MV - Mana Engine (Demo Available)

Thanks, so would you say you like the new one better but without the goggles?

Not exactly, I feel like the googles are too... dark? I guess ones with another color palette would work better. Then again, i'm not known for the best character designs haha.

Awesome sauce. The goggles were the last thing I did and was kind of running on empty at that point. I'll play around with the swapping some colors around.

I’d be curious to see how the new color palette interacts with the environments. Seeing it shift away from something very colorful to something rather monochrome is quite the jump, and makes me wonder if that’s in line with the other art decisions.

The new outfit is more distinct from Chrono, but I’d play with the color palette to try recapturing the poppy color it had. Shifting away from the large amounts of orange and blue will do the trick, don’t need buckets of gray unless it actually is the vibe!

That's definitely something for me to consider. He should still pop on the backgrounds but not as much, I may see what he'll look like with the old colors. Wonderful suggestion.

I loved the red hair though, but once available, I redownload it :)

Sorry for the radio silence, I've been busy, I swear!

Pretty bug update!

Composed all original music for the demo, 13 tracks! I'm still tweaking my mixing and mastering. Miss Little Fish and AM-Dol have been a huge help!

Kept Guy's design the same but he now uses nunchuks in battle. That meant I had to redo like 300+ sprite cells. All the language in his skills had to change to reflect this too.

Bunch of bug & grammar fixes!

Dimp cave redesign for more curved walls.

Battle HUD redesign and recoding to be like a "radial" menu.

Credits updated.

**There's really no "NEW" content added to the game, so if you've already played the demo, you won't be seeing anything different story wise.**

I still have to make new key/capsule art with Guy having nunchuks instead of a sword.

Played the demo until a game crash, here's some thoughts:

Good first impressions with the title screen, but why can't I seem to play in full screen mode that fills the whole screen?

The mapping is really good, but the towns are so large that I'd add more (silent) NPCs to liven them up, same with the festival area. It can look a bit weird though when in some spots only your sprite's head is covered by shadow. Diagonal movement also goes through some objects.

I like the walking sprites, except the floating cloaks of the women are a bit too pronounced for my liking and they clip through some objects. The character busts are a bit weird, but they work, and I got used to them. Menu theme is nice.

The large namebox in text is a bit weird to me and if it appeared at the bottom or top it was cut halfway.

Main story and dialogue seemed interesting enough. In the beginning I'd add a couple of lines to show more surprise/shock of the sudden attack and obliteration though.

Battles seemed nice, didn't get many skills up to the point where I suffered a game crash, so don't know how tactical they get. However, after the battles the sprites returned to their positions quite slowly, which got a bit annoying. I'd also maybe make the characters turn to remaining enemies if they defeated an enemy in battle. It looked a bit weird when they kept looking at empty space when an enemy was taking actions to their side. The biggest issue though was that the sprites jumped on top of another when attacking. It'd look better if there was some distance between them.

Not much to say about the music, it was okay. Some of the sound effects maybe jumped out a bit too much, like the sound effects when balloon icons appeared.

Some random thoughts:
-I'd make the orphanage leader comment something if you leave your name as Guy
-If you decline the sergeant's invitation and talk to him again, he will repeat the "Hey, don't I know you..." line to Brand
-The airship fight was a nice addition, but when the enemy ships cruised ahead of me after their initial attack, they never approached/attacked me if I didn't fly toward them
-I wouldn't use day/night cycle at the time when you're still regrouping with the party after the airship crash
-spelling mistake: Grayridge Pass gate guard "...unitl it's cleared"
-spelling mistake: regrouping with Nael "She choose to stay..."

The crash occurred after I had regrouped with everyone and there was the battle on the bridge and some enemy used a skill "failed to load img/animations/darkness4"

Good luck with the project!

Thanks for playing the demo! It means a lot! I can't believe I didn't catch that crash after hours of testing! I'm so sorry that happened. I uploaded a hot fix if you wish to keep playing. In the next (bigger) update I'm going to try and implement some of your suggestions. Some stuff is just kind of baked into Mog's chrono engine or I'm at MV's limit before frames start tanking but I'm going to see what I can't tackle. Thanks for the feedback, it's very helpful and appreciated!

I like the concept for difficulty that you used.

I did the demo a bit till the airship blowing out of the sky (will feedback more later),
but I do saw some changes about the message, which is better , maybe a bit to big,
but readable without issues.

I think the airship intro was also a bit changed, but it smoother than it was, I do hope
you can make the propellers work in the intro when it's flying over.

Edit:
I played your game for the forum’s Web Feedback Festival.

I play it further and the veins does the same thing, look up when on the edge
without the pressing up button.

also on the bridge at the start where you fall down, you can use your fishing rod,
which can be throw on the grass (facing right).

while I do know the throwing is on the character side (left or right),
its best looking is down, but "up" is worse as it start on the feet behind his back!

the first message name box is halved when saving luma:


further more, I found some little typo's from the sanctuary.
same thing happen there with 2 typo's found there.

which is until


and later with decision


as the name boxes here are often out of screen. as I stop currently at the first campsite,
and will continue later from there when time allows it as it looks really and smooth.
I do hope the veins can be fixed (top to down and down to up) when just walking while not
facing up/down before changing character sprite.

Keep up the good work as the story is great, but I do feel the nodding/shaking head
of "Guy" might be a bit to slow?

Please turn off OrangeMapshot as it keep opening the folder of your parallax images?
or few tiles placed in the editor which is a bit annoying while using printscreen!

Progress update/report since I've been rather quiet.

Fixed the typos/spelling errors that you guys found. Sorry about leaving Mapshot and Realscaling on. They will both be off in the next update. Working on changing some of the airship enemies behavior. I also had to manually edit Message Core to shrink the name boxes some. I'm also removing the faces in dialogues for now to try to keep the name boxes on screen. We'll see how that goes. Also dumped Yanfly's synch monitor fps plugin for Mac's HI rez fixes.

Made a couple more NPC sprites to plop into town to make it livelier and working on some other stuff to spruce the festival up. It's a balancing act to not introduce lag because the map is huge with a lot going on.

Bigger news, I've added autosave on most map loads. There's some weird compatibility going on so it needs more thorough testing but so far, so good.

Also there's an unused function in Chrono Engine that moves characters to enemy front instead of on top that I have coded to the 'move_to_enemy' command. It has some slight unwanted behavior here and there, so it also needs a little more testing.

Edited to add: Also followers move faster into and out of combat positions. They kind of zoom around so it's kind of experimental right now.

So with that all said, i have to do a lot more testing before I push out the next update.

hope autosave can be turned off :p so I can just manual saving it,
but nice job =)

At this time, it cannot, but manual save is still in and it probably wouldn't be too hard to implement. That's a good idea! Thanks ShadowDragon.

Are you using moveToTarget() (move_to_target) or something else for this?

You can rewrite the function to match the jumpToCharacterFront() function (with a bit of modification) and it should move as intended.

I rewrote move_to_target to use jumptocharacterfront with a little tweak to face target after it moves

I see - what are some of the issues you encountered? I'd be glad to share a few solutions if it might work for your setup.

Appreciate it! Changing every 'melee' skill to have at least a range of 1 instead of zero which in turn can lead to player hitting multiple enemies if they are close enough. So far that's been the only thing to turn up. So not too big of deal. I'm sure something else will turn up, lol.

Update to Baycliff. There's confetti and balloons weather/particle FX. More NPCs, most provide game or lore hints/tips. Also I've made Luma's and Nael's cloaks not as "floaty". This map is kind of pushing it and I'm hoping it doesn't tank the fps for too many people.

Updated the demo today. Last update of the year!