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My favorite political satires tend to write scripts that are believable, and people would say things that people would actually say. If we don't aim for that, the characters will look like straw men. It's not enough to just sprinkle 'the other side', we need genuine understanding of the situation

This game is poorly written. While the dev did nail down the Donald Trump impression, the NPC's are written ad-hoc to entertain a demented stereotype of how the developer believes the world works.  Shows like South Park knows how to do political satire well because they know how to show self awareness by playing to 'both sides', but this game felt like it had to self awareness or skepticism of how the dev perceives their own reality and do not understand the other side of the conversation. Please go talk to people, turn off the news, get a feel for how real people talk.

I can reasonably infer it's mechanically the same as health, mana and TP but the short time I spent on the game did not reveal what those stats are. This is a game advertised to have hidden mechanics so I want to think ahead about side effects

I didn't understand the game. The game starts off with a vague allusion to a girl related to the protagonist and throws a lot of vague symbols at you. I notice the game is keeping an eye on whether I respond to in-game choices with love or hate and because of that, I didn't enjoy killing deer with that gun. I didn't understand what "phantasm", "evaporation" or "swagger" was and I understand how it was going to impact my playthrough if I lose "swagger". I found I got "cursed" which I didn't know what that meant until I noticed it's basically a poison status effect which I don't have any obvious curing items for. Sorry to say, I don't feel comfortable with this game

There are game features which do not work with a touchscreen. Sorry

I am happy. Are you happy?

Many menus are annoying to navigate because pressing cancel goes to choice #2 instead of the exit option

Never found the key ring for the jewellery store but having the other three was enough for me to guess the missing digit in the end

Reminder I should recommend these plugins anytime someone asks around for "undertale plugins" or something

I'm still on a Windows 7 which seems to get screwy with user devices, but XP predates RPGmaker XP which doesn't make any intuitive sense to me

At seemingly random times of the game, the game will think I have an arrow key held down permanently until I close the game. A dissappointment I can't progress the game without frequently losing progress.

There does not seem to be much to prototype. You answer some few questions and a mysterious narrator railroads you into behaving how they tell you. Could make for an interesting horror about obedience but there's very little to comment about

Hello, I managed to play your game all the way to the ending and was impressed by that choice of twist. I decided it was right for me to write a review. It's a little long, but I think the extensive feedback would be beneficial.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dMumfbK7tDjVJrgXdvlyv90nDIWvS2_O6KdAzN70q0E/...

Let me know what you think. Best of luck.

Holding shift with Always Dash on should slow your character to your walk

Are you playing with mouse controls? There doesn't seem to be an intuitive way to walk while moving with mouse. With keyboard controls, walking and running is controlled with the shift key.

The key is to not run within three tiles within the gargoyles. Walking is fine

Wild guess, not enough meaningful offensive skills for Fred?

This game feels incredibly ambitious. It dumps a lot of unfamiliar terms to me almost immediately and it feels these characters exist outside of this game and does not feel self-contained. Turns out clicking on your profile, it's exactly that. There also seems a lot of plugin incompatibilities that makes the UI difficult to navigate and I have to switch back and forth from keyboard and mouse controls to get the game behaving the way I want to.

About 80 minutes into the game I think I'm lost on how to proceed in the blue dungeon and am not sure if I missed a piece of dialogue that tells me where to go

This game isn't quite balanced. My first two battles in the ice prison were one-shots. As I went to the forest immediately, I came across an encounter with three frost imps who stunlocked me and wiped me out. about 20% of the encounters on that forest is reasonably beatable. Every enemy acts first and takes out up to 50% HP from one hit, which is far more health than what Solara can heal and she cannot respond to the amount of damage being dealt out. Escaping from 80% of the random encounters I meet isn't exactly my idea of fun

You are the playtester I needed but didn't get. I've rebalanced the game with an updated version but I can't tell if it will be a more suitable difficulty for you

Yes, it's intentional

Is there a game uploaded here?

I managed to get the game working once I hopped on to a different computer. Since you're trying to sell your Advent Heroes game as a commercial product I think it's right for me to leave honest but hopefully actionable feedback.

Because the game is meant to showcase parts of your commercial game, the game appears to start in the middle of the story where the player knows nothing about your four characters or your setting. As for characters, we have an Ayla who is borderline useless in battle wHo TaLkS iN aLtErNaTiNg CaPs which I've mostly seen used to denote mockery, but nothing she says is sarcastic in content. Nothing about the other characters stand out at all, which is a dissappointment for the genre you're working with.

