VXAce - Northwall v1.0.1

Not so much that he's an angel, but like an ultimate expression of holy abilities, since he's a cleric. I may actually move it to a later level (because really... What are you going to get after that that's going to be any cooler?), but I wanted to implement it so I could play around with it and test its balance. I'm thinking I might even make it some kind of unlockable ability for solving an optional dungeon or puzzle or something.

EDIT: Fixed a bug where Altered Form wouldn't be removed upon death in battle. Updated the link with this fix at 2:25 PM Pacific time.

I've just uploaded a new version of the demo (found in the original post of this thread). A lot of this update was focused on continuing to polish up the content that's already been created and especially on creating more abilities, ability animations, items, and tweaking balance. I also made some major overhauls to a couple of the forest dungeon's maps and added a few extra details and some basic shading to the Aylan interiors. I'm not looking for perfect or award-winning, but they should be less confusing and bland now.

For those of you who've played the demo already, this update also contains half of the new area: Silth! Silth is divided into two sections, West and East. This demo update brings along the new area of East Silth, where the cleric and the girl are thrown right into the middle of a civil war. Everyone treats you with open suspicion (especially if you transform in front of them!), and the cleric will see if he can find the ship at Silth he came there for in order to get back to Northwall. Most excitingly, there is a much more complex boss battle to cap off the events of East Silth than the previous bosses, where you'll even get to choose between having an extra ally during the fight, or sacrificing him to start the fight off with a little leg up over the enemies.

While I haven't made any changes to the scripts, thus allowing people who have save files from the previous build to continue if they just want to see the new content, there may still be errors from using old continue files. Primary concerns would be not having access to the new accessory, missing some permanent stat-boosting items, possibly not having new abilities that should've been learned at levels 4 and 5, and possibly being lower level than anticipated. To the best of my knowledge, you could use an old continue file and still see just the new content and story without too much difficulty. I know of at least one event that will trigger very awkwardly the first time you go to the world map.

If you enjoyed the ruins chest puzzle, forest puzzle, and cave platforming event, you'll unfortunately have to wait until West Silth has been released to get access to your next puzzle - as well as the most complex boss of the game up to that point.

Listed below is a comprehensive list of all the changes I've made with this most recent update.

New Abilities

- New ability: Lunar Rage. Restores 10 TP and 10 MP. Can restore 20 TP if Lunar Strength is active.

- New ability: Deadly Wound. Deals 130% weapon damage and prevents enemy healing for 3-4 turns. Removes regen buffs (but does not prevent their healing if a new one is applied after).

- New ability: Altered Form. Increases attack by 15% and unlocks Slash special. Cannot use items while transformed.

- New ability: Slash. Deals 100% weapon damage and ignores 25% of the enemy's defense.

- New ability: Tendon Slash. Deals 100% weapon damage and slows the enemy by 40%.

- New ability: Heaven's Wrath. Deals 200 165 170% ice damage and lowers enemy's defense and magic defense by 50%.

- New ability: Infusion. Increases attack power and critical chance by 10% for 2 actions.

- New ability: Protective Aura. Raises magic defense by 40% and physical defense by 20% for 3 actions.

- New ability: Meditation. Reduces the cost of magic spells by 50% for 3 actions. Has a 25% chance to fall off when damaged.

- New ability: Angelic Form. Comes in Angelic Fury and Angelic Mending flavors. Fury removes the ability to cast magic or attack, but causes all damaging holy spells to do double damage 60% more damage and be free of cost. Mending removes the ability to use damaging holy spells or attack, but causes all healing to heal for double the amount 60% more and be free of cost. Lasts 3 actions. Gives you WIIIIIIIIINGS! (Note: This ability is not available yet in game. It will be a reward for an optional puzzle later on).

- New ability: Flurry. Deals 150% weapon damage. Counts as a physical attack, so is likely to miss on high evade enemies such as bats and the red worm if impale is not used first.

- New ability: Guard's Mark. Applies a mark to an enemy for 5 turns. The next time flurry is used against that target, flurry deals double damage and consumes the mark.

Ability Balances and Tweaks

- Searing light's damage reduced from 200% MAT plus 23 to 180% MAT plus 17. Still deals 1% HP per tick over the next 2 turns.

- Holy barrage's damage reduced from 160% MAT to 130% MAT.

- Cleanse moved to level 3, holy barrage moved to level 4.

- Many abilities that previously lasted for a set number of actions now last for a set number of turns. In general, this will cause many states to last for slightly less time.

- Added new animation and sound effect to Tilana's transform ability.

- Renamed Lunar Rage to Lunar Strength.

- Shifted double TP generation from Lycanthropic Regen to Lunar Strength.

- Lycanthropic Regen now generates 5 TP.

- Revert no longer uses up your turn, allowing you to act immediately after using it.

- Transform now locks the use of items.

- Lycanthropic Regen now heals 15% max HP while transformed, down from 20%.

- Maul moved to level 7.

- Reduced TP cost of Focus from 10 to 5.

- Focus now also raises critical strike chance by 6%, in addition to providing 25% more attack power.

- Double slash now does 150% damage (75% damage twice), down from 200% damage.

- Maximum TP carried over from previous battles is now 25, down from 100 different for each actor. They can "store" approximately enough TP to use 2 abilities at the beginning of the next battle.

- Added the "substitute" flag to the taunt buff, in addition to the 1000% TGR. Rick should hopefully be better at his job now. If not, he will be fired from the profession of taunting and given a new occupation.

- Ability tooltips have been rewritten to be more explicit about their effects, e.g. "Deals high damage to a single target" now might say "Deals 200% holy damage to a single target."

- Bleed debuff has a new icon to make it more distinct from poison.

Item Balance and Tweaks

- Regrowth Flask now restores 75% HP and 45% MP over time, up from 60% HP and 30% MP.

- Regrowth Flask immediately restores 25% HP and 15% MP on use, then has 2 ticks. It previously had 3 ticks of HP and MP regen.

- Potions now restore 25% max HP plus 25 health, up from 25% max HP.

- Magic Potions now restore 25% max MP plus 10 MP, up from 25% max MP.

- Magic Potion renamed to Mana Philter Draught.

- Honeycrisp Apple now increases max HP by 15, up from 10.

New Items and Equipment

- New item: Carrot. Increases attack by 3 permanently.

- New item: Red Potato. Increases defense by 3 permanently.

- New item: Blueberries. Increases maximum MP by 5 permanently.

- New item: Flash Powder. Deals 5% max HP plus 15 fire damage.

- New item: Thunder Stone. Deals 5% max HP plus 15 lightning damage.

- New item: Ice Stone. Deals 5% max HP plus 15 ice damage.

- New item: Galarand's Teachings. Increases MAT by 2. Useable by the cleric only.

- New weapon: Reinforced Glove. For use by Tilana.

- New armor: Frost Armor. Better defense than steel armor, lowers fire damage by 50%, but lowers agility by 1. For use by the cleric.

Enemy Balance and Fixes

- The stun applied by snakes' Constrict ability didn't wear off until the battle was over (or was removed via cleanse). It's supposed to only last through that actor's next action, but the stun prevented the actor from ever having an action. This has been changed to last 1-2 turns, meaning the stun will wear off significantly more quickly.

- Lowered the maximum HP of the blue and red worms.

- Nerfed the burn debuff's defense lowering attributes against players. Now lowers defense to 80% instead of 0% and magic defense to 90% instead of 20%.

- Buffed the burn debuff's damage. Now does 2% of max HP instead of a flat 5 damage. This is a nerf against the worms, Ben, and Rick, but a buff to all other targets.

- Added fire vulnerability to the carnivorous plant and its vines.

- Added lightning vulnerability to Marion and Silth soldiers.

- The Aylan boss now has Tendon Slash. She also will enrage at 35% health, no longer using focus or zeal on herself, and instead taking on a permanent 25% attack, 40% agility, -20% defense state that also lets her attack two times. Her face also turns red because she's a drunk she's angry it amuses me.

Mapping Fixes and Tweaks

- Fixed a display error in the cave platform event.

- Fixed a number of errors in the cave platform event when taking the bottom path.

- Fixed the water tiles in the forest to look more appropriate to their location.

- Major changes made to the Aylan forest maps to give more appropriate depth and more randomness to look more natural.

- Encounter rate adjusted for Aylan forest. More adjustments made to maps to force more steps per screen to trigger more battles.

- Added more objects and lighting to all of Aylan's interiors, so the buildings will look a little less bland.

- Added several small rewards for exploring Aylan and Northwall before it's destroyed. Rewards include a handful of permanent stat-boosting items and a fire damage consumable.

- Removed the drab, boring, anti-climactic heavy mace reward from the ruins chest event. Upon solving the password, the chest now contains 3 potions, 2 flash powders, 2 antidotes, and an accessory for the cleric called Galarand's Tome that provides the magic ability "protective aura." Additionally, if you fail the password check, the boss will now randomly USE the 3 potions, 2 flash powders, and/or 2 antidotes, and the accessory will be unobtainable.

General Changes

- Added a warning before the forest boss to encourage players to heal up and/or save.

- Added another battle in the opening sequence teaching players how to escape.

- Changed the cleric's default name to Kaven Suven, to help prevent confusion from people calling him Kevin.

Very pleased to announce that an area I'd been planning for quite some time has finally been (mostly) completed and is now available for play in the demo!

You can see my previous post for notes about East Silth, so I'll just mention the new area included in the newest demo release: West Silth. There are no random or scripted battles, but there are several floors that include a bit of necessary exploration, a twitch-response puzzle where you have to avoid fireballs and fire walls, and a logic puzzle of the truth-and-liar variety. Slowly work your way up West Silth to the top floor, where you'll encounter a boss that is, if I do say so myself, probably the most entertaining fight I've designed so far. Some of you may find it aggravating, but rest assured that pretty much all of your abilities will be useful in some way for that particular battle.

