Wow, an Ahriman's Propecy reboot demo! Happy to see this has been making headway.
Definitely appreciate the graphical refresh while still staying true to the flavour of the original Ahriman's Prophecy.
Here are my observations from playing through this demo:
Positives:
- Music overhaul is wonderful. Keeps the original, catchy theme intact while adding some creative liberty to modernize the tracks
- Title track is A++
- Battle music feels appropriately intense
- Atmospheric tracks are exactly what I was hoping for
- The facial expressions are quite well done
- I noticed Talia's face becoming demoralized as she was damaged in battle, and turned grey upon death
- Menu is more robust than the original, and it's great that there is some transparency, allowing us to still see the game when pulling this up
- Heads up display items such as the health bars, total gold on hand and the location on map are great additions to the screen
- Pathfinding is great - I love that we can click on a square and let the character walk there, even though I'm usually someone who prefers keyboard input
- New sound effects are great and fit well into the game world
Critiques:
- I'm not sure how possible this will be for you, but the ability to remap keys would be much appreciated. Arrow keys and spacebar get the job done fine, but it might help some people adjust to the game more seamlessly if it were possible to assign keys of choice (or perhaps offering a few default layouts)
- This is a matter of personal preference, but I preferred the live action battle system that existed in the original AP. It was one of the things that bothered me about the rest of the Aveyond series - how the prequel had this epic system of real time combat, and then all of the subsequent titles in the series reverted to turn-based combat. It's understandable, however, given that it's likely easier to program and probably produces fewer bugs as well to use this system
- Display resolution:
- I have no idea if this is possible, but could the game adapt to higher resolution displays, so that we can see more of the game area instead of our monitor's resolution becoming downscaled to match the game?
- Along the same vein, can the aspect ratio be tweaked to match the wider screens that are available today? The original AP was developed for displays which were much closer to a 1:1 ratio, so that it won't have to be stretched out? (eg. 4:3, rather than more common 16:9, 21:9 of today, etc.).
- Would it be possible to introduce a borderless window mode?
- 7 save slots feels a bit limiting - I believe the original had 20. Which allows for a few different styles of playthrough with a few saves for each.
- Dollar signs beside items in shops feel a little bit out of place when the currency being used is pieces of gold
- When no weapon equipped, the max damage seems to be 0. Perhaps it could be tweaked to one? Probably negligible, given that not much of the game is spent unarmed, but I'd say it's somewhat realistic that someone could deal damage with a punch
- Extremely minor, but interacting with the roaming chicken produces a rooster sound, while the rooster makes no sound at all
- In the Easy version of the game - it might become hard to level up if the monsters don't respawn, as it would eliminate the ability to powertrain. Perhaps the xp scaling would need adjusting? I wonder if it would make sense to convert this game mode to a 'story mode' of sorts
Just FYI - the Demo B zip folder is missing a dll file "RGSS104E.dll", which the game can't launch without. Works fine after downloading that file from another source and placing it into the root of the demo folder.
Appreciate all the work that has been put into this!!