MV - Northwall 2: Haven (version 0.4.2)

I've identified what the issue is causing that error to throw on a game over, as well as issues with game over and "return to title" not returning to the correct title. Version 0.3.3 has been uploaded to address that problem.

I'm potentially OK with that, though I think ideally I'd like players to not feel like they have to try any given fight more than twice. Did you enjoy the first couple attempts and feel like you had ideas on what to change for the subsequent ones? Or was it frustrating because you feel like there wasn't enough information or you got lucky?
My thought behind the design is that whenever the hunters camouflage, it's not obvious which bush they're behind and you can see the bushes rustling indicating they're still hidden somewhere, but that you're right, the important mechanic is to keep an eye on which ones show the bow and they're sniping from.

Do you think it would be more fun if the bushes didn't rustle at all and if a hunter wasn't behind a bush, it just skipped its turn and stayed still?

One benefit of breaking the bushes up is that when a hunter snipes from the bushes, their ATK is 50. However, when revealed, the Hooded Hunter and Masked Hunter have an ATK of 30 and the One-Eyed Hunter has an ATK of 40. I could try lowering their out-of-camouflage ATK a little more.

Whenever a hunter is revealed from a bush, a cooldown starts on Camouflage that lasts for 2 turns. If I increased it to 3 turns, so they remained revealed for longer, do you think you'd be more incentivized to go looking for a hunter you were already working on?

Also, if a hunter is on fire from Quinn's engulf, they can't camouflage. If they're bleeding, the bush they're hiding in is supposed to bleed, as well, to reveal their hiding spot, and they'll continue losing health while hidden. However, they prioritize putting out fires and bandaging up bleeds on themselves above all else when not hidden.

Ideally, I'd like to leave a few ways to approach this fight - either reveal everyone as soon as possible, reveal until you find a hunter, or reveal until you find the same one you were focusing last time and continue to try to focus it. Do you have any thoughts on one feeling more intuitive than the other?

Currently, the protagonist recovers 120 HP over 2 turns with a 4 turn cooldown, Cutter heals 120 HP with a 4 turn cooldown, and Quinn heals 30 HP for 10 TP with no cooldown (meaning, over 4 turns, she could heal the same amount if she's generating enough TP). Additionally, the protagonist's heal prevents bleeds for the duration and Quinn's heal increases her damage for her next spell.

I think Quinn might have trouble generating enough TP to keep up, though, so perhaps I'll look at boosting its heal or maybe giving it a shield-like effect to allow her to go over her maximum HP.
I don't think any RPG Maker packages do that, do they? I'm just using the export option from within the editor to generate a folder of files. I had the same experience with RPG Maker VX Ace. You can create shortcuts by right-clicking the executable, though.

Well, I was still learning the battle mechanics of the fight. It was different from the first two. I was experimenting instead of trying to win on 1st 2 fights. Yes, I figured out what worked and what didn't. I learned something new each fight. The ones that were sniping were doing almost double damage. So maybe I should have discovered them. I like a game that is a challenge. Too easy is boring. Too hard is frustrating. It got easier once I understood it. Now, it's no problem. I just replayed the fight. I don't think there was any information. Just trial and error. I think the Bushwhacker battle is fine the way it is. I saw that the axe could be used to hit all bushes. But needs to hit them twice to remove them all. The magic missiles can hit two different bushes. Otherwise, don't deal much damage. I would be more incentivized. But there are also workarounds.
I saw that if the one-eyed hunter got engulfed he could remove it. I didn't know about the bleed effect. I usually just focus fire on one enemy at a time. But it can also depend on the battle mechanics of the fight. If things have to be done in a certain order. Strengths, weaknesses, threat level, healer, etc.
Quinn's heal for 30 covers only about a single hit. So if she gets hit twice in a row she could die. I'm not sure why there is a huge gap in the healing abilities. It's not like she is a tank or anything. Maybe just have them all set to about 60? It's not too powerful but also not too weak to be next to useless. Cutter is pretty much last to be killed because of his heals.
Scratch what I said about a shortcut. I'm just misremembering. I haven't DL a game in a long time.

That is one thing I thought of while playtesting, too. The "hit all enemies" attack of the axe depends on how many enemies there are.

If there's only 1 enemy alive, then it's just a straight ATK - DEF calculation against that target. After that, it's:

• ATK * 0.75 - DEF for 2 enemies
• ATK * 0.5 - DEF for 3 enemies
• ATK * 0.4 - DEF for 4 enemies
• ATK * 0.3 - DEF for 5 enemies
• ATK * 0.2 - DEF for 6+ enemies

With a minimum of 1 damage per each target affected. Since there are potentially 8 bushes alive, it means the attack only does about 5 damage per bush, but they have 7 HP, so it's not quite enough damage unless 1 or 2 bushes are down.

I'm thinking about reducing their health to something like 4 or maybe increasing the floor of the whirling slashes attack so that the axe could be used as a way to just clear all the bushes in one go. I think it would reward smart play by the player to consider that an axe is good for rapid clearcutting to remove foliage for camouflage.

During my playtesting, I've had times where Quinn gets enough TP that it seemed like she was just sitting at 100% health the whole fight because she kept using surge every other turn since it has no cooldown. It doesn't seem to quite pull that off with the hunters, though, like it does against the hydromancer, but given that the arena and the hydromancer fights are the first couple fights in the game, I'm thinking of erring on the side of making them easier and just buffing Quinn's self-healing.

Instead of making it heal for more, though, I think I'm going to look into it providing a temporary shield that also boosts stats in some way - like maybe instead of boosting MAT for the next spell, it boosts MAT as long as the shield holds. Or maybe it boosts MAT for the next spell, but also boosts DEF / MDF as long as it holds. That effect would be in addition to the heal it provides.

Appreciate you taking the time to play and provide feedback - maybe I'll just see about changing Quinn's Surge ability and the axe's ability to clear the bushes in one attack and see how that affects everything without otherwise touching it.

You could give Quinn's healing ability a CD and increase healing or shield as you said. So she doesn't seem so powerful. I know you want to make each character feel unique in both personality and playstyle. I usually wait until the last minute to heal a character. Which was a bad idea on my part. Instead of using her small heals more often.
I'm glad to help. And happy you took my advice about making a second game and having Tilana as the leader of the monsters.

Version 0.3.4 released, with the following changes:

• The +20% MAT buff from Surge was being consumed before damage was calculated, meaning the extra damage from Surge was not applying. This issue has been fixed so that the buff will be removed after damage is calculated
  • As a result, the damage estimation while Surge is active is more accurate
• Surge, in addition to providing 20% MAT for the next Magic ability and restoring 30 health, will now also provide 20 shield points, stacking up to a maximum of 100. Damage taken is removed from the shield before HP damage is taken. As long as the Surge shield is up, DEF and MDF are increased by 5 each
• Surge shield has a new state graphic and buff icon
• Shields are now displayed as a glowing white bar over the health bar and with the amount of shield points remaining in parentheses next to health

• Some states were not being removed at the end of battle. Every state should now be removed at the end of battle
• Shields are removed at the end of battle
• The swap command during the hunter fight was throwing errors because leaving the Battle scene cause every enemy to appear and every battler to revive. This issue has been resolved
• The swap command during the hunter fight was causing bushes that had been cleared to reappear, even though they were correctly down and non-targetable (sprite issue only, not mechanical). They should continue to remain hidden when returning to battle from the swap command
• Bush health has been reduced to 5 so that a single use of whirling slash can clear all of them
• Whirling slash had its description updated to note that no actor can gain more than 15 TP in a given action
• One-eyed hunter has had her AGI reduced from 40 to 30
• Masked hunter had their AGI reduced from 40 to 35
• Hooded hunter had his AGI reduced from 40 to 35
• Adrenaline rush had its description updated to note that no actor can gain more than 15 TP in a given action
  • Adrenaline rush is not currently available to players, even though it's in the database
• A typo during the arena scene was fixed

Version 0.3.5 released, adding another optional tutorial to the beginning of the game. Now, when examining the skeleton that provides the healing tutorial, you can also experience a tutorial that will explain the damage ranges in abilities and the damage range when hovering over a target, as well as the warnings that display if an ability is going to do less than 66% of its originally-expected damage.

Version 0.3.6 released, changing how the "Controls" option in the title menu and party menu works. Previously, I had created images of a keyboard and mouse and there was a selectable menu that would highlight keys to show the controls.

