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

• Every weapon now has a secondary skill that can be unlocked
• Story intro edited to be overall faster and get player into a dungeon sooner
• UI updates for battle, equip, skills, store, and supplies:
  • No more outdated info
  • Consistency of information: flavor text at the top, stats in the big window
  • Skills no longer have flavor text
  • Crafting items now show up in inventory
    • Recipes show their material requirements in description
    • Materials show general information about what recipes they are for
• Damage to subsystems now carries over to the main target when destroyed!
  • Morality method also carries over, too!
• Exp now shown on the main menu

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• Increased duration of Stable to 3 turns
• Lots of balance stuff for all weapons
  • Namely non-lethal weapons, which generally do more damage but less effective CC
  • Off-Balance, Staggered, and Dazed changed to 10%, 15%, and 20% respectively
• Increased cost of Chem Box
• Slightly lowered the amount of Ammo from random loot and enemies
• Slightly lowered the amount of Chemicals from random loot

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• Changed art for Big Blade
• Swapped starting weapons from Carbon Blade and Carbon Baton to Sharpened Tire Iron and Tire Iron to fit new intro (no other changes to function/balance)
• Swapped Melee Sync mod out for Vibro Core: adds a non-lethal DoT to enemies hit
  • Melee Sync will return at a later level as it does not feel as useful at the start of the game

Again I really appreciate you getting this far! Maybe I assumed people would naturally stop before this point... not sure what I was thinking. But the simple solution is that I'll throw in something at the exit of Crysdale to say the next area is "under construction" or something.
Ouch this one kinda hurts, heh. Anything in particular feel like placeholder?
So I have a machine that was built in 2015 running on an nVidia 970 that I plan to use as my min spec. I do find the laptops are... troublesome. Do you normally run into issues with RM games that use a lot of parallax mapping + lighting mod?

Also, I do know of a bug where loading a save puts the lighting in some kind of bad state which obliterates the FPS, so maybe you ran into that. Unfortunately I am yet to find a solution for that.
This is exasperated if you're on an HD, but still visible on SSD. It's because spritesheets are being swapped out, that's all. So I'm hoping I can fix this with a preloader. Otherwise I have to do sprite-ing another way :kaoeh:
Yeah, this is a casualty of the removal of AI art. I have a plan in place to get something back in eventually, don't worry!
The main limitation is RPG Maker. I don't think larger maps are that much harder, unless you mean breaking up a map into multiple parts. That does get hard, for many reasons, yeah.

The next (gameplay) zone I want to do will be bigger. I guess I'm keeping things mostly bite sized and there will only be like 2 "big" zones by the time it's all done. But I'm definitely interested to see how people navigate through these areas. For the big zones, I do want to have more of a navigational puzzle to be able to get around and find everything. Hmmmm....
I have been trying to balance the "too much talking" thing. So perhaps you'll appreciate that the next planned zone is a "city" with much more quests and finding out what's going on. But it'll still contain my attempts to streamline the standard RPG nonsense to keep the player doing stuff.
This is super interesting to hear! I'm very curious to see how players figure out the combat.

If I may ask: what weapon did you end up using? Did you mod it? Did you use the Technique Program (alt fire)?
This issue has come up in the past. Admittedly, I've been stubborn about it. I feel like a lot of the suggested fixes I've received are what I call "QoL'ing out the gameplay." But I just had a... possibly controversial idea come to me about how to solve it.

I'll try to put it in the next big-ish patch (it's something that'll need a fair bit of playtesting to know if it feels good).
Maybe I've been a bit too slow introducing mechanics... oops! Well, I'll have more mechanics in the coming zones. You've just been dealing with bums and dogs so far. Later you get to more militaristic enemies, weird mutants, and robot stuff. So they'll make more sense as enemies with more tactics/tools at their disposal.
I was troubled by this puzzle. There's only so much variety in 9 digits, heh. I should probably come up with some wrinkle that makes the puzzle a little more challenging besides having repeated numbers...
This is a very interesting take! I'm curious to see what others say. I mean, it's less work for me if I don't make this loop break lol
Thanks, I'm doing what I can!

I love the maps and the Fallout 1&2 vibes you have going! (I watch your Fallout long plays.) I also had poor frame rate on most maps, but you said that was to be expected. I played on normal difficulty for about an hour according to my save file. I like the intro and thought it was just right in length, not too long, not too short and definitely not too wordy. Something odd I noticed during the name input scene was blank squares tracking the mouse which lead me to click to see what it would do which turned the input to the default style and then it wouldn’t accept typing. Also some of the letters overlap each other. There’s a few script snippets that fix this floating around the forums.