I'm also very pleased to finish work on a new party member who joins you at the end of the demo, although you will not get to see any combat with her yet. She is, in effect, 4 mini party members combined into one, who you can frequently switch between as you need various utilities - raw damage, debuffs, or healing. I'm extremely interested to see the feedback on both the boss and, once I have more of the demo completed, the new party member.

And as a final little teaser for this release, there's a bit of a hint at the end of the demo about what Maestro is up to - or at least some indication that what he's been doing is not just random and for the lulz.

This demo version also brings with it a short list of updates:

- The East Silth boss will now always use a potion on himself the first time he reaches 50% health, instead of on a random ally.

- The girl's glove weapons now have a note in their description that they can be dual wielded.

- Rewrote the description for cleanse to explain that it removes all debuffs except bleed and broken.

- Fixed a minor mapping issue in East Silth, 1F.

- Fixed a typo in the desert conversation where the cleric's name appears instead of the girl's.

- Moved infusion to level 7.

- Reduced General Celandine's health by 200.

Finally, I'd like to mention that one of my goals in addition to building the new area for the next demo version release is to add more equipment. At the moment, the weapons and armor list is quite small, with many slots only having a single item to equip for them for each character. While I'm pleased with the way combat is turning out, I'd like to add a little more customization to the equipment options, so that will be a major project to tackle coming up here.

I'm really looking forward to feedback on the new areas of East Silth and West Silth, as well as from players who haven't had a chance to make any comments about the game yet. The West Silth boss and new party member, in-particular, are the culmination of ideas I've had bouncing around in my head for months, and I can't tell you how excited I am to finally have them in the game and operating (balance tweaks aside).

One final note - there is a bug that, while rare, is quite major. Any time the last enemy in a troop dies from slip damage (most likely to be the 1% health that holy fire ticks for), you will receive double rewards, then the client will simply close. There will be no error, nothing telling you what line of code caused the crash - it will just close. I have no idea what's causing it, it's only happened to me twice and anyone else once (to my knowledge), and I only today discovered exactly how to reproduce the bug. I've disabled "K.O. by slip damage" in my system settings for the time being to see if that alleviates the problem.

Heya man. I started playing through the demo and it's looking great so far. Perhaps what stands out the most to me is the cinematic feel the game has. The atmosphere is very well done. The lighting is great. The music is very suitable too and kicks in during all the right moments. And the feeling of isolation and hopelessness the characters are in is very vivid.

I am quite liking the battles as well. There's lots of strategy involved in them, though at times it feels as though too many useful skills depend on TP, and without it you can't do much. Maybe it changes later on. I think the two worms battle was a bit on the hard side considering it was right at the beginning of the game, but the other battles were pretty great. I enjoyed the giant spider boss a lot.

I also really like the little dialogues that appear in the corner the characters are having when you're wandering on the maps. The only bad thing is if I go into the menu suddenly as one of them appears or get a random encounter, those tend to erase the message and so you end up missing out on some lines of dialogue. But otherwise it's a neat feature, because it makes us more familiar with the characters as they chat to each other during their journeys.

I'm at the forest part now. More feedback to come as I get further. I noticed you uploaded a new version of the demo today. I am guessing I should re-download it? Because the one I'm playing right now I got about a couple of days ago.

The one from a couple days ago is missing a couple minor fixes, as well as the newest area I just finished, so yeah, I'd recommend picking up the newest version. I don't think there should be any compatibility issues if you're continuing from a save point in the forest.

I'm not really sure if there's a way to get messages to repeat if you open the menu or get into a battle while it's still being displayed, or transfer screens or something like that. It's basically just a parallel process on each map with a running variable that continues the conversation along so you don't get any repeats if you go back a screen or something. I used to have it so that it would happen whenever you touched certain squares, so the conversation would progress as you progressed through the dungeon, but then if you turned around, there would be huge gaps in the talking and you wouldn't know what they were talking about.

I've tried to make the gab conversations unimportant to the plot and just be some chit-chat to establish some more character personality while you explore dungeons, so that if you do happen to miss statements, you don't miss anything big.

I'm still working on coming up with TP-generating abilities that leave you with options other than the default attack - not that I want to remove attack entirely, I think it has its place, but the idea of the combat is definitely to build TP with weaker abilities, then spend it on stronger abilities. Or, in the case of the cleric, it's to build TP using support/healing abilities, then spend it on damaging or stronger buffing abilities. I'm trying to come up with some more abilities for the cleric to have to build TP, in-particular, because I feel he's kind of lacking at the moment between levels 4 and 6 (especially if you don't pick up Galarand's Tome from the chest event). He's mostly just a cure bot until you have enough TP to use your holy abilities. It's difficult coming up with skills for him that are useful, defensive, and don't infringe on what other characters will be doing (for example, I could give him an elemental shield that reduces damage from an element or all elements, but there's a character you get later who would make more sense to have such a thing). I also don't want to do things like Cure 1, Cure 2, etc., so that "cure" is simply useful through the whole game, so I can't get away with adding stronger versions of skills you already have. I also have to be sure that whatever it is isn't too strong or too weak, since I want every ability to feel useful.

My next update, before I start building any more areas, is going to be focused on coming up with more equipment and more TP-building skills. I will say, though, that once you get to level 6 and 7, there's a pretty good mix of abilities going for your party members, so I mostly just need to figure out what else I can do for the earlier levels.

EDIT: Added a couple new screenshots to the original post. Also, I moved infusion back down to level 4, but that's not reflected in the updated demo. You won't get it until level 7 currently. It's a TP-building ability that buffs a party member's attack and crit by 10%. I didn't really want it available until Marion joins the party. Ideally, I'd like the cleric to gain one new TP-generating ability and one new holy ability every level until he feels like he's got a good mix of everything. This means I need to come up with two new magic spells for levels 5 and 6. I think at that point, he should be pretty well set to be OK going a level or two with only one new ability or something.

I'm thinking about changing purify to be more useful, since all it does at the moment is remove poison. While the forest enemies are capable of poison, as is the spider boss, none of the harder boss battles use it and after the forest, nobody else has poison. While it would be an easy fix to simply put poison back into a couple attacks, I think it would be better if purify simply removed more debuffs. Of course, I still like the idea of having the ultimate cleansing ability be the holy ability "cleanse." Perhaps I'll add an extra effect to cleanse, like a minor heal or something (perhaps I can figure out a way to make it heal for every debuff removed).

I like where the girl is at so far, though. On my playtesting, by the time you reach level 6, I'm not even using the attack command any more for the most part, and she starts at level 5. At level 7, I really like the capability of all of her moves, though I'd be curious if other people think they're as solid as I do.

MORE EDIT: Added a new ability, conviction, to the cleric at level 5. It heals 15% max HP and increases max HP by 15%. On the surface, this seems like a kind of bland ability, but it actually synergizes with two other party members. The girl's lycanthropic regen is based on her maximum health, and when she fully transforms, she gets additional maximum health - so conviction can be taken advantage of in two ways for her. The newest party member has two heals that are based on her maximum health, not the target's, so conviction also increases the healing done by those skills. Healing items and skills are also largely based on maximum health, so this also increases their potency.

Heya. I've played some more. I like the sidestory involving Aylan town and the beast. It's well executed. Makes me wonder what would've happened if I picked a different option when I had to choose whether to spare her or not.

Yeah, definitely. I think there need to be more TP regenerating abilities. For example when in the forest I had a lot of trouble with the wasps encounter because they have 100% evade what means that Marion will always miss an attack and hence never manages to build any TP (since it doesn't build if you miss). Suven couldn't hit them either, so I just had to keep spamming the cure all the time to build TP before I could unleash some holy abilities, but more wasps would come in, so that encounter took longer than necessary simply because there weren't enough tools to use. At first I thought the tendon ability would remove their evasiveness, but it didn't seem to do anything other than Agi debuff (or maybe it just lasted for a very short time).

I am also still a bit perplexed about the Girl's abilities. It's a cool mechanic how she can transform in and out of the werewolf form, but I couldn't understand what determined when I could transform. I noticed I spent like 80% of the time buffing with her and only 20% of the time actually attacking, which is again, making the battles seem more overdrawn than they should be I think. But it is a cool idea indeed. I just hope she has more offensive abilities. And that pic that pops up when she transforms is awesome!

I've made several quality of life changes to the demo and uploaded the new version. Changes include:


- New ability: Conviction. Heals 15% max HP and increases max HP by 15% for 4 turns.


- New ability: Sanctuary. Raises defense and magic defense by 70 40%, lowers attack and magic attack by 70 60%, and provides 5% HP regen for 3 turns. Removes protective aura.


- New ability: Rapid Strikes. Deals 80% weapon damage and costs half an action, allowing the user to act again sooner. Requires altered form.


- New ability: Quick Strikes. Deals 80% weapon damage, cannot be evaded. Should help Marion build TP against hornets.


- Moved infusion to level 4, down from level 7.


- Moved tendon slash to level 4.


- Protective aura now raises magic defense by 30% and defense by 15%, down from 40% and 20%. Removes sanctuary.


- Purify now also removes burn and chill, in addition to poison.


- Cleanse now heals the target for 5% max HP for each state removed (thanks to ShadowLurk for help with the mechanics of this ability).


- Ben's motivate ability and Rick's taunt ability no longer cost TP and instead generate 7. Taunt no longer draws enemy attention - instead, it increases enemy miss chance by 30%.


- "Broken" debuff should now wear off after 3 turns instead of 2 actions. This should cut back on the issue of having both party members under the broken status at the same time, effectively preventing the use of offensive skills.


- Marion no longer applies taunt to the werewolf and vice versa (funny though that would now be). She still taunts her with cheesy lines of superiority.


- Increased the girl's defense growth rate slightly.


- Increased hide armor's defense from 3 to 8.


- Flash powder, ice stone, and thunder stone now deal 5% HP + 30 damage, up from 5% HP + 15 damage.


- Made several color corrections to guilt, despair, and rage sprites.


- You can now enter Aylan's item shop before going into the forest, after Marion joins your party.


- The empty Aylan house has been renamed to Marion's House, and you can find her there just before you leave Aylan.


Overall, this should give Ben, Rick, Marion, the cleric, and the girl a wider variety of ways to build TP, as well as make a couple more frustrating or tedious fights less so.


----------------------


I've updated the transform ability a bit. Previously, transform would be greyed out until you had at least 25 TP. Transform would then cost 10 TP to activate, and it would wear off when you fell below 15 TP. Altered form was a new ability that appeared at level 6 in your Special menu that worked like a mini-transform, lasting 3 turns and unlocking a couple abilities while increasing attack by 15%.


Now, both Altered Form and Hybrid Form (the new name for transform) are skills that can be selected from the Transform skill menu. That is, when you select Transform, now you will see this:





Hybrid Form now refunds 15 TP when used, so it still only effectively costs 10 TP to activate - but you must have at least 15 TP leftover after activation to use a skill.


Using Transform also used to grey out the transform skill - now Hybrid Form simply seals the use of Hybrid Form and Altered Form. Altered Form also seals both skills. The only change this causes is that now you cannot go directly from Altered Form to Hybrid Form, you will need to use revert first. However, revert has a 0% turn cost, so you can immediately act again after using it. It only means the use of an additional action to go from one form to the other.


To alleviate the drawback of this, Hybrid Form now refreshes lunar strength and lycanthropic regen if you have them applied when you use it.


If you happen to come across any bugs with the new way Hybrid Form and Altered Form are activated (such as skills appearing in your menu when they shouldn't, or skills not appearing when they should), please let me know.

Added a number of changes to the demo since the last update. Changes are listed below:

- Fixed a bug where the West Silth boss was completely reviving near the end of the battle. Only one of the 4 party members should be restored.

- Fixed a display error in Aylan with the item shop door.

- Fixed an error in the starting Northwall area that allowed you to walk through a torch.

- The West Silth boss's healer is a little smarter now.

- Altered Form no longer seals Hybrid Form. You can transform directly from Altered to Hybrid.

- The broken debuff (applied by the East Silth boss) now lasts for 2 turns instead of 3.
- Changed most enemy attacks from "certain hit" to either "physical attack" or "magical attack." This gives most enemy attacks a chance to miss. Player attacks remain certain hit with a couple exceptions (although enemies have 0% evade and actors have 100% hit by default).

- Lowered the Aylan boss's Double Slash ability from 200% damage to 150% damage.

- Changed the "null effect" message from nothing to "0." This should mean that any time an ability heals for 0 or deals 0 damage, it will now display 0 to let the player know there was no effect. Certain abilities might display 0 when not intended to - these are bugs that will be corrected when found.

- Changed antidote item to salve. Now cures poison, burn, and chill.

- Diseased bite no longer adds the agility and attack debuffs. It now applies a new state, diseased, that reduces attack and agility by 25%.

- Purify and cleanse now remove the diseased state.

- New item: Vaccine Amulet. Protects against poison and diseases.

- New item: Swift Boots. Protects against agility debuff and Slow.

- Increased Steel Mace's attack by 5, lowered magic attack by 3.

- New Weapon: Pike. Slightly more powerful version of the spear.

- Added several new items to the Northwall ruins to discover.

- Lowered blazing mace's attack by 3.

- New item: Frost Mace. Slightly more powerful version of the Blazing Mace.

- Lowered Steel Armor's price from 35 to 25.

- Heavy Robes renamed to Enchanted Robes.

- New item: Heavy Robes. Increases MAT and MDF slightly, but has no DEF. Reduces ice damage by 20%.

- Added Heavy Robes to the chest for the cave puzzle.

- New item: Galarand's Codex. Teaches Divine Shield spell. Difficult to come by...

- New ability: Divine Shield. Absorbs 99% of the damage from the next source of damage. Learned by equipping Galarand's Codex.

- Hide armor reduces to 3 defense.

- New item: Leather Armor. Slightly better version of hide armor.

- New item: Targe. Slightly better version of wooden shield.

- Iron Helm's value reduced by 3.

I've been making several smaller changes over the last couple weeks to continue tweaking balance and make combat in-particular more interesting. Barring any major bug fixes, I don't plan to make another update to the demo until I've built the next area (which is going to take awhile).

OK, I downloaded the newest version and will be playing it for a bit. I'll write comments as I play through the demo.

-Holy ****, My characters start off with 4 different custom skills. You deserve a medal.

-Would love to see an auto-dash option.

-How much is 180% Holy Damage? Is that 1,8x stronger than a Cleric's regular attack?

-Some good and quick combat tutorials.

-The dark on the town map is too dark. In the light everything is visible, then outside the circle it's complete black...

