MV - Automatic Messiah (demo available) (post-apocalyptic CRPG) Updated Oct.21, 2025! Lots of new stuff! Announcement!

First issue I ran into was on the title screen, the game autostarts in fullscreen. That's fine for some people, but it makes it tough to take notes or jump to a different window to check something. If you're going to include fullscreen, please make sure there's an easy way to turn it off in the options menu.

When it came to choosing a difficulty I think changing how the difficulties are worded would be good, since right now Normal mode states enemy health is lowered and Tactical has unchanged health. I'm sure that's because of a plugin for the health, but I don't think you have to actually tell players that enemies are weaker in Normal mode. They don't know what the default health is, so you could say that Normal has a normal amount of health and Tactical has increased health. That would make Tactical feel more like a challenge instead of the 'default' difficulty.

The intro sets the scene well, and the use of placeholder images was smart even if the people's faces on the ai art were horrific. I do want to suggest a small edit to the Ambassador's intro image: remove its belly button. It's a tiny detail, but not having a belly button can trigger our "that's not a person" instinct and will make it seem even more robotic. It would have also been nice if I had some options on how the Ambassador responds in the intro instead of waiting until after the fight with Jooey's goons, just to help set up its personality early on.

The dirty and desolate exterior map does sell the post-apocalyptic setting, but it felt a bit too familiar to me. I know you're taking inspiration from Fallout and games like it, but it would be interesting if there was still vegetation around. Humans may have mostly died off, but that doesn't mean that plants have, especially if the nuclear destruction was a while ago. Lush green fields of grass may not quite fit the post-apocalypse style you're going for, but what about mutated cacti or ivy? Something to consider if you were trying to find ways to make the game stand out from other brown-toned apocalypses.

The controls worked well enough, I did get caught on some tiny things a points, but overall it was fine. I do think the movement plugin didn't want to play well with events though, since sometimes I had trouble interacting with a box I was pretty sure was in front of me and enemies would run away from me before circling back to attack. That made battles a little difficult to start, since I couldn't walk into them to start battle and had to wait until they bumped into me. I'm not sure how to fix that, but looking into a way to make the events 'smarter' in regards to interacting would make exploring maps more enjoyable.

Battles are where I had the most fun and also got the most annoyed. I started on Casual difficulty but after a few easy fights with the dogs I switched to Tactical for a more interesting challenge. Enemies being able to call for reinforcements was a neat effect, but it felt like it happened a bit too often in battles. I would have preferred the enemies to appear right off the bat sometimes instead of always waiting a turn or two to show up, since that would change how I approached the battles. Since I knew it was likely another enemy would appear later, I ended up saving my stronger attacks just in case I needed it, leading to sometimes longer battles than they should have been. Though I do get that that's mostly because of my playstyle.

Having a single damage dealer with two supporters is a neat idea and it worked pretty well, but I do wish that Fabricator could use the Grenade instead of just making it. It may change later in the game, but in the demo I rarely had enough enemies to make giving up a turn of healing or a Barbs of Light worthwhile to make a grenade. Speaking of Barbs of Light, did you mean for it to be so powerful? It was pretty much a necessity in battles, since it was the only other way to damage enemies when it wasn't Ambassador's turn. So instead of playing around with Fabricator's other skills I found myself mostly focusing on using Barbs of Light and then recovering its Battery so I could heal or recast it.

Computer's Scan skill was one of my most-used skills, though I think you should adjust where the weakness appears because sometimes it blended into the background or ended up hidden behind the name popup window when selecting a target. For the most part I didn't use Predict because its other skills were more useful to my playstyle, if it also decreased enemy defense slightly I would have been more likely to use it. The Delay Pattern skill was extremely useful once I got it, and made a few battles a piece of cake since I could pair it up with Adrenaline to destroy strong enemies before they could attack. I don't know if it balances out more later, but that skill may need a short wait between uses or cost at least 10 Battery so Computer's other skills that do have a cost don't seem lesser in comparison.

The tips gained from hovering over enemy states were super useful, but I wish there was a key press option to see them instead of using the mouse. I prefer to play rm games with the keyboard only or mouse only and in this case having to use both was really the only option. I also am curious if there's a way to get rid of Septic Contamination, because it was doing 30 damage to me every turn and lasted the whole battle. If there was a skill that cured it, even if it caused Ambassador to lose a turn of attacking it could make for some difficult but interesting decisions. Overall battles were fun enough that I went out of my way to battle every enemy. I just wish that they dropped equipment or other items so I could have seen how those could change battles.

