MZ - Drew's Adventure

A journey about self-discovery, fighting, friendship, and a pineapple.

Quick Summary of the Story:
(everything here might be modified!)

Drew and his friends Cube and Stevhen go to the newly opened convention center. Stevhen is kidnapped by a drunk furry named Alpha, and Drew and Cube go save him, supposedly killing Alpha. They then meet with Josh, who wants them to find a 'special thing' in the Dungeons. They do that, and it turns out to be a golden pineapple. They escape the dungeons through a hole in the top of them, and end up on the top of Mount Celestia. They then travel through a multitude of environments to find their way home.

That's all I'm really solid on for now.

Endings:
Canon/True - Let Drew fall into his temptations, and collect fursuit parts. Despite the error messages that pop up, and Stevhen's trauma, everything works out in the end, and Alpha becomes a better person (and boyfriend!).

Bad/Good - Keep Drew away from everything he wants. Be good and stay in line. We don't need character development, just friendship. Although... this wasn't the plan that God had for Drew...

Gameplay:
Typical 'quirky Earthbound-inspired indie RPG about depression' stuff!
Plenty of talking and checking, if you ever find yourself lost, try talking to some NPCs, or check anything that looks suspicious.
Battles are time progressed, like FFVI.
Everyone shares TP, and it can be used to use team skills that you learn through your adventure. Each team skill has a funny cutscene, and it requires everyone using it to be present.
Other skills are used with Energy, which slowly drains like HP. TP is earned by performing actions, and lost by taking damage. Guarding heals HP/EN, and restores more TP than attacking does.
Using skills/attacking may trigger one of a few minigames to play, as well.

After 4 years... the demo is COMPLETE!
I've made ~80% of the music (my friend made the rest), as well as all the art and events.

Biggest Inspirations:

• The MOTHER Series (Especially Earthbound!)
• Undertale/Deltarune
• OMORI
• Final Fantasy VI

Remember kids, this game is rated T for Teen! It says crap! ...And other stuff!


Screenshots:

DEMO!:
Play here!

Learn more about the main 4 party members here!

Use this little banner thingy to show support for the game!

Yes!

Very cute looking game.

Thank you!!

Might as well update this lol

Demo trailer!

The game has a demo now! It only took 4 years :p

So I had a shot at this with difficulty 1 higher than normal, but got picked apart by some birds after going outside. I ran away. Drew started with 1 HP after the nightmare anyway, with no obvious place to heal up so I'm really puzzled how this game's supposed to be played... EDIT: so I noticed that you can eat the pizza to heal up.

Thoughts:

• The opening battle is (I think) unwinnable yet all you can do is swing. On Normal difficulty this fight is rrrrreeeeeeaaaaalllyyyyy long and boring.
• Since the coach and the Pizza serve functions essential to the game, there really should be a visual cue to guide the player here.
• You go outside and are picked apart by dogs (on normal mode) and birds (on hard mode). Does not compute what the expectation is here. Am I supposed to get some equipment somewhere as except for the tophat the party is butt-naked?
• I'd like to suggest removing the "talking SE" from narrations.

That was my favorite part of the game :kaoswt:

w...was the armor shop not clearly labelled...?

also whaaaat the talking sounds are one of my favorite things in the game ;_;

Sorry I realized it wasn't very clear. I meant the parts where there's no talking taking place: thinking, or just story-telling... The sounds for when the characters are actually talking is absolutely fine!

BTW... since you said the game was easy, I wonder if something was amiss in the build that I downloaded, because I was not able to survive a single encounter with three dogs...


Both times I died upon leaving my house. I reached the shopping mall after disabling random encounters using the scarecrow, but I still had zero cash... so again, it's just not clear what to do.

I absolutely like a challenge, but this just didn't make much sense...

well you DID play on hard mode....

also, the opening fight is unwinnable on the 2 harder difficulties :p
(although you MIGHT be able to squeeze in a victory with good rng)
that part is intentional

No, I also played on normal mode and I encountered three dogs. Not sure how I was supposed to be able to win that with the limited options at hand...

I think I disabled random encounters until I got the feathers, and was able to level up. I also had the stick

this is why i invented the scarecrow lol :p

I mean it's your game, I'm not here to tell you how to do things. Will just say that:

The heal point at home that is not properly explained
The save point at home that is not properly explained
The fact that you practically NEED to use the scarecrow to guarantee safely arriving at a shop

These things I do not consider sound game design. Even Demon's Souls and Bloodborne go easier on its players in the first 10 minutes.