-Would be nice if the 2 guards that join the party had different facesets. Maybe even just mirror them, so there's some visible difference. But you should probably try to do some Photoshop editing to make one look a bit different.

-What's the bar for in the corner of the screen in the dark cave map?

-Small jumping puzzle is cool. But the guard sprites disappear after failing a jump.

-Cleric can't equip Heavy Robes?

-I don't like having only 1 character effective against Slimes, especially since I need that character to play support as well.

-How did the Cleric heal one of the guards from 20HP back to 84HP when the Cure spell says it only heals 30%. Even with the Blazing Wand equipped my Magic isn't that high?

-No, but I want to admire the flowers!

-Beast girl is in the party now. Will stop here for now.

Game's pretty good, there's not too much to critique actually. Well, not as much as with most games at least. Characters all have their own personalities and you do a lot with relatively little dialogue (also haven't noticed any spelling or grammar errors). No huge ass cutscenes, no wasting of the player's time. I appreciate that. The only thing I'd like to see is an option for auto-dash, but your maps are all small, so the lack of one isn't too bad.

The mapping is alright. Since it's only RTP, it isn't really all that interesting to look at, but for what you have it's good. I like the small maps.

It's clear you know what you want with the combat, not something you see a lot in RPG Maker games. Starting off with a good amount of skills, and earning new ones with every level-up, I like that. The skills are pretty useful too and useable in every encounter.

I feel Shield is a little too weak, though. I'd like to see it give a +33% or +50% increase in defence.

Guard's Mark needs to be stronger. It costs 1 turn to cast, in which it does nothing, and only increases damage by 50% for 1 skill. So, the player will have to be able to use and hit with Flurry at least twice to break even on the use of Guard's Mark. I think it would do well with a bigger damage boost, longer duration, and/or make Flurry's accuracy 100% while target is inflicted with the mark.

What bothered me with the description of that first Holy spell (forgot the name) is that it says it deals 180% Holy damage. But without a point of reference, what does 180% mean? It might be better to say it does 100%, then use that as a reference point for all the other Holy spells that cause damage.

As for boss fights, I think I'd lower the HP on the Worms a bit. They took quite some time to kill, and weren't exactly challenging. The HP on the Spider and Beast bosses was just right.

I also really liked the music... I don't think it was RTP, right? It didn't sound familiar, but it fit really well.

So, like I said, there isn't that much to dislike about the game in its current state. I get the feeling you know what you want; there aren't a bunch of unnecessary scripts or features that clog up the game and graphically the game is pretty minimalistic, using RTP only. It's simple and to the point, but that's just fine for a game like this. If you can keep this level of quality throughout the rest of the game. this will be a great game once it's finished. :D

Just noticed the reason you can't wear heavy robes is because the robes were set to the shield slot, not the body slot. I'll update the demo with that fix shortly.

Does it make you feel better that there's nothing to interact with in the dark areas of the town map? I really want it to feel pretty damn oppressively dark in that particular screen. The lights highlight anything of interest that you can interact with, too.

The bar in the corner of the screen is an encounter bar - it's not something that really comfortably can be explained in game without breaking the fourth wall too much, so it will probably have an explanation in the "instruction manual" that will come with the game (I also explain it in the promotional video under the "features" section). Basically, it's how likely you are to get into a random battle - green is not likely, red is very likely. It's also how many random encounters there are left in that area - when the bar is empty, no more random battles.

The cure spell heals 30% plus a portion of your MAT stat (specifically, 150% of your MAT). This means the heal continues to do more as you increase your magic. Since the guards don't level up and only have 100 HP, by the time you reach level 3 and have the blazing mace equipped, cure is almost a full-heal for them.

Damage is the same way - 100% damage would be 100% magic attack, 100% weapon damage would be 100% physical attack. So 180% holy damage means it does 180% of your MAT plus a small amount (I think 17 or something to that effect) as holy damage. The description fields are already maxed out for a number of skills, so I don't think I really have the room to explain it any more than it already is - but again, something that can be easily covered in the text guide that will eventually be included.

Guard's Mark actually doubles the damage of flurry. Since flurry costs 7 TP to use and guard's mark costs 4, you're basically getting 14 TP worth of damage for 11 TP. I may adjust the cost on Guard's Mark to be 3 or 2 TP in a future update, though. The idea of making flurry a guaranteed hit while guard's mark is up is interesting, though it will devalue the impale skill (since impale has no purpose other than removing enemy evade chance as it does the same damage as a normal attack). Still, having a couple ways to deal with the same problem is always nice. It's something I'll think about.

Thanks much for the feedback - and like I said, I'll get a new demo version out to fix that Heavy Robes bug. The project is unencrypted, though, so if you want to go into the editor and change it from a shield slot to a body slot without re-downloading everything, that's all I'm doing.

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Made a couple hotfixes to the demo, the download link contains the fixes. Changes include:

- Divine shield description redone to explain that it lowers damage by 99% until an attack is strong enough to do more than 0 damage, or until 2 turns have passed.