Battles are well balanced and fun. Computer and fabricator never received damage so it’s unclear why they health. Also for skills that only effect chassis, why do I have to select him. Would be cooler if it just fired off the skill kind of like how user scoped skills work.

First playable map had ~30fps and some stutter. Also the NPC/Enemy sprites flickered sometimes during their behaviour animations. I’m not sure if preloading them would help or how you’re changing their images. I had to tend to my kids right as I was entering the police station so I had to quit and come back and the map reloaded at 60fps! Upon entering the police station, frames dropped to sub 30 hovering sometimes around 8fps. Pathfinding for mouse movement would routinely get stuck on just about everything and sometimes the pixel movement was awkward with interacting with environmental loot. The way your game is set up, I prefer the mouse movement but with getting stuck on things I would have to use the keyboard and mouse almost like I was playing a FPS game. I’m not entirely sold on the pixel movement, it’s always so janky and such a hassle in RPG Maker, but I feel for this kind of mapping and game it would be a bonus if it was smoother and the pathfinding more polished than it is at this point. I did notice the less enemies on screen, because I killed them, the better the FPS would become.

I like the arrows telling me where the transfer events are but would personally prefer them to be player touch rather than action button. That could just be a me thing though. I also love the interactables/loot flashing green to let the player know what can be interacted with at a quick glance. I thought the lockpicking scene was pretty cool and original. It’s simple but it works. The “hacking” minigame is a little awkward and when Computer is facing up interacting with the top middle square, you can’t see the number, so I had to walk around to the side to see what I was doing. Maybe make Computer semi-transparent or use a smaller sprite to represent the player cursor or something.

On level up the Tip dialogue says: “All of the player’s damaging skills are increased by level.” Like a level, one level, 2 level, or… Also what does each attribute do? Most are self explanatory or intuitive but Efficiency isn’t and Charisma isn’t explained until a little later. Maybe lock upgrading attributes until the base is unlocked or give a quick summary of the attributes when the tip tells me to use my attribute points.

Mouse tracking for the quest log is kind of weird. I’m not sure how to explain it. Maybe it is because you have to select the available quests and then scroll to the active one and then click on it to view. Would be a lot cooler if it would just jump into the active ones from the get go.

After talking to Gim the first time and before fixing the terminator, the fps tanked to a solid 5 and stayed there until after shopping. The low fps and the pixel movement made interacting with the robot extremely difficult. It’s a little weird how I shopped at the Gim’s cart and then exited the shop scene and then was told by computer to buy the thing, meaning I had to interact with the cart and re-enter the shop scene. I love the opening to the base, very cool touch. After interacting with the sleeping pod thing and doing the tutorial, it continues to glow/flash green, so I interacted with it again and had to do the tutorial twice. Afterwards, I traveled west and the next map went into super low fps and that’s about where I stopped playing.

Some thoughts about fps. Does the pixel movement contribute to the low fps? Personally it wouldn’t be a deal breaker for me to not have it, although it would be preferred. Have you tried upgrading your nwjs? It can help with performance. You could also try indexing the colors on your parallax maps. It can greatly reduce their size, which reduces the load on the computer. You can lose some gradients and a little bit of detail but it’s more obvious over semi-transparent areas. Could be worth a shot.

Anywho, really cool game and concept. I’ve been following your progress for awhile and like the direction your game is heading.

Just wanted to say thanks for the views, too!
I'm not sure I worded it that way, but I will say there is a definitely a "min spec" that cannot be ignored. I think the nature of the stuff I'm using does push RPG Maker pretty hard, but in general the engine can only be made so efficient for older machines, as far as I know.

It definitely sucks because I know it will attract people with older machines (or like Chromebooks) but I don't think I can really fix that. I mean, I'll look for optimization, sure, but it's never going to get to the point some users think it should be.

For the record, it runs MUCH better than what you and RPGLord are describing on my min spec machine (last I checked, anyway, it's stuffed in a closet atm).
I'll have to get on this!
They do receive damage from the one irradiated zombie in the police station. But other than that, not at the moment.

Having them take damage does create an interesting wrinkle in combat, so I'll be doing that here and there :wink:
Funny enough, the AoE and user only skills that skip the selection is technically a bug. But I like it. Sounds like you like it!

At some point I'll decide which is correct, based on feedback. It will simply take a little bit for me to figure out how to fix whichever way it goes.

Oh, yeah I should really add this to the known issues. It's a conflict between the pixel movement plugin and Yanfly region restrictions. I believe I will need to hire a programmer to help me with this one, so it'll probably be a while before it gets fixed :hswt:

Clicking on stuff can be rough. I wonder if I can maybe increase their hit boxes or something.
So the maps are totally off-grid. The pixel movement also comes with custom collision box shapes. I can't have cool maps without this stuff! I feel like boxy collision/movement is worse than the struggles of doing pixel movement. It also helps the game feel like it's not made in RM, lol

I wish the pathfinding was smart enough to go around things (in addition to fixing the Yanfly region bug) but that's just default RM logic.
It's not just a you thing! Definitely something I think about changing all the time.
Semi-transparent sounds like a good idea. I do that a little bit here and there, it makes her feel non-material.
I guess I could just point out that every damage skill updates, too. So something like: "Check the skill description to see this change."
They have descriptions in the attribute screen :hswt:
Bad UI flow. I'm thinking of defaulting to opening up "all objectives" and then just skipping the step where you choose the objective category.

This "click on a thing before you can click on what you want" is all over RM's default UI, too. It sucks!
This is surprising. It makes me suspect your processor is... old? Dying? This is like just one parallel process (running every 4 frames) that starts up. That's rough! :eek:
Hm, I guess so. You can skip this step by buying the thing before she can point it out. It's set to 0 cost (for the first purchase) so I hoped that would entice people. I guess I figured narratively she needed to see it? So narrative logic vs game flow... hmmmm....
"Had to?" You shouldn't have to do that tutorial ever. You don't mean a scene replayed, do you? Because both times you should be able to pick "Maybe later." I keep it flashing because I assume players will skip it and then try Diplomacy and get super confused so they'll need to come back to it, heh.
The custom collision, I believe, is the part of that plugin that's a strain. That, and the lightning mod in areas with more lights. I try not to do too much lights. And I do try to optimize the collision by having fewer boxes. But I'm sure this will still be a problem for some machines.
Yes, it broke everything and I got scared, heh. Maybe I'll try it again later when I do optimization stuff in alpha or beta.
I think this suggests an improvement in RAM performance, which I don't think is the main culprit. The biggest map is the first one, which doesn't seem to be the worst area for people.
Thanks again! You know, I'm trying to pick games to do for the feedback festival and I might do yours :wink:

-Button rebinding is always nice.
-The font was a bit hard to read. I have poor eyesight, but it might help to make it a little bigger or change it.
-I liked the intro and general idea of the story, however, the dialogue was a bit hard to get through
-The first thugs you meet are incomprehensible. I couldn't tell what they were saying and it felt a bit forced in my opinion.
-I'm personally not a fan of the artstyle, however, most of the maps looked good. The only exception would be the first abandoned building you go into, which was visually chaotic.
-Sometimes characters would disappear for a frame or two during cutscenes.
-The little bleeps when characters talked were great. Definitely keep those.
-The combat was interesting. I didn't get super far (more on that later), but it was better than most RM games
-The main draw for me was the idea of three characters with dedicated jobs. Usually in a game, I don't like using assess or support skills, because I always want to do damage. Having dedicated characters forced me use more strategy and made combat a bit more interesting.
-The lockpick minigame was actually pretty fun, although I did find the tutorial to be confusing.
-After I got back to the base and obtained the map, the framerate started to drop. I tried to continue, helping the old hobo, but the framerate was so low I couldn't get through it. That's where I stopped.

I do want to ask about the frame drops, if I may. Did you play continuously or did you load a save at some point? Did this occur after entering combat in that zone, or just right when you entered the zone?

I have some stuff I'm working on that should fix some of the frame rate issues, and I'm curious to see if it solves things for the lower end PC's. Although that's another question: how to rate the gaming ability of your PC. I don't want to get too personal there, but last I checked the game runs fine on my 10 year old min spec (although there are still specific issues that trigger drops).

You know I was just reading some feedback for a different game where players HATED the beeps. I'm glad they're pleasant for you. Maybe I should share my thoughts on how to make dialogue beeps less grating with folks who aren't sure how to fix such an issue.

I'm glad you seem generally positive on the game. I'll have to consider some of your dings alongside other player feedback before making any changes.

Thanks again!