As for the setting, it is abnormally unclear for a JRPG. The dungeon design is made of square passageways and bare undecorated "frozen" walls. The player will be introduced with some vaguely techno-sounding music that sounds sci-fi as the party of four are thrusted into a dungeon that is described as "sub-zero" as if this is a world that uses fahrenheit. Then I get greeted with a fantasy priest which since I read the in-game tutorial I know is also the save point. Party members begin the game with "dragon" items for no clear reason.

The save point is super easy to miss as this game opts to use non-standard terminology and busted out the thesaurus for essential game mechanics.  "Confession" is saving.  "Power" in this game refers to health, not the physical attack stat." Adv" is TP. (Advance? Advent? Adventure?) Where you gain in originality, you get a higher learning curve for your game.

The content warning about naziism and religous insensitivity also makes no sense as I haven't seen anything resembling as such.

On the first map the player will be dealing with a generous encounter rate and so it will become a slog to even walk over to the first priest. The first battles will be slow as you will need to use every skill to figure out which does what and how much damage. Most skills are completely lacking in skill descriptions so the experience is like playing an untranslated Japanese RPG.

By the second map, you'll eventually understand what every skill does, and the quickest way to victory (buff attack and magic, use tornado/earthquake), but once you've fought the first random encounter battles, you've fought them all. Subsequent battles become increasingly boring as they offer nothing substantially new. Because this game was made with the default battle system whereas, this game has serious pacing issues especially in encounters with up to six monsters the player must patiently wait for all actions to play out, and must do this at least three times to win each battle. If it helps, there are action sequences plugins or even alternative turn systems which address this issue and helps give you faster more streamlined battles

By the third map, you're in a room with doors going North, South, East and West. If you enter any of those doors, you appear back in a room that is visually identical, and there is no feedback telling you if you've entered the correct door or not. At which point, I've decided I've seen enough of this game. I would expect there to be a final boss, but I'm going to have to decide that whatever effort is necessary to make it past the + shaped room is not worth it.

This is a good entry. The first section was a little slow due to your weak characters and encounter rate but it really picked up after finding the dungeon. The statue-pushing puzzle I think could be a potential problem area as it requires the player to have background knowledge of Christianity to know the answers to half the riddles

I cannot get the game to respond to any input. Yes, even when I clicked on the game screen. Now I can't see the game for myself to see why you chose to add the content warning that some themes may be comparable to naziism.

From what my buddies are saying who are able to get your game working, they're weirded out by the choice of giving text random colors every time a window is refreshed and couldn't get very far into the game.

I also tried a demo of your advent heroes game on steam but your game immediately crashes with a loading error that Map211.json is missing.

Hello, I was playing this game, came across a cave with a bear in it. The game encountered a loading error with effects/Bodyslam.efkefc

This was a game design flaw I could not grapple with. It's a "pick your punchline" game which means you only get funny, not necessarily good choices. This meant I will dissappoint people who are used to getting good endings in games

God damn I'm worried about the dog

That was 100% intended as the default engine does not allow negative money. Wrote a small plugin to add support for negative money. Felt it was perfect to rub in the absurdity of Reid's decisions

I had just just sent the invite to that email. See you there!

I saw your reddit post and I've been meaning to playtest this game earlier but I haven't had the time. Meanwhile would you be interested in a discord server for beta testing? The only catch is that for anyone to be able to submit their game for beta testing, they must test other people's games first. Let me know if you're interested.

A HUMAN APPEARS

This game does not run on my computer so I've had to watch Hawk play this. Since it's a 3D game and its core gameplay is essentially a long chase scene, it is definitely the scariest game of this jam.

> but it did confuse me until I realized where I was.

Confusion? That's a symptom of the devil being near. Wink.

That's an interesting story about trans empowerment

"Oh cool, a farming sim"
"Isn't oleander poisonous?"
"Ricin? I know that's been used for assassinations."
"Why does this guy want death caps???"
"Why are there gravestones popping up"

This is easily one of my favorite entries of this jam. I know you don't like your own game but it's part of the minority of entries where the gameplay is the horror.

To be honest, this was very rough to play due to the engine of choice being RPGmaker. Shooting mechanics are literally cutscenes and behaves like short cutscenes, so the character was very hard to control