I had major issues with the lockpicking minigame because of one dumb reason: I play games with the sound off to avoid headaches. Since I couldn't hear the tumbler noise cue and couldn't open the menu, I was trapped in the tutorial minigame and had to reload to avoid testing every combination to beat it. It would be very helpful for your players who play without sound (or can't hear the sound) if there was a visual cue like a burst of sparks or the tumbler glows for a moment when it's in the right spot. The lockpicking controls themselves were a little finicky too, for the minigame it may be better to stick with grid movement or limit the player to only moving to the spots right under the tumblers.

In the police station I ran into some framerate issues (dropping to and staying below 20 repeatedly), which led to some jerky movements. I'm not sure if it was caused by your lighting plugin or another event, but you should look into that. The darkness itself made seeing the zombies on the map and in battles difficult as well, I don't know if you wanted your zombies to blend in with the battlebacks but it took away from their scariness to me since I could just see blobs to attack.

A small thing I'd like to see changed with the mapping is to have more of edges visible if there are events near them, especially where the window was on the second floor. I didn't realize there was a window there at first, and if I could see the whole thing I would have been able to guess what was coming. Personally that would've made that whole scene better.

Bugs/Errors:
⦁ After choosing the Remorse option after the intro fight, Ambassador's dialogue is green like Computer's (not positive if this is a bug or not, but seemed odd)
⦁ Can walk on the blue tiles in the base, making me able to stand on the edge of the ceiling

⦁ The debug barrel: I found a barrel in the center of the town area keeps giving me things even though it doesn't have a green highlight. Might want to move that off to a side, unless you wanted people to find it easily

⦁ Can walk close enough to roof of building near police station that Ambassador can stand partly on the roof

Yeah, I'm not sure why I wrote it this way. Maybe I thought it was being transparent, but it does fall more under "showing how the sausage is made" and is confusing.
That's not a bad idea. In general I want to hire someone to do edits so he looks more robotic, since NPC's are able to tell he isn't human just off a glance.
My plan right now is to revisit the first couple maps toward the end of mapping. I just don't want to get stuck fiddling with this stuff and not making progress. I'm entirely new to parallax mapping (not that I was ever an expert in mapping with tiles either) so I figure it'll be good to come back after I've had the experience of doing a bunch of other maps.
I'm not sure either. Seems like a problem with RPGMaker itself and the pixel movement plugin. I can make the enemy collision boxes bigger, but not sure if it ever won't be a little jank.

I thought about lowering the safety buffer between when an enemy aggros and when they chase (they can only start combat during the chase), or maybe making the buffer time change based on difficulty.
Hm, I thought I only did this like 4 times... To be honest, I thought about doing it more. But if it has the effect of creating uncertainty already then I don't need to push it. The whole reason I did that is I found that "hardcore" players would "solve" combat and... well, the opposite would happen. They would get by on doing the minimum and not use better skills/ammo/chemicals.

Hopefully this makes more sense as the game goes and the player gets more attribute points and equipment and their build takes shape. IE you can play more conservative/tanky, OR make your costly abilities more spammable. Ideally this is a motivator for chasing that power curve!
It used to be half as strong but cost only 10. I buffed/nerfed it so that it could satisfy that "the other characters don't do damage" concern while also pushing people to use Reroute Power more.

Something that doesn't come up in the demo is that it is only supposed to work against melee attacks, so there's that downside. But otherwise... yeah. It's your bread-and-butter when you don't need to heal and don't want to spend Chemicals. At least that's how I see it.
Yeah, the scan needs new visuals. I had to stop myself because I kept making things I didn't like and needed to move on. Will need to revisit. I also want to move it to the side inside of above the enemy since pressing left and right does weird things in RPGM when there's a vertical row of "enemies."

I definitely nerfed Predict and Lightwall into the ground. I want players to use their skills and not just coast on auto-attacks.

Definitely happy to see someone abuse Delay Pattern. It comes in pretty late, so I get that there's not much chance for folks to play around with it. I considered giving it a small battery cost, but I wasn't sure. It's infrequently useful and it has to compete with things like Scan, doing more melee damage, and cheating battery costs for the other two. All of which are very often useful. I'll keep an eye on it, but I think it's okay? Hmmm...
I do want to add something just like this. Not just for KB players; it makes controller possible. I'll have to commission a plugin edit or something to do this.
Not a bad idea. I might make it pretty subtle, though.
I tried someone's change to this pixel movement plugin that allowed turning the feature on and off with an event call. It broke other things, though. I think my cheap answer will be to slow the player down so they don't move so frantically.
Yes, this is one of my listed known issues. I fear I will be chasing this for a long time.
I'm not sure what this means. You mean you want the outer walls of the map to be more prominent?
Hm, it seems this isn't making sense to people. This isn't the first comment I've had on this. I was trying to use green for thoughts, white for out loud. But folks seem to think "green for Computer" and then not understand why the player is green. Maybe I'll do italics or something.
I think this is happening because I changed the player sprite at some point and it's a few pixels different than what I had built before. Might try shifting the player collision box or changing the size of it. Otherwise I'll just adjust the level collision.
I'm not sure how or why this exists. Some test I made and forgot about, probably. Easy enough to remove!