However, given the variety of keyboard and mouse configurations, as well as possible accessibility needs where the default controls might be difficult for some users to use, I've instead done away with the images and now show a menu where the mouse and keyboard controls can be remapped:

I wasn't sure how difficult implementing this feature would be, but it proved to be decently challenging - enough that I'm not currently interested in trying to pursue the same for gamepads for now as I think my time and effort is better-spent elsewhere. Gamepads will still work, but their buttons cannot be remapped.

Additionally, when you save your game, your remapped controls should be saved to that file. As a result, when opening the game, the controls will be the default, but when continuing a game, your remappings will be reloaded, as well.

I'm fairly certain this change should be backwards-compatible with any existing saves, so I'm only noting this change as a patch version and not a minor version.

Been a minute! Quit a job and got a new one in the meanwhile, life's been busy, blahblahblah excuses. But! Have had some ideas kicking around that I finally got around to implementing and thought I'd let people know development is still ongoing.

Version 0.4.0 released, with the following changes:

• Surge has a new graphic and behavior - the first time it is cast, it removes the cooldown on Shock and, as long as the shield holds, increases the damage of the next Shock by 50%. If the increased damage from Shock has not been consumed yet, the shield crackles with lightning. Once Shock has been used, the lightning goes away
  • I felt like Engulf and Oil Blast were doing so much more damage than Shock that its 2 turn cooldown and AGI reduction wasn't quite keeping up to make it a competitive choice to make most of the time. Hopefully with the bonuses to its ability when using Surge, it'll be more of a choice to make
• New ability for the two werewolves during the hunters fight - Track Scent: Half action. If hunters are hiding in bushes, they will show a yellow outline indicating which bush they're in and which hunter it is
  • I've been planning to introduce battle-specific special commands and this seemed like a good opportunity. The two characters even mention at the start of the fight that they know the hunters are present because they can smell them, so I thought it would be a good flavor add - plus now, if you want to focus a particular hunter down as part of your strategy, you can spend a half action to highlight where they are. Additionally, this lets players possibly expose the enemy before they get sniped or by random guessing, so I think it's overall a good-feeling improvement
• Auto save has been introduced. The first save slot can no longer be saved to and is instead reserved for an auto save
• When you gain or lose attitude with your party members, a small window will appear in the top right corner indicating as much
  • There's already a fair amount of change in dialogue depending on what choices you've made, e.g., how many times have you asked the other werewolf his name, did you ask any questions about Haven, did you refuse to talk about yourself, etc., with plans to add more than just "different dialogue" as the game continues to build out, but people had mentioned they didn't feel as though their choices really had any impact on anything. I'm hoping that by showing attitude changes with your party members when selecting certain options, it will encourage people to consider what they're saying a little more and to give more weight to their decisions
• Slight tweak to Surge's behavior - previously, it would subtract the enemy's MDF before applying the 20% buff, but now the MAT is multiplied by 20% before subtracting the enemy's MDF
• Other small bugfixes, dialogue changes, and tweaks

It's tempting to call this version 0.3.7, but since the auto-save system now reserve save slot 1 and would overwrite it, I'm thinking it's not necessarily backwards compatible enough to not consider a new minor version. So hey, we're into 0.4!

Here are some GIF samples of new behavior:

New Graphic and Effect on Surge Shield


Gaining or Losing Attitude With Party Members


Track Scent Battle-Specific Ability


The goal is still to build out Haven, which will be the hub for most of / all of the rest of the game, so I'm intending to make it fairly dense with activities. Probably going to start looking at just using some fairly placeholder stuff to make development feel less daunting so I can actually make forward progress.

Still, I want to make sure the core system is where I want it to be and I think this first hour is a great way to do so, so I'm still looking for any feedback on how the early areas before Haven play out.

The "creator playthrough" video I used to include in the main post to help attract attention was also a bit out of date to the current version, so I've removed the link for now with the intent to record a new one at some point soon here.

See you all around again Soon™!

