itch.io

wow!! my brain is ruined

If I was very smart, I wouldn’t have been holding the calculator upside down the whole time without realizing it.

Great puzzle!

Great design, and an idea I hadn’t seen yet, too!

Great mechanics and art! I’ll be watching you in the future, for sure.

Nice! Cool art and good game design.

Library of Ruina, but without the grinding/etc? I like it!

I completed this - it’s fairly easy and light, which isn’t a bad thing at all. Your art is extremely charming, and I like the effort and love you put into creating your world.

Thanks for sharing this!

Clever - good work!

Thanks for explaining. I probably had more fun in ‘unintentionally hard’ mode anyways - up until the last boss, so no harm done. Also good for me to know for the future.

Great work, again!

Thanks! I tried this a lot by touching different places on the walls, but wasn’t able to adjust to a position where this happened. Maybe you can get into a pixel range you can’t correct from?

Would be appreciative if someone educated me on the EasyRPG issue - why the enemies get so many more turns under that engine? Is there a setting or build setting that fixes this issue?

I couldn’t find anything conclusive in the github issues.

Great work! I had decided this was a very hard, but well done RPG, but I was a little salty about the last boss - it seemed impossible given the turn economy.

Then I read Matt Bee’s comment about EasyRPG, and she got about 1/3-1/4 of the turns when I ran the thing directly with wine, instead. (WTF?!) No problems after that.

So, probably not the intended experience for the rest of it, but still quite fun!

Sick ideas! Defeated… could neither figure out how to straighten after this gap, nor how to cross it if straightened before:

Great work! Got big shrimp, and was learning even in the last level (made me finally take note “for real” about gear chain parity). Thanks for sharing!

Wow, this is great! The looping storyline is unique and the story is interesting too.

Started out playing Resident Evil, ended up playing DOOM. Now I understand the character’s name (or model designation?)

Good stuff!

Difficult, but good. Great atmosphere and cool artwork!

Damn.

Yes, absolutely Nepheshel. Looking it up that is definitely it.

It’s been awhile, so I might be remembering ‘vibes’. There may have also been some issues with the later game balance?

Running defense/shutdown was a lot of fun, and I haven’t often gotten to use that toolkit, especially while the nuker is AI controlled.

Czarina wasn’t frustrating at all, and the sorcellons and danger of running were nice touches. Plus this game had nice vibes, felt like a nice bit of flash fiction and you had a story going with no real dialogue. Very nice!

Grateful you are putting these up for download now - the web interface is nice but a bit laggy.

Cool! The ‘true hero’ joining was great. I actually thought there would be multiple waves, and I’d really have to ‘git gud’.

Once I fully explored the dead end ‘tri-path’ end, I dropped back to a rote, right hand wall follow strategy. As soon as the cognitive load gets too be too much (I find myself having backtracked unintentionally) I tend to fall back on such a strategy, or start mapping if I think I can.

I think one way to keep the player engaged with an ever deepening dead end or ultra confusing maze is ‘stuff’. I you put odd happenings, strange marks and sounds, or other ‘things’ into the environment, I’d stay more engaged and probably not turn into a wall-follower.

The ‘stuff’ wouldn’t even have to build towards something, and maybe it would be cruel if it didn’t, but imagine a meta story playing out environmentally about a horrible monster or a frightening mystery where the environment gets more and more intense (and big, and labyrinthine), but eventually just peters out in a dead end like this game. It was just a side area. The main area might be plan, or all branches, main or side, might seem to have an escalating narrative.

Maybe that’s too cruel. I’m not sure.

There’s the one rpgmaker 2k game that I can’t remember the name of with all the huge, interconnected dungeons and visible on-screen enemies milling about. It was so sprawling, but there was just enough random treasure, some kind of fast travel points, and odd hidden connections between the vast dungeon ‘sections’ and such that it was still stimulating for quite some time. At some point, I had to tap out on that one, and I was fairly far in. It just ended up feeling exhausting at some point, like being lost in the inversion of a giant desert with no landmarks… an infinitely crowded city where every block is so noisy and full and interconnected with twisting alleys you aren’t sure if you’ve seen it or not… Hopefully you know the one I mean, I feel kind of stupid describing it like that.

It feels a bit like the vibe you are describing here, and it was quite popular back in its day, I think.

“And Scalooms… Well, they turned out okay, I suppose.”

:(

I actually found this one pretty challenging! First few games - trying to learn the system and find all the ‘camps’. Next few games - routing, culminating in me ‘being shamed by my cowardice’. Fair…

Then two more, using the fastest route I could find. First, killed by the first encounter (?!) a vine and ice magiya using jerk.

Second routed run - the boss seemed to mostly use physical attacks and the anti-phys armor, with a -str condition. Just kept them blinded and blasted away with the 2mp magic attack.

Then I saw here that I was actually lucky with that boss… oh well. I think I gave this one the most ‘tries’ out of all your sketches I’ve played to win, by quite a few - I’d guess around 10?

Protect your (fem)elf.

Good stuff! Rusted Moss meets Cave Story? No matter what, nice pacing, good mechanics, lovely music and visuals. Thank you.

You have real skill (and enjoyment, that’s clear) for making up silly little guys. I’m glad you let yourself be indulgent on this one, it was a lot simple fun, even without your signature novel rulesets and punishing difficulty.

This is an idea I’d love to see you revisit, if you are ever feeling it! Having this kind of concept combined with your mechanical style would be so interesting.

If you like the GBA era of Fire Emblem, check out the “Storge” romhack (if you haven’t already). It plays with the exact space you outlined here!

Good stuff! I fought the boss and went pretty hard, i used one christ’s love and one ‘round’ of scripture, then mostly holy water with some strikes mixed in. I got ‘black plasma’ from the fight, and realized I had to climb back up.

