itch.io

i love that you said that, because that's a whole factor i didn't even think about. of course it's true that if the boss feels hard, then (what i've termed) the easy and obvious approach isn't gonna feel easy and obvious. maybe a further revision would turn down the heat a little bit but cook you a little longer, like lower per-turn damage but aiming for the same amount of total resource drain.... much to consider! thank you for your observations

really love the hard-earned progression from having to completely drain my mp if i want to not deal peanuts for damage, to multiple party members cranking out the deeps. karin carried my team for most of the game because i got queensblade early, but uuva with her full-party speed and def debuffs was my real mvp

i went out if my way to remove those desert corners and still wound up with three in extremely disruptive locations lmao. funny how that goes

some incredible presentation choices going on here, a parade of original and effective devices. i didn't end up connecting with the story, but i was really excited about all the tools used to tell it. it's super cool

i'm reminded once again that it's one of the great simple pleasures of life to read a little story your friend wrote. thanks for the batch of treats.. my favorites are take me fill me and talent show

one of the best villain motivations of all time.. perhaps i too have taken the food i eat for granted

GRGHHL

thanks for your thoughts! my opinion is that a little bit if chip damage promotes a little bit of pressure while you're figuring things out, even if you can suss out a stable defensive strategy, you can't sustain it forever. that's the principle anyway. i'm not convinced it's 100% necessary, but it'd feel wrong if it was straight zeroes. the thing that bothers me is the inconsistency. partly that's the system (i don't think i can math it out so ranged attacks deal 1 while you're in the fray), part of it's the rushed development cycle (ogre bat originally served boar spear's function before i arrived at the concept of reach weapons and revised all the damage formulas late in development, and i cant promise all the changes in the spreadsheet made it into the game), part of it is for tutorial purposes (i'd like all blocked melee attacks to deal 1, but the falchion dealing 0 to the axe guy in the first battle helps communicate that you need to be doing something besides just attacking). i'll be working on untangling this stuff in the next round of revisions..

re: randomization, that's a needle i'm still figuring out how to thread. i like randomization in general and it feels right to me that some enemies should resist it to various degrees. but any time you have a percentage chance in the middle range (i use a lot of 70s and 30s in this) you create a communication problem, and now it takes a lot of experimentation that players generally aren't that motivated to do in order to assess the effectiveness of your status ailments, etc. sometimes i like living with that ambiguity, and i don't like predictability of moves that always or never work. but when you have this many different enemies it's kind of a drag to have to restart the learning process with each one.. my ideal would be to collapse the range of fray resistances to a couple of heuristics (ranged enemies resist a little, flying enemies resist a lot). there's also the possibility of making fray/disarm ALWAYS work if not resisted, and expressing 'fray resistance' purely through enemy reactions - but the sequencing of actions in rm2k3's turn order might end up undoing that, situationally. so i might have to play around a bit to see what feels right.

so yeah, they kind of were both intentional lol! but that just means you're even more right to raise them. thanks for helping me see the realities of these decisions more clearly, it's valuable perspective. you're on your own with the controller but i'm rooting for you. good luck!

i think that's a super solid analysis. that's more or less how i would've liked to do it if i had more time. to be honest i hadn't really thought abut the 50 steps thing, which is a pretty big oversight. you can almost picture two different games because of it... i do like that as a texture, but having two concepts available to contrast with each other now, i can appreciate what valdivia turned into a little more.

if i had WAY more time i probably would've had a more complex economy and diverse range of items to buy, and designed distances around investment calculus, and as i type this i'm realizing the 1-hour limit is the only thing stopping this from spiraling into a full-blown maritime trading sim. probably for the best!

*lizard noises*

cute! i liked playing this after sky & flare maximized my vine awareness

it shouldn't surprise me, but it does, that i have friends who think the easier games are just right, and friends who think the hardest stuff isn't hard enough. i guess i had forgotten that even my people have a range of different tastes and i can't necessarily please them all at the same time.... i guess my own tastes lean on the difficult side too (for the same reason as you, i want the game to make me actually engage with its language), and in principle i believe in shooting to please yourself. but i think the flexible objectives in sketches 3 and 4 really let me have my cake and eat it too, so i'd like to aim for that sort of thing whenever time permits.

in any case i appreciate the vote of confidence. thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts.