As noted from Sunday's post, here's the updated creator playthrough / content demo. The old one was on version 0.3.1, so it was missing updates from 0.3.2, 0.3.3, 0.3.4, 0.3.5, 0.3.6, and 0.4.0:


Open to feedback just based on that, as well! It's not the full experience, since there are quite a few choices to make and I'm intending to keep that a primary feature moving forward, but it should give like a 90% overview of what the game currently offers, as well as an idea of what the core experience and engine will play out with.

Biggest changes are likely to be art assets, most notably the werewolf sprites and facesets - but, again, still just working on what I've got available for free for now and if I'm not happy with it, it'll just be placeholder for a bit.

As a side note, since literally every Plugin for the game is written by me, it's amusing coming back to code I wrote apparently over 6 years ago and going, "Yeah, I definitely should've left comments for my future self, I have no idea what this is doing."

Version 0.4.1 released, with the following changes:

• Major changes
  • Gamepad Control menu added
    • With some players choosing to use gamepads, the Controls menu now dynamically loads either a mouse/keyboard remapping window or a gamepad remapping window, depending on what device it was opened with. If you open the Controls menu with a gamepad, then gamepad buttons are shown. If you open with a mouse or keyboard, the mouse and keyboard controls are shown
    • 
  • Most skills' descriptions changed
    • I've modified my Plugins to now dynamically read more data about skills and the states they apply and to more clearly state what each skill does.
    • Example of Skill Description Changes

      
      
      
      
• Medium changes
  • The scene walking across the desert to get Hatcher's Hood has removed questions about Haven in favor of a "Can we stop walking?" dialogue option
    • For people with accessibility needs or who otherwise find the kinetic movement of the scene distracting to the text, there is now a dialogue option of "Can we stop?" and "We can keep moving" to cause the party to stop or start walking. For those who enjoy the Aaron Sorkin walk and talk, they can leave it on and skip the option, but for those who'd really like there to not be a lot of movement on screen while trying to read text and make choices, they can just have a nice Shot-Reverse Shot
• Minor changes
  • Camouflage adds 1 action cooldown to Track Scent
    • Track Scent sort of negates a lot of the original design of the battle, which is to make the player pay close attention to the bushes to see which ones the hunters are sniping from. It's thematic, flavorful, and cool, but I still want the player to have to pay attention to some degree - plus hunters chasing down werewolves would probably think to mask their scent as much as they can, so adding a cooldown to Track Scent after camouflage seems flavorful, too
  • Surge grants +25% Shock damage, down from +50%
    • 50% was a bit too much and made Shock the obvious spell to use after every Surge. +25% puts it in line with Oil Blast's damage, plus the removal of the cooldown means the AGI debuff can be maintained longer, so it should still be a good choice, but not necessarily the most obvious one every time now
  • Armor Breaker icon changed
    • To ensure players don't think a physical ability will do lightning damage, the icon was changed from a lightning bolt to broken equipment
  • TP renamed to Fury
    • TP's always been sort of a "makes people giggle" name and seems odd for werewolves and hothead mages to be using. Its color has been changed to red from green and is now named Fury to be more thematically appropriate
  • Battle recovery happens at the end of battle
    • There's no need to heal outside of battle because I'd been fully healing the party before each combat, but that meant that, after combat, if you opened the menu, you'd see you were missing health and MP. To ensure players don't feel anxious about not being able to heal, they'll always have full health and MP in the menu so they can be sure they're going into the next battle ready to go
  • Fixed a bug where, if you were using a gamepad and holding buttons during the tutorial, you could cause the selected menu item to get off track and throw the tutorial off. Controls should now be more consistently locked until the game is ready for input again

Update, May 11, 2026: Version 0.4.2 released, with the following changes:

• Re-configured the Equip Scene to try and make more use of the available space to provide more information about skills before you equip the weapon. Screenshots below of old and new versions.
• Although the tutorial mentions that swapping weapons is a half action, it's only mentioned the once and easy to forget. To help players recognize the swapping weapons only uses a half action, the CTB prediction is updated as if your next action is Swap whenever you select it. GIF below showing the behavior.
• Conjured Missiles nerfed to 40% MAT per missile, from 60% MAT per missile
• A few Skills have had their descriptions updated to try and be clearer about what they do or be more consistent with other abilities' descriptions wording

Old layout while in the menu out of combat:

New layout:

Old layout while swapping weapons in combat:

New layout:

CTB prediction updating when hovering over Swap: