MV - Full Moon Over Necropolis (Demo Available)

SYNOPSIS

I always adored ABS games and with Moghunter's wonderful Chrono Engine doing so much of the heavy lifting, I decided to finally make my own and push MV to its limit. Restart's CrossEngine marrying chrono with altimit was also paramount to making this happen, many thanks to all the people sharing their plugins with us.

The game flow and combat are fairly standard zelda-esque walk-and-slash ABS fare, but I am trying to put more emphasis on the boss fights, with multiple phases and unique behaviors. The game turns out to be a little tough and colliders feel a little janky sometimes, so I am trying to gauge how it enjoyable it is to play for others!

All visual assets are custom-made, hand-drawn and animated by me. The soundtrack is also composed and produced by myself as a fun distraction. I'm a newbie composer so hopefully it's not too jarring!:kaoswt2:

SCREENSHOTS

DOWNLOAD LINK (ITCH.IO)

played a bit around and it's really nicely done, didn't expect it to be that good
for a small demo, checking your files, if you made that art, it's really, really nicely
done, can't imagine the time put into those enemies/character.

keep up the awesome job, it's really interesting to make it smooth like this.

The game was in development for about a year, but most of the character folder I did over the course of this summer.

Thanks! I wanna make it even smoother actually :kaoluv:

This game looks gorgeous. I'll be sure to play it once I get some free time. :kaoluv:

So! Just some very brief feedback.

The art and atmosphere of the game is amazing. I especially love the UI, with the different face sets depending on the amount of damage you've received.

My main issue is the progression. I found one save in the ~20 minutes I played, and that save is sitting at 4 minutes currently. You lose all your progress when you die.
I think that you should either 1: add more saves or 2: make it something like Souls games where you keep your items and any shortcuts you've unlocked.
I got to the first boss twice, but died quickly both times. That's fine, actually, I'm used to that sort of thing, but having to walk all the way back, and regather healing items if I want them is just too much.

The combat itself is quite fun. I'm making an ARPG is RPG Maker as well, so I really appreciate things like the control scheme. Having different buttons do different things when you have your sword drawn or not is genius. In addition to being practical, it looks really cool XD.

I didn't get a great feel for the story. This was mostly because I found the font to be difficult to read.
However, I was definitely interested to learn more about the world!

Anyhow, I will be watching this one. Let me know if you have any more questions :smile:
EDIT
I did also have some performance issues in the large maps.

Thank you! I really liked it when old games like DOOM did the dynamic faceset and always felt sad this little thing fell out of practice over time.

Indeed, I've received numerous complaints about saving, progression and navigation, so that's definitely my next focus. I do like your idea of a dark-souls like approach to gameovers, perhaps the current model of 'death = hard loss of progress' is a bit old-fashioned.
It will take some effort to reset boss switches on death before respawning at a bench, but I think it should be doable!
For now, I can recommend exploring to gather healing items and find NPCs, then saving before trying to tackle bosses. In 3 out of 4 bosses there's a bench in a map preceeding the bossfight. And in the 4th case, it's close enough too.
You can orient yourself better by refering to crypt nameplates, to have names for the places you discover, but I am also considering adding some kind of a map system.

Yes, the font is a little unpleasant... I am still on a look out for a better free pixel font, although I haven't looked closely yet.
The story is a bit tight-lipped since I am leaning into the suspense/mystery kind of vibe, but it will gradually become more clear as the heroine progresses through the game.

It might be difficult to fix that outright, but I can at least refrain from making big maps in the future :kaoblush:

Thank you for the feedback, hope you have fun and manage to beat the demo eventually!

Your welcome! I might take another crack at the demo today, if I have the time.

After organizing all the demo-release feedback and reflecting on the results so far, I suppose I'll try my hand at writing a devlog going forward.

By far, the most common complaint about the game was its lack of directions or a map. People got lost very easily and I suspect many players did not finish the demo because of that.
So with that in mind, I set out to implement some kind of a navigation system... I did not want a streamlined and clean world map, or an omnipresent minimap with highlighted objectives. By personal game design philosophy, I don't like some game features to be that convenient, particularly maps.
In the end, I settled for something more 'artsy' - a paper map hand-drawn by the protagonist for herself as she progresses through the game world. It's a bit of a chore to implement I suppose, since I'll have to keep game switches dedicated to examining things, but I think it's worth doing for the extra characterization I can put in this thing. In action games, opportunities to explore the protagonist's character are a little sparse.
Here's a still-rough take on how I think it'll look. Hopefully this will be good enough to help people keep track of places and find their way to the crypt they need.


Another big undertaking I set out to do is changing the protagonist's design a little, before it is truly too late(the animation load to rework is already pretty big!). It's not exactly related to feedback I received (although some people did say some animations were choppy), it's more to fix old mistakes that bothered me. Nina's sprite was among the first things I made for this project and I think some parts were drawn/designed poorly.
Here's an early idea for a new outfit that I like better. I'm not rushing into this, as redoing all her motions will be a big job and I want to get it right this time. Do you guys think this version is better?

nice art, your good at it, so keep it up.
love the new style, more catchy if you ask me.

The new art is definitely better!

The hand drawn map is nice too. I do understand not wanting to do the ubisoft "here's where everything is!" approach.

Howdy, I played your game for the Forum's Feedback Festival!

Thank you for a detailed response! All fair points I'll be addressing as best as I can.

Sorry to hear you had performance issues. I'll have to look into reducing the load brought by events, since so many map elements had to be implemented as events... :kaoswt: