MV - Fidel & The Pauper's Paradox (Sean Murray)

So it's funny to me, that I clearly was aware how important quick traversal was in the first level I built, the Seas, because from its inception it had both a key item that could be used to create a short-cut and a teleportation system to jump around to specific points on the map.
However, I had tunnel vision (ha) on how I wanted my Cave to be formatted. I felt like these tools could not be used in the level. But thanks to RCX and Wind Ryder, I folded on this.

So in my efforts to improve traversal, firstly, I remastered my teleportation system so I could implement it into the Cave.
The new teleportation system looks like this:


This video was made mostly to show off some of the sound design work I had done (Including positional audio), but it also shows off how it works.

At its absolute basic functionality, it is just a checkpoint system. Whenever you change map or reach certain trigger zones, your position will be saved to a checkpoint.
In my game, whenever you die, you are brought back to town. This checkpoint system means that after you are done fiddling around in town, you can go to the teleporter and jump back to the last checkpoint before you died.
What is unique about this is functionality that had to be built into it because of the way players are able to play the game.

It's a nonlinear game, so players can take on any level they want at any time they want whenever they want. So it is very much possible for a player to go to one level (let's say the cave) and then die (or save and quit - we'll talk about this later), and then decide that they'd rather make some progress in a different level (let's say the Seas.)
With a typical checkpoint system, you are just constantly overwriting your checkpoint with the most recent checkpoint. Well if that's how I did it, then if the player decided to go to the Seas, then when they return to the Cave and use "Restore Fidel's Position", Fidel would be brought back to the Seas. Oh dear. Now poor Fidel would have to trek all the way back to where she left off in her Cave Adventure because she dared to take a break and adventure around the Seas.

So, the checkpoints are unique to each level. When you select "Restore Fidel's Position", Fidel will be restored back to the most recent check point within that specific level!

The cave was designed with this idea of "one way forward." The fish mechanic - allowing the player to catch a fish then throw said fish into lava to create a temporary platform across (yes it's silly) - is designed to facilitate the one way direction of the cave. Once you jump across your temporary fish platform, there may not be a fish to catch on the other side to go back.
The cave being split into what I called a "right ribbon" and "left ribbon" (called ribbons because it's a thin, long, linear path that loops back around on itself), the right ribbon puzzle gimmick is that the player could only test the results of their puzzling later. With the actual elements that control aspects of the puzzle on the lower part of the ribbon, and the ability to complete the puzzle on the upper part of the ribbon, the player needed to observe carefully what the puzzle elements are doing, and have the foresight for how those puzzle elements should be set up for the future.
If the puzzle elements were not set up properly: bad news: It's a one way trip back down the cliff face for you to adjust the puzzle elements, then have to shamefully walk all the way back around to the upper ribbon again. (And sometimes that could be a really long walk).
This is really unfairly punishing to the player. So to alleviate this unnecessary back-tracking, I have changed all of the one-way jump-down points to points where the player can place a ladder to climb down or up.

Now I have finished all of the maps for the Forest level, and all of those initial experiments helped me find some techniques that both speed up the process while also adding more detailing work to the maps. There are 9 maps in total (for the Forest level), I won't share all of them, but take a look at a few of my favorites:

This is first map of the Forest. There is only faint shading, light ambient occlusion around corners plus a shadow on the factory in the top left, and "deep" and "shallow" waters in the Red Juice river. I plan to make a quick revision to this map using some of the newer techniques I used in the following maps...

The forest is designed as a 3x3 square, with each row being tiered above the other. Row 1 being the "highest point" in the forest, the lighting is gentler. Row 2 has slightly heavier shadows. Pictured above is from row 2. As you can see there is some stronger contrast and processing to add additional details to the map.

Row 3, as you can see is much darker, hopefully creating a feeling like you are in the "thick of the forest". One of the map overlays I used to add faux detailing is much more apparent here due to the added contrast between light and shadows.

I have already partially achieved this by creating a call-able autosave event that will overwrite your existing save. This is to prevent save scumming by just aggressively and constantly overwriting your existing save to prevent you from "rewinding time".
However, the new part of this is how to handle loading the game there after.
I am thinking that whenever the player loads their game, they will be returned to the town. Easy enough to execute at it's most basic form; I already have a plugin to run a on-game-load common event. However, there are many situations where I DON'T want the player to be returned to town otherwise it might break things.

