itch.io

I’m sorry I couldn’t resist. With any UI elements that display text, you’ll want to make sure that text has good contrast so you don’t give people eyestrain in a game that largely involves reading.

The easiest way to do this is to create a solid background in a color that highly contrasts the text and set it to a high opacity. (Probably at least 80% but whatever looks decent.) This way it should always be readable regardless of the background while still letting a bit of it show through.

Edit: oh, unrelated, but the executable installer is already compressed so putting it in a rar archive does nothing to reduce the size and mandates 3rd party software to get it out in most cases.

If it’s an attempt to work around Windows Defender false-positives, it doesn’t do that either. Just adds an extra step before the AV flips out at you.

This is a rough outline of what the process would look like:

1. Convert the story to the Twee2 format
2. Import the story into source control (git)
3. Sign up with a third party localization service and import the english strings (there’s a few of these, could probably help you pick one if you wanted to go through with this)
4. Integrate the localization service with your repository host (GitHub/GitLab/etc.)
5. Profit

This sounds like a lot, but I’d wager 90% of the process could be automated if you’re good at computer-wrangling (hi).

The hardest part would be moving away from the Twine GUI, as while there’s no technical reason it couldn’t support all of this, it doesn’t seem to be a design goal of the GUI despite the massive benefits source control brings to projects that are 99% text.

Once this is set up, filling in the blanks with machine translations for languages that don’t have proper translations yet would be pretty straightforward.

lol no it isnt. (Poor) quality of the machine translations aside, integrating them into the game without an automated build process would likely take longer than writing the original text did.

This game has a lot of soul and I’m excited to see where things go! If you need more eyes looking over the project I’d be interested in helping too.

I’m pretty good with the technical side of things and with solo(ish) projects it’s important to automate as much of the development side as possible so you aren’t spending your free time computer-wrangling.

I haven’t exhausted the contents of the demo yet, but this is looking quite well done. The aesthetic feels well thought out and the combat is far beyond just reskins of RPGmakers base mechanics.

Can’t say I’m a huge fan of how much of the genre is jRPGs (which I understand is largely due to RPGM’s accessibility) but I can’t deny this is a good one of those.

My main gripe currently is the jump to chapter 7 feels very disorientating because it plops you half way between the town and the fairy portal, making the path forward in what has so far been a linear game unclear.

I spent a good 2 hours wondering if I was going the right direction because I fought my way to the portal first before finding the town.

To me it would make more sense to drop you into the town after the timeskip and introduce the party management/social features there before the player dives back into combat with their new companions.

And this is probably more of a personal taste thing, but I think most combat animations should be at least 30% faster. Turning them off completely is a shame when so much work has been put into them and some really overstay their welcome for how often you see them.

1-2 seconds is generally the sweet spot where you can process what happens but things still feel like they are moving along.