- Lowered blue worm health by 30 and red worm health by 20.

- Added in new portrait for Ben and replaced all dialogue with him to have the new portrait.

- Fixed a bug where heavy robes were considered a shield, not a body item.

- Fixed a bug where hybrid form would refund 30 TP instead of 15 TP if used with lunar strength active. Hybrid form is meant to require 25 TP to activate, but to ultimately only cost 10 TP, so this fix should restore the correct behavior.

- Fixed a bug where people other than the cleric were able to use Galarand's Tome and Galarand's Codex.

- Fixed a bug where, if lycanthropic regen or lunar strength wore off on the action that hybrid form was used, they wouldn't be refreshed.

- Fixed a bug with cleanse that showed double debuff removal and a "0" effect on the target.

I don't think the bar is necessary to show if you don't explain what it does. But even knowing what it does doesn't really add anything for me as player. Knowing when to approximately expect a random encounter is nice... I guess, but it doesn't really help me in any way. Random encounters didn't happen frequently at all, and encounters don't last a great turn number of turns, so it never got annoying.

I don't like the percentages in the descriptions, because they're way off of what they actually do due to the added MAT bonus. It says 30%, thus you're expecting it to be around 30%, and maybe slightly above that because I have a few points in my MAT stat (maybe 35% or so). But then it heals the guards for like 70%, and that's just confusing if you went by the skill's description. It might as well just say "Restores target's HP. Heals more the higher your MAT."

The 180% Holy damage makes sense now, but for the player it's useless information, because there's no way of knowing that by just playing the game. I see 180% Holy damage, but compared to what? I don't have anything that does 100% Holy damage, so how strong is 180% supposed to be? It might as well say "Deals moderate Holy damage."

I liked the percentages in the skill descriptions of the Warrior girl because they used her weapon as reference point, so it's easy to figure out what you're getting from your skills.

So, Guard's Mark adds a 200% on top of the 150%? In that case it's worth using, yes. I thought it would do 200% instead of 150% damage. "Flurry deals 300% damage against targets inflicted with Guard's Mark." would be a clearer description then.

It initially did say "deals moderate damage," but I found people kept using abilities that didn't make any sense to use when I didn't give explicit descriptions of what they did. For example, before impale said "deals 100% weapon damage and lowers enemy evasion," people used to just use impale whenever they had TP up, even though it didn't do any more damage than the basic attack - thus depriving them of the TP necessary to use impale when it actually would've been useful (or guard's mark or flurry or something). That was why I did the overhaul on all the ability descriptions to explain exactly what they did.

I guess I'm not really sure where the confusion is in explaining that cure has a base heal and gets stronger as your MAT goes up. You want it to say "Heals the target, heals for more the higher your MAT," but that's what it does say already: "Heals for 30% max HP, increased by your MAT." Can you clarify why the one is more confusing than the other?

I've changed the skill description on Guard's Mark to say, "Causes flurry to do double damage," instead of "causes flurry to do 200% damage" to clear up that issue.

I'm also a little confused why "180% holy damage" doesn't make sense, but "75% weapon damage" does make sense. Holy is a school of magic, so it's saying, "Does 180% magic damage as the holy element." Saying weapon damage is saying, "Does 75% physical damage as the weapon element." One uses your magic attack stat, one uses your physical attack stat. Literally, the formula is "1.8 * a.mat." Can you help explain why it's confusing that "holy damage" doesn't make sense, but "weapon damage" does? I'm not understanding what I can do to help improve the description.

Yeah, that's definitely a problem, because it's true that "moderate damage" isn't clear in what it does either. And 100% looks like a big number (and big number must mean it's good!!), even though it doesn't add anything in reality (lol). More of a psychological thing.

Because it says 30%, so when I heal the guard I expect the base heal to heal the Guard around 30HP (and then a bit extra with the MAT bonus). But when it then heals for 64HP, that's really confusing, because it's nowhere near 30%. I see now that every single point of MAT is added up to that heal, so in that way it does make sense. I'm not used to a system like this, because in most RPGs the whole stat system is vague, while yours is very literal with every point I have. I guess this is just a psychological thing as well, because when I select the skill, the first thing I see is that 30%, so I set my expectations around that number.

Because weapon damage takes the character's auto-attack as point of reference. So if I see a skill that does 75% weapon damage, then I know it's 0,75 the power of my auto-attack. Then I can decide if I want to go for the extra power, or use the skill for less damage but 100% accuracy. I know exactly what I'm getting from my 75% weapon damage.

With 180% Holy damage I don't have anything to compare it to. I don't know how to explain this any better. How am I supposed to know how much 180% does when I don't even know how much 100% does? This 180% problem fixes itself once I get more Holy damage skills to compare it to, but when it's the only thing I have it's vague to the max.

Do you have any recommendations for what I could put that explains, "This skill does 180% of your MAT plus 17 damage to a single enemy, then does 2% of their maximum HP over the next 2 turns, and is a holy element spell," using about half that space? Would it help if I changed the description to, "Deals 180% MAT plus 17 holy damage to a single enemy. Deals additional 2% max HP over 2 turns"?