The pros:
It encourages one of the main pillars of my game: interacting with the town. It's just another way to encourage players to not ignore it if the game is constantly gravitating Fidel back to town.
It hopefully encourages players to consider their quit points; both discouraging quitting mid-level, while encouraging quitting when back in town ("Well, I'm already in town, so might as well quit now.")

The Cons:
Both of those pros can also be cons, being brought back to town means the tedious trek back to where you left off.
It will probably take a lot of tedious work searching and accounting for the edge cases where I would want to disable the on-game-load common event. Missing even 1 spot where the common event should be disabled could potentially result in soft-locks and completely destroying a save file.

As of now this has not been implemented (if that wasn't obvious already), however I will continue to think about it.

It's about 2 hours long (depending on your RPG-ing/Puzzling abilities) and I think has some cool ideas that were obviously not well executed. Some of the foundation of Pauper's Paradox is there, but I can promise you that Pauper's Paradox has refined...uh...most everything you see in this OG prototype. Those who play Maker's Trial now are likely playing the best version of it due to the number of updates I have done since it's launch. I still support the game, if not a bit irregularly.

It is filled with some jank, I don't intend on fixing it, however I do still enjoy the project for what it is, so if there are major errors such as critical bugs (such as softlocks or crashes), balancing problems, or minor grammatical issues then I can issue an update. (I might only issue an update for grammatical issues if there are other issues to fix too. No reason to push a full update for a typo)
Any feedback you do provide, however, will help me consider design choices for Fidel & The Pauper's Paradox or future projects, so while I don't intend on changing much of the OG, the feedback will still be valuable.

I get what you were going for with the story, but unfortunately it doesn't quite click for me. The lack of an intro before getting control makes for a lot more questions than answers, and while I could piece together things eventually it would have been nice to hear more from Fidel. Beyond being a wannabe game dev, there wasn't much to her character that stood out to make me connect with her and I think that was mostly because she was only responding to the negative comments. There were a number of ways her personality could have been fleshed out (having her comment on things more, give herself little pep talks, small celebrations when completing a puzzle, etc.), though I can understand not focusing on that and instead focusing on the gameplay.

Not gonna touch mapping, you know the quality level that was there. :p

Using save crystals is a nice idea, but that does mean that players who may need to quit to take care of something (pets, kids, late for work) could lose a good chunk of their progress. And for this short game it wouldn't really be worth redoing a lot of the puzzles, so you could lose players who would have otherwise finished the game. Striking a balance with an emergency save item that doesn't heal and can only be used once before needing to be restored at a save crystal would give players that safety net to quit and run off without having to worry about their progress.

Puzzles were a big part of the game, and unfortunately I think a lot of them suffered from "new dev-itis". Boulder pushing and jumping puzzles can be fun, but the quirks in them really showed that you weren't familiar with eventing or planning them in RM. The ways boulders could be moved didn't have much rhyme or reason to me as a player, sometimes they could roll only one direction and sometimes they couldn't. Pushing puzzles can be a great way to challenge players but you want to keep the rules consistent, so having marks either on the floor or on the boulder to show which directions they can roll would be good. If you wanted to do away with boulders completely, creating tracks in the floors and stylized puzzle pieces could be an interesting replacement.

There was a silly bug with the first boulder you interact with, I tried to push it from the side before the fight but couldn't, so once I won and was able to move the boulder I pushed up upwards and blocked myself. So of course I chose to reset it... Which ended up with me moved back to the start and the boulder vanishing completely from the map. I could keep going, so it was fine, but seemed like an odd thing to happen.

I also ran into a bug with the boulders new the first crystal, where the far right boulder didn't move and instead a fourth boulder appeared. If that wasn't a bug and was meant to happen, then some dialogue would've been good to clue me in to that not being a dev mistake and instead how the game would mess with me as a player.


The jump puzzles were okay, but I think having the player need to hit a button every time to jump was overkill. A lot of the later jump 'puzzles' were just paths, long ones at that, so it was me just holding a direction and spamming spacebar to reach the next puzzle section. Perhaps having it start with a button and then being able to jump just by touching the jump events would be nicer, your players should be able to figure that out and then can focus on the puzzle itself and not having to click all the time.

Next up, let's talk about the battles. For the most part I did actually enjoy the fights, the limited enemies and weaknesses meant that I learned what skills to use on each enemy quickly and they were quick enough (for the most part) that the battle screen didn't overstay its welcome. Gaining MP from being hit does make for an interesting mechanic, and it was nice to not have to save my MP or potions for emergency battles like in some games. The miniboss battles that blocked levers were different enough to make me think a bit and not just spam the attack button.

Though it did take me a while to figure out why there was a timer after every battle, it would have been good to explain that quickly after the first fight.

The Maker battle and the Worse Thought battle are where the battle system really falls apart. Both were much longer than they really needed to be, and instead of making me feel dread or depressed they just annoyed me. That may be because I deal with negative thoughts by imagining them coming from a little bothersome gremlin, so when the Maker and Thoughts were being negative I was just going "yeah yeah, back to your cave you little green ball of negativity". The Maker battle felt like the final battle, so dealing with the Worse Thought battle after that didn't add much to my experience. The fact that I was meant to lose that battle was disappointing, while I do get the point story-wise, it wasn't clear since I could do damage and I was able to defeat Bad Thoughts. Once I realized that Worse Thought was able to heal itself fully and that I needed to kill Fidel to end the game, it meant I had to still run through a bunch more turns because I had been healing with items. Sneaking in a 'Give Up' skill after a few turns of Worse Thoughts buffeting Fidel would have gotten the same results (most players would keep trying for a little while before using that skill) without having to take so many extra turns.

You can also open the menu after losing the Worse Thought fight and as the camera pans away from the fainted Fidel, which does take away from the scene. I assume the cutscene was done with a parallel process instead of autorun, but that should be easy to fix.

It's 2 boulders. 1 boulder has the movement ability, the other can't be moved and just shows the text. When you take the tunnel to the right, you will step on an invisible event, which uses a transfer event to swap the boulders around.

After watching SG Harlekin stream my old beta, one of the complaints he had was that the maps were big, not necessarily empty. He seemed to praise the mapping, but lacking stuff to do.
Here's the challenge:
How do I reward the player for going off the beaten path?
The obvious answer is "A chest, you dummy!"
But sometimes the "off the beaten path" way isn't really far enough out of the way or challenging enough to warrant a chest. So what do you do then?
I believe this is a common problem all JRPGs tend to encounter whenever they try to do wider, more open maps, and they have had a solution to this problem for it for quite a few generations of gaming.


pictured above: Blue Reflection: Tie, Ao picking up a crafting material item drop.

Crafting materials.
Crafting materials are a reward for going off the beaten path, but are minor enough that you aren't overly-rewarding the player for something menial.
The problem is that crafting can create a whole new scope of items and balancing that need to be accounted for. It can be quite complicated to implement in more facets than one. In the scope of my game, crafting just wasn't the answer.

Unlikely Inspiration:
But probably not surprising considering how often I have referenced this game as an unlikely inspiration for Fidel.

In Heroes of Might and Magic, you can find treasure boxes in your exploration. The fascinating thing with these treasure boxes is that they aren't like other resources. Resources you find just lying around on the play field are just picked up like a typical resource. Treasure boxes present a simple, but interesting choice:


Never say I don't put effort into these posts. I re-installed Heroes 4 just to capture this gif.

When you touch the treasure box, you are asked whether you want to take the gold for yourself, or to donate it (that's the role-play reason) to receive a bounty of experience points for your hero.

I've actually really like this system. The challenge is that I cannot copy this system 1-to-1 in my game, because in a sense, EXP plays more of a neutral role in the game. If you've read previous updates, I effectively removed leveling from my game. You still "level up" (now called ranking up) because this helps dictate gold drops, player luck, and enemy difficulty. Due to enemies becoming more difficult at higher ranks, some players may wish to stay at a certain rank, thus negating the desire for more EXP.

However, the idea I had initially settled upon was that the player can give the presents to any of the NPCs they want. There is no affinity or romance system, but instead certain NPCs would "thank the player" for the gift by giving them 1 of 3 different rewards assigned to that specific NPC:

• Community Experience (leveling up the town)
• Player Experience (ranking up the player)
• Notes (money)

Each category would only be a small pittance, but the player could decide to just give many gifts to a single NPC get get a lot of rewards for their kindness.

I did ultimately decide to step back a little bit from this idea. Giving a gift will always grant a tiny amount of Community EXP. Undecided, but I may have NPC's give 1 of 2 awards assigned to that NPC: Either notes or Gratitude tokens.
But...Gratitude Tokens? What's that?
And notes...hmmm, that sort of contrasts with...