(re: valdivia, i just think exploration is more interesting when it's weighed against your survival needs. a situation where you're committing suicide to explore because death.. feels like flouting the premise rather than engaging with it. although maybe it's just another kind of engagement....)

great to hear that it came together like that for you. i wondered if the dungeon's design would lead anyone to start looking for entrances via the overworld instead of discovering them by progressing in the dungeon. i thought about having multiple disconnected sections so you HAD to look for hidden entrances on the overworld (which would be smaller to compensate) but ultimately felt better about this instead.. it's definitely something i'd like to explore more in the future

this was really sweet! it's straight-shooting and earnest in a way that takes me back to like, 00s forum rp, full of personal touches that root the "standard" rpg storytelling elements in a specific perspective and make them feel fun and new again. i'm glad that perspective includes dudes who like each other. extra kudos on the last twist which totally got me

always love seeing your stuff zim, your releases over the past couple years have all been treats. please keep it up!

i love what a neat little experience you've put together out of all these weirdo skills and encounter designs. i had a great time figuring out a route that would let me beat  the game if i was... "indecisive". the process of learning what different skills i can learn from losing different battles was really rewarding, particularly for how hard i had to go out of my way to figure out how to lose them. i feel really lucky that i accidentally poisoned myself fighting a wizard on my first playthrough, because it resulted in me losing very quickly against a hehehe, and i realized on a subsequent playthrough that that's not an easy thing to do at all. and skills i got from losing hard-to-lose battles (particularly alluring song) really saved my ass in the fight against the moon. so, really creative and interesting little rpg possibility space. thanks for putting it out there so i can enjoy it and learn from it >:3

i really like the use of the same map to represent multiple different spaces, and how different each instance felt. and great style all around. super cool stuff

I'M BAD

every time i play one of your games i feel like you must have lived 100 years of life somehow. this must be the poet's power.. well, i'm off to play more great greed

my kobold children shall eat nothing but LETTUCE and they will like it

leaving the game running all evening just to jam out to the game over theme

got a bunch of chuckles out of me. it really did feel like the kind of rpg maker game i might have played as a teenager (but probably way funnier than any of them actually were). nice stuff

i really like the way this game makes you move through each map, slow and methodical, attending the details of level geometry.. makes for a very distinct experience of these familiar maps but also just a really interesting way of existing in them. i really liked the cutscene in the forest, it was the first one i saw and already i could really feel the horror of the little girl unknowingly approaching, i thought it was immaculately executed. really cool stuff

i'm really touched that you would play this one to the end in its current state. i was having my doubts at the last minute, but it's super heartening to hear that the vision came through and that it was technically possible to finish. i'll try and polish it up good so it doesn't take the next challenger 6 hours lmfao. thank you

really cool design in this one. v yvxr ubj gur vapernfvatyl qvssvphyg ybbcf rapbhentr lbh gb bcgvzvmr lbhe ebhgr. v unq n terng gvzr gelvat gb zvyx rirel ynfg uvg cbvag v pbhyq va zl guveq plpyr. vg raqrq hc abg orvat arprffnel ng nyy, ohg vg'f fgvyy n sha qrfvta fcnpr gb ratntr jvgu. great stuff!

bu ab qba'g jbeel v sbhaq gur sberfg, v whfg arire unq zl "uhu, jurer ryfr pna v hfr guvf" zbzrag. cbffvoyl sbe gur orfg orpnhfr v guvax Oyrffvat pbirevat hc Dhvpx jbhyq unir qevira zr penml yznb

oh my goddddd lmfao. i think beating a game like this is a matter of asking the right questions. realizing in the aftermath how many questions with important answers i just never thought to ask, suddenly the game almost retroactively feels easy. almost