I didn’t get any drops at all from enemies, so i gave up on that idea did a lot of running and some judicious healing, fighting only against mercs. Won with 0 MP and like 12 hp, took the wrong fork on the first map (that’s where i thought, “i’m dead now”), but made it straightaway after.

I thought there were no drops, like a reverse trolling from the first game, and the ‘black plasm’ would hurt me, but i did eat it when things got tough.

All in all, i managed to make it my first try, somehow, and it was e-x-c-i-t-i-n-g! When I saw the altar at the end, and knew a bad round against even 3 lowly mercenaries could end me…

I also naturally went from Soraion->Treasure->Soarion->Balbalap, just by deciding to explore a bit.

It’s just barely reachable. I died but saw the port the first time, made it the second.

So, I didn’t visit hetra bheb, grunita, the southern lighthouse, or nouf! I went straight from balbalap to luwoll, and was able to guess at ‘just go east’ from the directions at luwoll. Just barely made it, but on the first try.

This one was fun. I’m thinking now how to combine this with something a bit like Uncharted Waters, but keep the ‘arcade game’ feel of this one without the safety of a friendly, full sim like Uncharted Waters.

I’m so late to the party, here - i feel like i’m always echoing others, but I want to reinforce a message here.

I was also surprised by the ambiguity/negativity of your author’s notes for this one. I thought the vibe would be ‘finally got it!’.

While you might have felt there was ‘too much’ for your process, there was certainly not ‘too much’ for the player. I play a lot of ‘magic tower’ games, so the format here was instantly readable, and I liked the simple game of the battles, as a replacement for the normally deterministic way those games go.

I was able to get all chests, botch a couple paralyzes against the ‘cave bird’, and still get out with enough mp to paralyze and bop the last ressurectoid on the way out. Good stuff.

An hour is nothing weighed against the fun and just plain playable result you got out, i think :)

Ugh. Just a touch too hard. Even after getting the “idea” here, couldn’t win after a few different strategies, probably just too RNG dependent.

Great work for an hour though, and interesting idea!

“I thought people would tune it out and dismiss racial hatred as an explanation for any of the game’s frictions.”

Yeah, I tuned it out so fully that I didn’t even have a chance to dismiss it, just never occurred to me. I figured the townspeople were just selling junk goods to foreigners! I recently moved to a new country - so that narrative feels on point for me (although luckily am not having that experience).

I also figured out the joke after my first run - the bad spear and healing items, and refusal to stay at the inn (which now that I’ve read your post comes out in a different light!)

I’m getting inspired by trying your sketches. I grabbed both rm2k and wolf editor and plan to try to make some small basic sketches myself.

I haven’t used either tool yet, so it’ll take a while to

1. understand the base systems at play
2. figure out how best to subvert them to my own mechanical preferences

But! I think i will go faster to making sketches this way than building something myself. My goal is to make a handful of sketches and re-evaluate what tooling i want to use going forward. We’ll see…

5 stars just for your successful trolling - played this right after the first sketch. You succeeded in your goal, at least with me ;)

^-^

“believe it or not i just don’t like puzzle battles that much”

Wow, as a ‘full consumer’ of the OI brand, I’m quite shocked! Great idea on just speeding up execution in easyRPG - that may be an easy setting to tweak for the user already. That’s what I’ll try coming back to this.

I actually like hard+attrition fine, now that I’ve had more time to think on it. I think the combination of the battles having a lot of ‘quiet’ moves (to borrow from chess lingo) combined with the ATB waiting, it blew other qualities a bit out of proportion for me. Honestly, if this was the same but made in 2K I might have not even noticed the ‘friction’. I think I just really hate ATB - if it would just ‘jump’ inbetween inactive time, it would be fine.

You do attrition really well, so it makes sense that you love it. I loved the ship-based OI game, for instance - I still remember the feeling of replaying battles to preserve resources in that one.

I plan to check out your ‘sketches’ too! And thanks for signal boosting Razuth - I don’t know if I’d have found their work otherwise.

Glad you are still out there doing your thing :)

This is like some kind of strange rm2k gambling game. I could seriously see people laying bets on an ‘automated’ version of this… What an odd idea you had!

Missed exactly one attack, on level 48 - with one party member and one enemy left, then went first on next turn and continued. Then all good outcomes till 55, when 3 enemies all went first, killed 3 characters, and then one went first in the 2nd turn- game over.

I still had lots of resources left, too.

I think Beautrix is the actual main character, right? Fun and inspiring ‘skit’ - such a cool idea to do these!

Good one. Made it to 28 with Lament, Cearcelaan, and Jorkon. Maybe got lucky with RNG and encounters till I got a whole party paralyzed by zap boxes.

Not 100% sure I understand the mechanics - may try again later :)

Ah! Clever with the Kraken, I wouldn’t have thought of that…

Very nice! What a strange world where just growing plants can be illegal… oh, wait.

There are a few possibilities to get stuck and sometimes cramming all plants under the light is hard, but it plays very well overall. Short and sweet. Thank you!

Fun to see new 2K content - it’s clear you put in a lot of care to the visuals, seeing the characters jumping around when they attack is a lot of fun.

I think I have probably missed an area somewhere - I can currently choose between Kraken, Lindwurm, and Shaytan for my next goal, and all three seem untouchable with my setup and tools. I’ll do some more exploring and see what I can find - the maps are extensive.

Small possible bug - there are bones outside the lindwurm that say ‘the door is locked’ on examine.

“I will lay on my deathbed and the doctor will ask if I want palliative care and I will say no because that sounds like a Skill name and I need to be ready for Gremlin Nob in the afterlife.”

I laughed so hard that the bloody, weeping ghost of the Silent squirted out of my nose! 5 stars!!