Initially I didn't want to provide this option to the player because the point was to encourage further interaction with the town, as well as an underlying theme in the game which is kindness. So I didn't want to allow the player to just open the presents selfishly for themselves when ultimately I want them to interact with the town and also to help emphasize the themes of kindness.

I felt like no matter what I needed to encourage players by offering some sort of reward, otherwise the system would just feel pointless. I just have to get over the fact that natural kindness cannot be encouraged, it just has to be exhibited normally. So there needed to be an "ultimate goal" for giving the presents.
See, with the introduction of ranks in my game, experience was no longer a good reward for the player. Community EXP is worthwhile, but will eventually be useless, and is pretty easy to earn, so it's not super worthwhile to get community EXP. So last is money - notes. That remains valuable in the game at least, but then it just feels like the player is giving the gifts to NPCs for selfish reasons, which is sort of counter to the theme I wanted.

This is where the Gratitude Tokens come in to play. I will come back to this, but let's first talk about these loot boxes.

This is actually a form of indefinite power gain, if the player so chose to grind it out, but each time you accept a reward from the Gratitude Fish, the cost of Gratitude Tokens increases 2 fold. (I do plan to put a cap on it, first to prevent rare cases of over-flow - not sure how the engine handles overflow, but not gonna mess with it and just cap it. Additionally, if I just let it infinitely double the amount of tokens required it would reach an impossibly high number. I want to cap it at a "very high" number, but still with in the realm of possibility to grind out for)

Choosing these 3 stats was actually quite difficult. As mentioned in the OP of this thread, Fidel really strips back a lot of the JRPG complexity, which means I have less stats and numbers to play around with, meaning less parameters to boost as rewards or items to give.
These 3 stats seemed the most balanced stats to allow for infinite growth of.

• Stack rate may potentially be the most powerful of the 3, but there are plenty of other ways of boosting stack rate late game. This just allows the player more flexibility in their build if by gaining that additional stack rate from somewhere else.
• Healing is of course pretty important, but also at it's base is pretty powerful; since this is a single actor game, healing naturally provides a turn of increased damage reduction so that player's don't get caught in a healing cycle. I'd say boosting this stat effectively just acts as quality of life.
• Battle's start at reduced ConP (the starting ConP value is based on the player's rank), so the starting ConP basically acts as a "head start" when entering combat, but is by no means necessary, as ConP can pretty quickly be gained in combat by just guarding and tanking a few hits. And again, late game items and builds can off-set how long it takes to build up ConP.

For a long time now, I have - at the very least - wanted to replace the stupid looking bean-faced SV battler for Fidel. I've never been happy with how it looks. The expression on the actor doesn't fit Fidel, and I am not a fan of the style the RTP uses for battlers.
@TESTOSTERONE had played a jank version of my game and even commented that replacing the battlers would go a long way for the feel of the game. While he wasn't necessarily referencing the walk sprites of the world, I had this feeling that maybe tall overworld sprites would also change the feeling of the game.
As a test, I decided to plop one of the premade templates @WTR had made, seen in this thread. Immediately I could feel how the game changed. It's like this one small change was entirely new coat of paint. From that point, I began investigating what it might cost to do tall sprites for my game. I knew that I would need all sprites to be in the exact same style, otherwise things would obviously look out of place. So if I have 1 custom sprite made for my game, then all NPCs would need to be custom.

I did reach out to WTR about commissioning them. However, they very politely declined; understandably - and I am thankful they even responded to me at all. So, if you see this WTR: thanks once again for taking the time to reply to me!

Everette, a resolute mother who prioritizes her child's future over their own immediate welfare, and has grown increasingly exasperated by her husband's laissez-faire parenting, fostering a schism within the family unit.

Unlike other townsfolk in Crossroad Commune, Everette is not intended to have a vignette (a short story covering a theme, idea, or topic). This is primarily due to scope. As I was writing out her dialogue, I saw how there could be a vignette around her ideals and how she might grow as a person, but I’ll have to save that for another time (maybe an update post launch if this game finds any modicum of success?).

However, rather than give her nothing, she does have some unique interactions:


June is hard at work preparing Everette’s sprite now. In the meantime enjoy the drafts you see here, and don’t mind the char-gen used in GIF.


As the player progresses, talks to her and her family more, and gives gifts (see my previous update), she will begin to warm up to Fidel and become softer over time.



How this is performed is actually a bit more complicated than you might expect, as she runs a calculation every time you talk to her which will check the aforementioned items to determine what stage she is at (of 4 stages of happiness), then a random variable will pick 1 of 3 possible responses she can give the player within that stage. So beyond her introduction, this gives her a possibility of 12 responses.
The hope is that she will rarely give the same response to the player twice (It’s also worth noting you cannot talk to her twice in a row. You must leave the house and re-enter if you want to talk to her again.)

There is also a hidden scene that shows a different side to her, but unlocking that scene requires very special conditions to be met. Don’t worry folks, if you miss it, you aren’t missing a core part of the story. It’s just a nice little bonus for others to discover.

Quil, an angsty teenager consumed by love, and callously disregards those he holds dear.
His vignette delves into the departure of friendships, illustrating how diverging paths in adulthood often lead to either an abrupt farewell or a silent recollection between the people in our lives.

Quil’s story makes up a much larger story that also involves Trisha and Sena - who will be introduced in the future.

Taking a page out of my own level design book, I wanted to start fusing other genre types into the way these vignettes play out. This, first of all makes the cutscenes themselves far more interesting that 2 pixel blobs shouting text boxes at each other, but second it also helps make the execution (the “quest design”) of the vignettes more mechanically interesting as well.

I’ll discuss this “imaginative” form of the vignettes more in the future as they move from the script and into the game, but as an overview, there are planned genre blending with:
A detective/mystery genre
A walking-sim influenced “piece the story together” type section
A typical RPG horror game trope.

Until then, I composed a song that is relevant to one of those parts. Please take a listen.

This song was discussed in more depth over in the sound design clinic thread. There is some really neat stuff going on in this song, so I recommend reading it if you are into music stuff.

There have been 2 major improvements to my game’s overall polish.

ACTION
Thanks to the help of @SGHarlekin , I’ve implemented some action sequencing. More will come in the future, but this was really more of a demo to see how it improved the feeling of combat.



In addition to all the fancy screen effects that the combat now features, the combat also moves much faster thanks to action sequencing.
This has greatly improved how combat feels.

MOVEMENT
You may have noticed those strange pink squares in previous gifs.
This is because I have implemented Chaucer’s Collision Altering Plugin. For dev purposes, the debug mode that shows collision data on tiles has been left on.



I was iffy about implementing pixel movement into my game. Fidel has mostly been designed with tile-based movement in mind.
In the past, I also played with other pseudo-pixel movement systems to see how it changes the feel, and while I liked it, it broke far too many things in my project to use.
However, I’ve been working really closely with Chaucer on this. He is one of the most active and supportive developers in the community. So getting things fixed, and getting things fixed fast is a huge factor as to why I will likely stick with this plugin.
It’s also hard to ignore how huge of a difference this makes to the overall feeling of the game. I enjoy that it feels like the player has a much more nuanced control over their character.
Most of the logic will continue to operate on a grid, and collision data will also likely be imprecise, but the results could not be ignored.

While I was watching Rebekah play my game, I realized that even on the default difficulty you can get through much of the first area with just your basic attack. It's not optimal at all, and battles will be a slog if you do so, but it is possible.
I realized I wanted to add a difficulty mode into the game that better reflected the OG difficulty which was quite demanding of players.

The problem is that so many of the balancing changes (especially the newly added limiter applied to enemy damage scaling) means it's virtually impossible to make the old difficulty a selectable difficulty without effectively doubling the database to have "current enemies and skills" and "1.0 enemies and skills". I mean, technically I could do that, but I don't want to put that much effort into updating this old jank game.

Leveling in the current form of the game makes the game become very easy in the latter half. So the answer was to limit leveling...by removing it.
But now that creates a new problem. If the player can't level at all, and there are no resources or gold in the game, what is the point of combat at all? Just run from every fight.
Okay, so to fix that I will disable running from encounters in this difficulty mode.
Well, now encounters just feel like a nuisance; just a road block/time waster.
Okay, let's score the player based on their performance!

And so the Sport Difficulty was born.

But, with the implementation of a score system, it felt silly to only tie it to the hardest difficulty. Maybe players want to go for a high score on other difficulties.
Thus, I separated out the score attack from the sport difficulty.

Let me tell you, getting my own personal high score to set as a default value in the game was a pain in the rear. But it did feel like quite the accomplishment to get my 7071 on sport mode with permadeath enabled! No items!
After my dev run to set the high score, I did actually change some of the score values, so it may, theoretically, be easier to reach that score.