Like I explained in @TRIDIUM 's reply, I don't mean the "voices". It just felt out of place to also have the plplplplpl when no one was talking.

Just to have it absolutely clear: the opening fight being unwinnable is perfectly fine. But especially on normal difficulty it just drags on for no good reason. It's just a missed opportunity because you could just as well use it to prime the player for the combat mechanics, but all he can do is... swing...

So all the hub-bub got me curious and I gave it a download...
I couldn't really stomach more than about 10 minutes.

• Lots of typos.
• The fake 3D camera effect in battle is kind of cool, but nauseating with how often it moves and zooms in especially because:
• The combat is mind-numbing. Hold space, use attack, do nothing else. Made all the worse by how much of an HP sponge everything is.
• Enemy HP is/wasn't clear. I'm still not sure. There are a bunch of weird bars floating another the enemies but none of them seem to respond appropriately? Like I hit an enemy and the red bar doesn't move. I assume that's the HP bar. But maybe it's the green one? Seems like blue is ATB.
• I'm not sure the constant references to much better games is a good idea, because every time I saw them I was thinking, "I could be spending my time playing those games instead of this one."
• The highlight on the menu selection (especially in the title screen) is not very clear. The highlight is virtually invisible.
• I had no sense of direction or purpose. This one we might chock up to me just skimming the text, but I had no clue where to go after:
• Fetch quests that seem like timewasting/padding, like getting a dude's hat who is already wearing a hat. Just because you drew attention to that doesn't change the fact that it still seems pointless. 4th wall jokes don't really excuse bad writing/game play.
• Lots of weird tile errors coupled with
• large, empty maps.
• No key rebinding.
• audio mixing is quite poor. Character voices are very loud, sound effects are medium, music is often too quiet.

I'd highly recommend revising the intro.
You really want to capture the player's attention right away, put your best foot forward. This feels like it's doing a disservice to your hard work.
By the way, the fake 3D camera truly is really cool. I just think you should consider using the effect way more sparingly.

---

Good luck with your game man. I think you got a long, long ways to go with this one.
Keep at it.

So I thought... "okay if you say so, I'll try again". Since I need to have cash to use at the shop anyway, I disabled the scarecrow and walked around. This time I encountered just a pair of birds! Maybe, just maybe, this is doable.

The situation just before trying to run and dying in the process:


It's just... weird.

;_;
that's so weird because the general consensus is that the game was too easy? like even from some of my friends.

also what I'm hearing is that I need to update the intro, and make things more readable.

So having made it to level 2, the difficulty suddenly makes a nosedive with "breathe" becoming available. The stat increase upon level up is enormous. Like, WTF?-level enormous. So yeah I can imagine this becoming a cakewalk now.

What I would like to suggest for the early part:

• Have level 1 stats be those of current level 2, and have level 2 be somewhere in between current level 2 and 3.
• Increase attack power of the opening nightmare (it just drags on and on...).
• Have breathe unlocked right from the start. It will give the player something more than just SWING against an unwinnable enemy.
• The problem of initial enemies being absolute meat shields at level 1 will also be mitigated with the above changes.
• And... go easy on the random variance, especially for healing.

Perhaps you can bulldoze your way through on normal, but you should not make hard mode so dependent on the RNG. At level 1, you need to keep redoing random encounters until you encounter single birds. And even that is holding down the button for ages. I mean... the idea still is that even highest difficulty is fun, right?

The scarecrow being a must-use mechanic (hard-hitting bullies in the shopping center... seriously??) I kind of have my doubts with... but I can see others liking this system.

okay, I'm considering making the opening fight more of a tutorial, that the player wins no matter what. You would level up after it (like in easy/normal mode), and that would make the rest of the game a bit easier.

I haven't played your demo, so this is just my two cents from reading the above posts.

It sounds like people are asking/encourage you to balance your game in a way that is playable and fun for the player.

Saying "okay, I'll make you automatically win" is not more fun than having fights that are impossibly punishing.

Having fun in combat is generally a matter of having choices and making the right ones, not automatically winning or automatically losing or having highly random numbers that make your choices irrelevant.

There are a bunch of threads that have discussions on how to approach balancing the parameters and formulae in your game, in addition to whatever you can analyze in professional games you like.