And yeah, I changed the skill formulas around in my game to make it easier to balance for myself, but I suppose it makes it easier for the player to understand, too. For example, the default attack is 4*a.atk - 2*b.def, but I changed mine to simply be a.atk - b.def. Magic spells by default simply do a.mat - b.mdf. So 1 point of stat increase pretty much always equals 1 point of damage increase, unless an ability states otherwise. Basically everything scales very linearly. I also went into the scripts and changed critical strikes to deal 150% damage instead of like the 350% or 400% damage they do by default.

The new description would be a lot clearer because the player can just check what their MAT is and calculate from there.

So, thanks to Engr. Adiktuzmiko and Tsukihime, ability descriptions should be significantly clearer now. Damage and healing is now dynamically calculated in the skill's description window, so that at any given time, you know exactly how much damage an ability can do before enemy defense or critical strikes are factored in. It looks like this:



I've updated the demo link with this new feature, as well as with a few other fixes and changes, listed below:

- Added in post-Silth cutscene.

- Changed Guard's Mark's skill description to say "causes flurry to do double damage," instead of "causes flurry to do 200% damage."

- Guard's Mark cost reduced from 4 TP to 2 TP.

- Ability descriptions have had a major overhaul, thanks to Engr. Adiktuzmiko and Tsukihime. All abilities now list exact amounts of damage or healing in their description, updating dynamically during battle. For example, the cleric's searing light might say, "Deals 55-80 holy damage," and if he gains a 10% MAT buff, will then say, "Deals 60-88 holy damage."

- Changed Hybrid Form to restore the amount of health increased. Example: Actor has 180/200 HP. Uses hybrid form. Actor will go up to 180/240 HP, then heal for 40 health, with a final result of having 220/240 HP after using hybrid form.

- Changed Conviction to heal for 15% max HP after the target's max HP has been increased. Example: Actor has 180/200 HP. Is healed by conviction. Actor will go up to 180/230 HP, then heal for 34, with a final result of having 214/230 HP.

- Changed all states to fall off after battle (namely poison), except death.

- Revive can now only be used in battle, but rewards TP for casting it.

- Refresh now revives and fully heals all party members outside of battle.

- Updated certain healing ability descriptions to note that variance affects the maximum HP part of the heal. Example: Something that heals 25% max HP plus 25 has a variance of 20. The ability description will say "Heals 20-30% max HP plus 20-30 health."

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Just updated the demo with a quick bug fix and a change to an ability's mechanic.

- Varsena's "Remorse" ability will now heal the party for the same amount regardless of her place in the formation. The formula is (a.mhp-a.hp)*0.4, but previously anyone who was healed after Varsena would have health restored based on her previous MHP and HP values. Example: Varsena is missing 30 health. She's the last member in the formation. Remorse heals 12 to member 1, 12 to member 2, 12 to Varsena. Example: Varsena is missing 30 health. She's the first member in the formation. Remorse heals 12 to Varsena, 7 to member 2, 7 to member 3. Now remorse will take a snapshot of the amount of health Varsena is missing when it's cast and restore health based on that snapshot to the whole party.

- Hybrid Form was incorrectly tracking the caster's TP when first applied. This could potentially lead to hybrid form falling off while the actor was still above 15 TP. This has been fixed.

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Added another quick update to the demo for a new skill that will combine well with the new ability descriptions.

- New ability: Scan. Reveals information about the enemy, including HP, MHP, ATK, MAT, DEF, MDF, and more information about certain special attacks they may have.



- Also reduced the cost of the Meditation ability from 10 TP to 6 TP.

So I cut together a short video showing off some of the new party member, the new scan skill, and a bit of the new area, to keep those of you who've been following the game interested and to reassure you I've been hard at work.

For those who've been following the game, everything after this contains spoilers!

It's really weird looking at side-view actor battlers fighting front view enemies... you should consider putting the actors below and make them back view or find side-view enemy battlers...


I also do find it weird to see battlers floating around the battlefield in places that they shouldn't be (like the actors floating around the already blurred part)...

Do you know of a large collection of side-view enemy battlers that's free to use? I've already put far, far too much time into animations and graphics to change the game from a sideview system (even overhauling the enemy battlers might be a lot of extra time, especially unfortunate since many of the enemies have a number of edits done to them and it would mean a lot of work for nothing to scrap them at this point).

As to the positioning of the battlers, I've tried having backgrounds, but it restricts the battle area to an extremely tiny section (which is why there are only foregrounds). I moved the actor battlers down about as far as I'm really comfortable doing, as the 4th party member already butts up against the actor windows.

Not really, that's why normally for this purpose we just opt to have the actors as back view, which is a default feature of lots of battler scripts out there that I've used...


as for the battleback, maybe you can edit the foreground such that it (the actual ground part) extends to the full size of the picture... that shouldn't be so hard to do...