank and kill them all despite their weapon types not being homogenized; an effective weapon or two might make you play a little slower, but for the most part someone like Julius or Jean can take on entire squads by themselves with a shield and a strong weapon. And thank god they can, because the alternative would be a fighting retreat where you pick off 1-2 enemies at a time and take five times as long. Not to say the juggernauting strat is FAST - the pacing is excruciating.

By the time I killed Amos I was ready for the map to please end, only for another, monster-focused phase to start. Again they start really far away, and you have to kill another boss. This boss is extremely annoying, with nosferatu, a chance-based skill to negate counters, and insane bulk. If there weren't a monster-effective sword some random enemy dropped that Trevor could use, I would've been softlocked against this guy. So I killed that boss and imagine my surprise when a third wave starts. This time the enemies spawned right on top of Trevor, whose action wasn't refreshed, and he was promptly killed and game-overed. Between the slow pace and the frequent bugs (error messages popping up any time the song would change), I called it quits there. Hopefully that was the last wave so I didn't miss much.

The passion in this project is clearly in the worldbuilding and the team customization. It's genuinely interesting thinking about what team to bring and what weapons and items to buy. It's a shame that I did not click with the gameplay at all. The player's toolset in this game would be much more interesting in a smaller, tighter game.

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Shanks MudFish73 days ago

First of all, thank you for playing my incomplete submission, second: Stream of instant responses.

-I asked a friend to make the title, so it´s on him.

-I mean it´s the same

-Yes, my time management made me do the texts on the game editor itself and as a not native speaker at 2 am, it wasn´t easy to spot the typos there (but tbh some are on me: sometimes wrote “Trusth”).

-Yeah, I have never got the instructions to kill someone, yet.

-I mean I tried to make I more like a Castlevannia style of names (Literally Julius Cruz is a mix between Julius Belmont and Soma Cruz), I understand that maybe is a bit dissonant for “fire emblemish” characters to have surnames, but giving them castlevannia names or elver´s existence was my attempt to make the players that they feel that this country has different ruleset than your average FE, like a monster can contribute to society, but those cases are not the rule, but the exception, but tbh I think that I haven´t deepened in that part.

-Mmm, I used to have the automatic conversation plugin, but it ended up making more problems than anything, so I erased it. Maybe it is still there.

-The music problem is something that I didn´t expected because on my tests the music was looping alright, maybe I will have to upload it again.

-Question: Did you feel that the walking speed was maybe a bit slow?

-It´s a shame that the game freezes when the enemies have it.

-I will try to correct the “Por usar:” and maybe erase the “Unidades” one

-Praise the kaga.

-Yeah, it was on of my first fixes: when you have the 7th recruit, a magic soldier will appear that will ask you if you want to end the map. (Tbh my laziness was the main reason: Because I would have to make alternative convos for the ones that you didn´t recruit).

-Seems like a good team.

-I will save it for later.

-It´s always the damn draw back, but thanks for letting me know.

-Question: Does the Rockanroll tome sounds like a stupid name?

-She is determined (even if her back pays the price).

-Yeah, the point of diabolical units, is that they are more of a demon than a chanter of magic.

-Well, the srpg studio community and I are way more grateful to you for being such an excellent coder.

-Jean was more powerful on my tests, I thought that I nerfed her but it seems that my Olwen “simpness” blinded me on that.

-Yua on the other hand maybe I nerfed her too much, on my tests she was WAY stronger: she literally had stats closer to Julius, which didn´t make sense since once of the houses, her master tells you that she hasn´t trained in some time, maybe I could give her a personal spear or something to compensate the lack of stats.

-This is something that I will improve with Moore and Elma, because they got really out classed by Simon and Jermie, which they can also fight back. Elma will get as a personal staff called the “Again” staff, that is basically a long-range dance and since the beginning I had the intention to give Moore as his personal skill: Staff savant / master, a skill that is like in the GBA hack rooms that if the user uses a staff, it will gain an extra action. I had the plugin, but I didn´t have the time to test it out, so I ended up playing safe and gave him charisma.

-The sleep staff is res x2 fixed chance, maybe it is too low, I will try fix it, but I have an idea on how to make the sleep status more interesting…

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Shanks MudFish73 days ago

(The message limit poped up)

-that is sus.

-Sierra, I FORGOR to implement her class group to the class badge. *Skull emoji*

-Nothing to say.

-It didn’t? I thought I would say something like “Survive Yato´s monstrous wave”.

-Still saving it.

-The battle or the map chip? Because the battle seemed quite simple to me putting the bats aside.

-Huh, time to re-download the tsukito music again.

-One idea that I had is that as in FE1 or FE5, you will have storage houses where you can get your items and put them near the entrances, but I ended up scraping that up because why would they stay? Maybe I can fix that making them military post around the city or something like that.

-Maybe she wasn´t determined enough. Some people told me that Julius death should have been a game over, I made him the only one to retreat.

-The only problem is that the generics will still talk even if they are wiped out.

-Still saving it.

- :(

-For some reason it changed to that, the intended purpose was to be a kaga era fortify staff, aka, global range.

-Never got across that problem.

-The main problem with yato was that I didn´t make a lot of magic spells. For my main project, I made the weapon table and it´s forges, but only for the physical weapons, I left aside the knifes and magic spells: I literally had 3 spells dark spells, so yeah, he ended more annoying that I thought.

(But for your closing thoughts I will copypaste my another comment).

I can identify that my two mayor flaws were:

-My map, even a friend told me that it maybe was a bit too big.

-My time management because I literally skipped 2 valuable days. So, I ended making the defense phase way more rushed down than I really wanted to, for example I would have tried to make more phases like the last wave where the classes got mixed, but I ended up making them more like FE4 enemies where they have one boss and only one type of enemies.

My idea of the enemies starting way too far, where also for two reasons: first: to give the player some kind of “uptime” so they can “reposition” themselves (instead of forcing the player into the preparations screen, between waves) but the city was really big and while testing it was really clear that it was almost impossible to do so. And the other reason was to make the game feel more like a tower defense game, were you see the enemy slowly approaching at you, instead of them being ambush spawns (but in the end they ended up being like that, because I didn´t make an end player/ally/enemy phase command and so your units will have some uptime to run away).

So yeah, I´m taking notes to at least fix up some of the issues there, while I´m also making the conclusion (yes, I will try to fix the typos), but I´m worried even more on the music part, because in my tests it wasn´t an issue. But again, my apologies for giving you an unpleasant experience and thanks for playing.

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TheRepeat73 days ago

Hey, sorry, I kinda had trouble following these replies since it was hard sometimes to tell which points you were responding to, but I'll address what I can. 

  • The music does technically loop, but unnaturally. It doesn't have a clean loop point - it fades out and restarts. That's all I meant
  • Re: walking speed - I didn't have a problem with the speed, but my plugin should have a run button if you wanted to use that one. That might help if you have concerns about the speed
  • Re: the Rockanroll tome - it's goofy but in a good way. I think it suits an unserious character like Jean well. It's great
  • A personal spear would need to have some kind of defensive utility to be good on Yua, like say a huge Avo boost vs certain weapon types or something. She doesn't need a weapon for killing things as she's already good at that - she needs the bulk or evasion to survive the big groups in this game, like what Julius has. This is an enemy phase game and she needs an enemy phase
  • Staff savant would also not be super good on Moore either since it's the staves themselves that aren't useful. But a buff to the sleep staff is exciting. With enemy groups being that large, at least a durability boost would be welcome :)
  • What problem(s) do the storage houses address?

Time management was a big factor of this whole game jam and even my game, much less ambitious than yours, took me until the last second to wrap up, and I had to cut some things too. It's pretty hard to judge how long things take to implement, but I hope if there's one lesson to take away from this jam, dreaming smaller is super important. The coolest part of your game is the team building, which takes maybe half an hour, and making another short, half-hour-ish level would have had the double benefit of a) making the game easier to make and b) making the game much easier for players to replay with a different team. A much smaller level, say a 25x25 tile cutout of the city, or a different area entirely, could have made your game more replayable and easier to make in the small time you had. I know, I know, hindsight is 20/20, but I hope this advice helps you for the next game jam :)

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