NYFB BU ZL TBQ v pna'g oryvrir v arire gevrq cunfvat guebhtu rkvgf jvgu fuvsg.. tbq gung'f fb pbby, v jvfu v unq svtherq vg bhg ba zl bja, v whfg fnj vg abj ernqvat guebhtu gur pbzzragf. v unq nyy gur pyhrf..... nuuu. bar ynfg snagnfgvp qrgnvy va n snagnfgvp tnzr

all done! the big stumbling block was svthevat bhg ubj gb trg gur zvenpyr sehvg jvgubhg fxl qlvat, v fcrag ntrf ybbxvat sbe n jnl gb erivir ure orsber ernyvmvat v pbhyq whfg ersyrpg gur qrngu fcryy yby. jbbbcf.. gura gur svefg gvzr v orng gur obff v sbetbg gb bcra gur zrah evtug njnl naq gur cbvfba xvyyrq zr yby....... anyway this is a perfect beautiful brilliant game that manages to incorporate everything i love about rpgs, thank you for this delicious feast of poison

very early on i thought "this is the coolest rpg i've ever seen" and it's only gotten better from there. i'm not done yet but i wanted to tell you "lol" and also "lmao" at the suggestion of this being a 30-60 minute game, i've put like two hours in and i'm still investigating a way to beat the final boss

seems kinda gay

really like the balance of this one, not just for how much drama it squeezed out of its relatively boss fights, but how stuff like individual level-ups feeling huge and the slow walking speed helped achieve a sense of scale and progress that is a) impressive for a ~60 minute game and b) necessary to sell a "village boy beats the demon lord" type story. possibly the best job i've seen of distilling a traditional rpg story down to its essentials, both in terms of sheer brevity and in terms of the effectiveness and completeness of its drama. great job on the formalism john

i appreciate that. i feel like i'm on some path to making increasingly austere, minimalist rpgs that please no one but myself lol.. but also part of the equation is like, if you're only gonna add one or two skills to a game, just for the sake of having skills, what's actually gonna lead to interesting dynamics? i don't have a good feel for that yet, so when i add skills on a single character this quickly it feels a bit like throwing darts with a blindfold on. i guess that's something i should try to develop a better feel for too though! so i will probably keep giving characters random skills just to see what happens

i am not worthy of the goblin gold. but i had fun trying! very cool thing to do with 2k3's event system, and especially to do with this particular cutter map

i'll try and give myself a little more credit, because i think i agree with you about it feeling "complete". there's too much stuff for the process, but for the product it feels about right. i think everything feels like it's serving a purpose and nothing important is missing. i think my actual issue with the product is that the level design is kind of slapdash and i feel like you sort of just end up fighting everything anyway. there are definitely enough resources to, and i'm not sure there are that many opportunities to reduce the strain with smart routing... if i had more time, i would've liked to stop and think through what different enemy placements or level geometries mean for decision making. and maybe make the boss a teensy bit scarier.

but i recognize that rough level design is kind of a luxurious problem to have given the circumstances :P thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts will, i always love hearing them

thanks a bunch for playing unity, i'm really glad to have your perspective on this one. especially the reflection on the gatekeeper name matter... i often worry i'm being too obvious in my messaging and taking all the precious ambiguity out of the equation. but in short games like these, you don't necessarily have a lot of time to attune players to specific ways of communicating, so maybe it pays to be a little unsubtle. so i think you're right, i think naming it gatekeeper was the right call after all.

also i vow to vindicate the slow-walking perverts someday >:)

it's a tough thing to convince someone that a character is useless enough to be worth killing off,  i think i seriously underestimated how complex a thing that would be to get across. so even if you can intuit that diao will be useful later, it's not the foremost obstacle - or like, if you did conclude "oh, someone has to die" i feel like diao would still remain a pretty strong candidate? up until the point where you confirmed that the second phase existed and was good for dark magic. i dunno. i think i'm gonna have to play around a bunch before i get this one where i want it :P

i am adding it to my notes that both the drama of the dungeon crawl and the humor of the monster names are coming through. really appreciate the thoughts, both of you

great info! an important reminder that you don't have to nail every piece to get the point across, if even one sheep got you thinking about routing then i communicated what i hoped for, and that's plenty enough for one little game.

wow! i love what you've done with the place. the way you've dressed these maps up with new details and pilfered game sprites, and couched them in this moody orb and custom system graphics and sounds... you've really transformed them into something unexpected and gorgeous, it's a real delight.