Personally I'm not sure if the pixel movement adds a lot to the game, there's a lot you can do without it to still make the game look good.

It could be cool if the player could rush an enemy before it aggros, maybe gaining the element of surprise. But even if that wasn't added it would be nice if bumping into the enemy would start the battle instead of the enemy being in full control of that.
Was it really that few times? It felt like it happened often, but since there were only so many fights in the demo maybe it just seemed like a lot to me.

I think the fact I only got 3 attribute points did affect how I approached fights, I wasn't able to play around with my build as much as I wanted so I ended up playing defensively for the most part even though I prefer hitting hard and fast. While I know that it could mess with the game's balance later, for your demo it may be nice for players to start with a few extra points to mess with.
I did find Bards (...I'll keep that typo) of Light very useful and it's good to hear that it only protects against melee, that should help with balancing. Have you considered having it defend per attack instead of per turn? As if it used up its power each time it's damaged an enemy, and perhaps Fabricator could have an attribute that could increase the number of times it can defend. That may be tough to balance though, so it's just an idea to consider.
What if you made Predict and Lightwall stronger again, but gave them a turn or two cooldown? That would force players to still use their other skills, but make Predict and Lightwall still decent options depending on how the battle's going.
Subtle is fine, as long as there is something visible so it's not fully reliant on sound.
Instead of that, what if you evented it so the lockpick hopped from tumbler to tumbler instead of having the player fully control it's movement? Just put events next to the tumbler spots that move the player to the next tumbler when they bump into the events.
I pulled this from your video of the game, hence the blurriness, but this is what I mean. Instead of the full window being visible, it's just the lower edge. You don't always have to have full walls visible (especially if the gameplay isn't near them) but for something like this it would be nice to see the whole wall with the windows easier to see.


Italics could work, but another option could be to add some inner thoughts earlier in the intro that is clearly not heard by Father (maybe Computer reacts to the thoughts, which is how it's introduced). It just worked out that I chose the green Remorse option and suddenly Ambassador's words were green, so it seemed strange.
I vote leave debug barrel, it made getting ammo a lot easier! :guffaw: But I totally understand leaving something in after testing something quickly, you may want to give your other barrels a quick once-over just in case.

Ouch. Well, it definitely adds a lot of work. But I'm pretty convinced it will be important for reaching outside the RM community. So I guess it'll be the cross I die on :kaosigh:
I think surprise attacks would up-end the turn economy too much to balance. I do think there is something to players just wanting to run into enemies and fight them. Right now that buffer is 60 frames. I think I'll make a common event that checks difficulty and changes the wait based on that so I can swap that in and change the system on the fly. I mean, it could even be 0 frames waited and they would immediately chase you and be able to start a fight.
I went back and checked. Only 4 out of 14 encounters (16 if I count the tutorials)!

Yeah, there's no room to make builds with so few points, so few weapons, and zero programs (the programs change your skills significantly. For example, there's one that gives you 2 charges of Deadly Strike). I would be very interested to hear what your game plan was/what you ended up doing!
Hm, or it could be a program. I predict I will be going back and forth on tuning this thing for a while :stickytongue:
Maybe I'm sticking to close to an old game philosophy of making sure the player can do SOMETHING (sort of like a garbage melee button in an FPS) in case all other options are exhausted. But I just feel like not giving them much use outside of what they do now.

That being said, there is room to itemize it if players want to chase that. Both predict and lightwall can be improved by equipping better "weapons" (not in demo). But also predict is improved by the computer's RAM attribute, although not by much. The RAM attribute is a little weak at the moment so I could see upping that. And maybe make a program that improves lightwall.
So I imagined a scenario here; a VERY HARD lock:
Imagine there's 5 tumblers instead of 3, and the chambers are also longer meaning there are more possible 2 vs 3 move combos to figure out. The player will figure out each tumbler one at a time. If they are stuck going in order, that means they have to keep clicking the first ones to work on the later ones. With free movement, you can try the later tumblers and come back to the first ones that you already know. It's a bit of QoL I predict will become important with harder locks.
Ah, okay. I kinda made a weird decision when mapping this area out and walls. I will also be looking to redo this map in addition to the first one later on. I will likely have more prominent walls in the future :wink: