itch.io

Thank you for playing! I'm glad you liked it. I wrote these down while listening to your video:

• On the topic of the story it's not gonna get any less confusing unfortunately, I'm not really adequate at explaining things and the whole Vanlen series is the remnants of a larger game I was working on that didn't take place on Earth about aliens that were supposed to be beyond human comprehension... I kept telling myself I'd make it one day so everything would make sense but it's been about 3 years now.
• The ten encounters at the start are definitely excessive, I apologize for them. I've replayed it a few times myself and wondered what I was thinking. I should've kept it at five. The sequels don't have required trash mobs like that. Vanlen 3 has upgrade points you can gain from beating enemies, though.
• Battles in the 2 sequels both have a battle retry option, so if you decide to play them you won't have to suffer through rewatching cutscenes.
• You can copy the eventing I've put into my games, just open the project file and check it out and ask questions if you need to. The following character in this game was easy but it only works with one other character.
• Vanlen's rant to Eric is a little edgy, I think she's mostly just trying to make Eric feel better in her own weird way.  Though, she's not really the comforting type...
• Okay that graphical glitch with the final boss was fucked up, I don't know why she appeared when she did but the reason you weren't hitting her is because she wasn't supposed to be there.
• Vriska's a great asshole character.
• The dark, fucked up truth about Vanlen is that she's a healer who can fly and that's the extent of her powers. If you took away her sword she'd basically be useless and she was caught off guard by Ian suddenly beating her ass. She gets sent on low tier grunt work most of the time because of that but her boss would never admit this to her.
• The jump was fixed as of the 3rd game, and future games will have higher jumps.
• Thank you for the compliments on the dialogue, by the way. I tried to make them feel like real people.

Alright, found the list I wrote for bugs:

• When Sarah gets her package from Billy, you can activate this event twice and reap x2 amount of the items he sent her.
• In Chapter 2's intro, you can open the menu and save your game before the phone stops ringing
• When going to the shooting range where Sarah gets her first kill, I interacted with the sign as something that looked like a soul sickness demon came out of the ground but I went back to the room before and it was gone. I'm unsure if this counted as sequence breaking and didn't retest it when I did Rotten Tree because I used the cheat room.
• Like Jungian Shadow, Underwater Billy's fight can be redone over and over again if you revisit the area.
• The 3-Eyed Jack you get in the area across from Sarah's hotel room changes its sprite if interacted from the sides

As for spoilery questions I'd rather wait to see the story unfold, a lot of the intrigue for me comes from not really knowing where anything is gonna go next.

I ended up finishing the neutral and bad ending for chapter one. Liked it quite a bit! Billy is by far my favorite character, I like all the development he gets and the fact that he's humanized despite all his shortcomings and past actions. Neutral ending Billy feels like a really bittersweet conclusion to the turmoil he's faced and it makes me glad he and Sarah can manage to contact each other after everything. Arthur joining in the Rotten Tree story line wasn't something I was expecting, but it was entertaining to see how heinous and evil he is. Beef Wellington's a cool looking guy and I love how bluntly Arthur explains him existing. Winter's dad is cool too. I wanna know what's up with Velouria so badly.
Again, the music is great. Favorite was the song that plays in Sarah's hotel room.
I played on an old version so I'm not sure if I should share any glitches I encountered, I don't know if they've been fixed yet. The most notable one was opening the menu during the party sequence and removing the filters from the screen. Jungian Shadow can also be infinitely rebattled in Rotten Tree if you go upstairs.

Played through act one, was going to play through everything before saying my thoughts but I really want to let you know the music is very, very good. Especially the battle music. The intros for the characters and the weapons are also very cool, I particularly like how the gun puts itself together when you get it. Winter has a lot of charm, love emo guys with oneitis.

Probably a linux problem then... I'll get around to messing with the text to make it look better anyways. Sorry it was all jumbled up.

I put that in there for grinding in case anyone needed it for the weapons. I have a bad habit of speedrunning when I playtest so maybe I'll buff all the enemies when I update.

Thank you! Cho is my favorite out of the girls to draw for several reasons and I'm glad you find her cute.
If you used easyrpg that might've done it... I set it to a really small font as a placeholder that was almost too tiny for me to read.

Right before "GO" you can cancel the command, I forgot to mention that anywhere as I often underexplain things. When I eventually update, I will mention that somewhere. I didn't put a cancel right after selection because I was already dealing with spaghetti and felt like it'd become a whole pasta buffet if I tried.

Grinding all your stats to 999 is insane man, I didn't expect anyone to do that so I didn't implement faster leveling. I'll try to add something where holding the button will start to increase stats by 10 instead of 1 at a time.

The story's all over the place, I don't blame others for not understanding what's going on. This game doesn't have much to do with the others besides the guys who show up at the ending being from previous ones, what a vitriol statue is, and the main girls being coworkers with the aliens that want to invade earth to beat up the giant man encased in earth's core.

Thanks again for playing!

It's totally fine if it's not for you, but I am glad you still want to play my games.

There were plans to flash them a different color, but I only ended up doing that for Namo (I forgot about it and it was really annoying to do in the way I decided to do it). I'll keep that in mind for the next action game I make. I'll see what I can do about collision, the way I made the battle system is just a little bit janky so I'm not sure I could do that without a bunch of bugs popping up, but it's been 3 years and I learned a lot more about the engine, I can overhaul it.

Thank you about the character designs.

Thank you for playing. I'm not a musician by any means so the uneven quality is to be expected, I can only spend about 4 hours on a song in FL Studio's trial before I risk my computer getting a blue screen. One and two are very important to the story, and honestly I'm most proud of the villain in two.

The collision thing was me trying to give certain states to where the boss can be hit so the battles don't end within a few seconds, but next time I'll probably just quadruple the health points of each boss so they can be attacked whenever on screen. Will also probably shorten the time bosses have invincibility frames (without delay the boss will die instantly whenever Vanlen slashes). I do want to focus on the narrative, but I also want the boss battles to be enjoyable.

Thank you! I'm very happy to hear you're going through my games. I'm pretty proud of my character designs, the trick to making them is just looking at patterns in objects you find interesting. For example: Zoe is based on ladybugs and Seagull is based on medical diagrams.

Gomez jumpscare...

Thank you for playing, and it's never too late to start doing art imo.

Thank you! Chaika 1671 Seagull is one of the designs I'm proudest of. I'm glad you enjoyed her antics!

Thanks for playing my old games. I'm glad you're liking them!

THEY'RE GETTING MARRIED BROS! Almost thought that when the screen faded to black after the proposal that Henley would propose to Tybalt right after but that's just the shipper in me.

I'm excited for the full release, but I'm very glad I got to see these characters again so soon.

The girls are cute and cool, I liked all their designs. Want to know more about the giantesses and the war they fought in.

Xochitl

Thank you! It's one of my favorite things to do.

Thank you for playing! I'm gonna let you in on a little secret and say that a lot of the assets are from my previous games so I just edited those rather than making new ones.

Thank you for playing my game!

I put most of the effort into the final fight, and I'm really glad you found the ending funny.

Also you have my blessing,  just know she eats a lot and will demand food if she's hungry and can't find any.

Thank you for playing my game! I'm glad to hear you got a challenge out of the boss battles, I got a little worried they wouldn't be hard enough. I've tried my best trying to make Ian and Penny as unsightly as possible to illicit the intended reaction of "what the hell", but I think I just have to accept that people are going to find them cute (that's also part of the intended reaction but I thought their grossness would cancel out the latter.)

Don't worry about it, I took no offense. I'm just glad someone wants to play my games.

Argh, I thought I removed everything involving the RTP for this one. You can get the RTP for 2003 here and then it should run properly. Rpgmaker is weird where you have to scrub EVERYTHING from the database to not get the RTP needed error, which is dumb because nothing that appears in this game is RTP. Sorry for the issue!

Edit: By the way, the RTP is all the default graphics, sound effects, and music. Every new project comes with all of those auto selected for characters, menu sound effects, enemies, etc. The way rpgmaker works is that if someone uses the rtp, they can extract without it and save space so that anyone who has the rtp installed on their computer can play it. I'm not sure if I explained this right but it's convenient if you play a lot of rpgmaker games.

Thank you for playing my game!

I try to introduce concepts without a lot of exposition, I've kinda found that in real life most people explain something once and get annoyed if you try to make them elaborate. I wanted to do more minigames, but the jam deadline crept up on me so I couldn't finish them in time. The apartment like houses, plastic chairs specifically, and hookah/arguile are all things you'll see a lot in the middle east. Or at least that's what I saw a lot when I went there. There's also a lot of cars but I wanted there to be an empty feeling to reflect how Amy sees the world thanks to her loneliness.

Thank you! I am kinda disappointed that I didn't include more actually, I'm caught up in comparing it to the image of what I wanted in my head.  The custom graphics ate up more time than I wanted them to. (spoiler) is definitely going to be the MC (if  you're thinking about a certain older man) and I'm excited to write about him.

Thank you! Weird is a compliment.

Thank you, the final battle is what I'm most proud of gameplay wise.

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed my characters and battle system. The final boss was my absolute favorite part of making this jam entry, especially because I drew a lot of heavy inspiration from Marx Soul's fight in Kirby Super Star Ultra (one of my favorite boss battles of all time).

Thank you for playing my game!

The battle system definitely needs more work, and I'll probably come back to it at some point to make everything more polished, as I really only focused on making the final boss hard enough. I was worried the genuine moments would be too jarring with the overall tone so I'm very glad you like them.

Thank you for playing my game!

I'm glad you like my characters and their colors. I tried to make Ian and Penny cute despite their slightly off-putting personalities and tendency to overshare.

Yeah I definitely should add more sound feedback in a later update, I guess it kinda slipped my mind. Also I need to give the bosses health bars. The buffs I kinda needed to make vital because otherwise Ian would just be chopped liver. In general I really need to work on the battle system because I put way too much time into getting it working rather than getting it good. 

Dimanche was definitely my favorite character to work on, and the alien thing he had going on was some intense plastic surgery he got done to feel above others. But that felt ooc the more I developed him. He's a fun dork even if he's shady and questionable at times. Thank you for catching that typo btw.

The cum button is a joke, the symbol is from wingdings. There's nothing bound to it, I just thought it was funny.