The credits.html seems to be part of the files by default when the RPGmaker editor exports a project. It's not for the plugins but for a lot of lower-level base code.
Do you have any suggestions on what can be done to aim for something more cohesive? Preferably a solution that does not require us to cut down to one artist doing the entirety of the work?
Just wanna say, the one who made Magical Grandma. Freaking well done. I was engaged from start till finish. Its impressive despite its flaws. I would give a more in-depth perspective but I was way too engrossed by the story. The difficulty fits enough. Although you can argue some attacks are more broken than others and some skills were... kinda obsolete at the end of it all. The faces being too big are weird. But honestly its a stylization, so I won't fault it for being that way. All in all, freaking well done. I'd give it an easy 8.5-8.6. Just a couple of weird glitch areas during the pool map and some of the dialogue being weird aside, this could be an easy contender for an 8.7 for me.
A short review I got from someone in another server
My best one is to make something plausibly submittable within the first few days or ASAP. Make it a cliffhanger or a give it a single punchline ending need be. After that, you can add new content and experimental mechanics all you wish.
it's so odd to me since I lost so many potential work days from running errands from having my car stolen and wrecked. To me this game lacks so much polish because there's so much more I could do if I had more work days. I think I learned a valuable lesson on how great games really need its most base fundamentals well designed.
I still feel you're very out of your element in this jam. It's well designed to be super approachable and get people replaying multiple times just to see if there's a better ending they missed. Since my first playtest, the game went a step up from being an arcade clicker and went up to being a horror-themed clicker. It's still not quite a horror game yet
From the story in the game, I notice you opted to play into a fear of rejection and a fear of weird monsters, but the game execution still puts an arcade clicker highest in priority and the fears you're playing to in the backburner. If you're going for a 'cosmic horror' I very strongly recommend reading some HP Lovecraft for some classics or looking at Subnautica 1 or Iron Lung for video game takes on cosmic horror, that's one of the hardest genres of horror to pull off in a video game and usually works in a literary medium
This is a pretty good mystery adventure, I beat the Bubbles route from beta testing but only got partially through Blaze. Coincidentally this game also shows me how a game plays if every object is interactable which I had been wondering about. It's easy to get lost due to the way the map design is non-linear.
Ouch, I should have tried harder to find playtesters for the latter half of the dev cycle (I had none)
Protip for everyone to save yourself some unecessary headache: it walks faster than the player and charges at you if it and the player is lined up on the X or Y axis. It has difficulty catching up to you if you make sure you're not aligned vertically or horizontally. If it makes a grunt noise, that is a cue to make a 90 degree turn to avoid its charge.
The exit on that first map is to the South West.
The second map is just a looping map and you automatically exit after roughly 20 seconds more or less. The timer goes faster if the Lost is bumping into obstacles or if your health is low
Your use of pixel art and chiptunes really work in favor for the horror genre. The basement was especially interesting since the perspective and layout made it very disorienting. I do think the battle sections were too drawn out so it lowered the tension that could have been maintained
Thanks for playing the early alpha! The video upload is very helpful for me to see how the game plays to a random player. Mind if I credit you as a tester when the full release is rolled out by Oct 10th?
Does it have to refer to or be a traditional family with a husband, wife and one or more kids? Can I instead do a tribal family structure which an entire village is considered one big family?
I bought this through steam and the collection is phenomenal! It meets a solid majority of my SFX needs when I'm writing events interacting with background objects
Congratulations on 9th place in the People's Choice in the IGMC! I'd say the rating is well deserved as this game feels like the most accurate, believable and frightening portrayals of what a cult actually is like! I am definitely recommending this game to anyone who wants to look at hour-long drama RPG's.
This narrative is like going through multiple layers of onions as it get darker and darker towards the rotten core. Normally my illiterate side glazes over text too fast but I slowed down and enjoyed the uncomfortable ride lmao
To be fair I don't even know if it's possible to have a "right" difficulty especially when people's skill levels are all over the place. I found that easier games tend to work better so people don't feel gatekept from the whole experience and it's a huge gamble to make it possible for a player to lose while you have a 1 hour time limit for gameplay experience
Most horror games I know do not feature combat at all, and effective horrors I know that do feature combat make them painfully obvious they're undefeatable by making them immune to damage.
Where horror games need to invoke a feeling of "flight", the game was balanced heavily towards "fight" which made the monsters not scary. That design made monsters feel like obstacles that could be solved with a couple of swings of that crowbar. That also heavily impacted the ability for the atmosphere to become scary when the game establishes that any threat that you encounter can simply be killed. The fetish main character also felt out of place with their casual sultry pose being their idle stance in an environment meant to be oppressive
There's also a bug that stamina does not drain if you move with mouse clicks which made spiders easy to walk around
As an RPG though, I do like the skill system built around the crowbar though! Survival difficulty definitely felt like survival as I had to figure out how to effectively use the crowbar as a main weapon
I feel like the game would be so much fun if the time it took to raise a Kaiju were to be about a third of the length, after figuring out the core mechanics it becomes a grind.
The payoff at the end is interesting though! Dunno why my per Kaiju (that I named Harold) was the size of planets but I'll take it
There's quite a bit of emotional impact delivered with the tough 1 hour time limit, very definitely worth checking out if you can figure out how to bypass the bug!
I managed to get past the bug by finding a random png file, renamed it to CoolSpringWater.png, and went to this tool: https://petschko.org/tools/mv_decrypter/#en-decrypt I extract the encryption key, then encrypt my png file to replace the missing file
In hindsight it's because I opted to design a game with familiar mechanics rather than experimental ones that made it possible to make a game of this scale in only a month. KV did end up explaining why my approach was sideways compared to everyone else's though. Next jam, I am avoiding my subtle but massive mistake to introduce major party members one-at-a-time, next jam they will be introduced all at once for a much shorter arc. On top of that, I will sic the very experimental battle system I was designing before I decided to join the Harold Jam
It didn't take until reading the in-game guide book did I actually had started understanding the game. Once I got past that, I started to really understand the strategic depth and I can see this scoring pretty high with battles. I didn't get to figure out how to beat the final boss though even when I only just figured out that I can stun monsters on the overworld.
The choice of Rm2k3 graphics were really interesting and I swore they looked a lot better when I was a kid. They had this sharp contrast between dark fantasy monster sprites and cartoony background tiles. Definitely had the feel of a mishmash of aesthetics thrown together from those early days of Rpgmaker.
Still, nice to see a Zelda-esque game making it past the finish line
I think this style of battles could really benefit from a longer play length with a wider variety of scenarios! Have you done other games aside for Day Dreams with this combat system?
I think most critiques I can have has been discussed in the discord already but I'll rewrite them anyways. When it comes to making a book, you can have as much story ideas you can have but you're ultimately limited if you don't have the available paper for printing the story content. Games are kind of like that.
You mentioned you've studied writing for years and it shows. Your dialogue has been the most engaging for me to read of all the games I played. I think my only hiccup was the shock at Therese emasculating Harold by saying she's stronger.
I like to think about how writing literature entails using as few words possible. Map design works like that too. Whenever a player checks a door to a building that is locked, this slows down the pace of the game and story. Most importantly it also slows down the speed you create content! While railroading can be an issue, derailing is probably the worse problem if the player explores in a way that they've lost touch with the main story or even get bored. Game maps usually have just a few select functional areas like inn, shop and a couple filler buildings.
If visiting Disneyland and looking at their maps taught me anything, it takes a only a couple of street blocks to create a feeling of a big town.
You're a talented writer, with the right game design strategy I know your best strengths will be put forward
Yes, until I had no more orbs to buy more. I tried a strategy of using Emotional Support to passively heal HP when I don't have the turns to heal up against a boss who 2-turn KO's you, tried using hype to boost Therese into OHKO range for the employee, but usually I can't heal fast enough to deal with Billy Gatewell
A fun adventure-puzzle game where most of us did jrpg's! I found I've had to backtrack a lot when I couldn't figure out how to get past certain obstacles but I eventually got through after about an hour and 15 minutes. I'm not sure about the message sound effect added which I don't think adds to the experience of reading dialogue though.
I did get stuck at the final puzzle when I took too long to realize I had to interact with the flag objects to progress the game. The best puzzles is easily the part where you had to collect pallets to cross the trash heap and went on fooling goons with noisemakers.
