MZ - Re Dreams Demo now available

SYNOPSIS

What do you do when life crushes your dreams? Perhaps you decide to just make the best of a bad job. Maybe you spend your whole life in bitter resentment. You might dedicate yourself to getting revenge. You could simply give up and wither. But it doesn’t have to be like that.

When you are blackmailed into taking on a job you’d rather not do, and others are press-ganged into joining you, an unexpected consequence is the chance to change, to dream again – but differently. If, of course, you come out of this alive.

GAMEPLAY

Battle

• Order Turn Battle [OTB] System so you can choose each action as the battle unfolds. Turn order for current and next turn are visible and there is wide scope to manipulate both your own and the enemy's turn order.
• 4 difficulty settings. These can be changed in-game. NOTE at this stage I have not play tested Hard and Veteran. You are advised to choose Normal or Relaxed.
• Once the party is more than 4, you can swap live actors in battle.
• At the end of Boss battles you have the choice to continue exactly as you are (including Game Over) or Retry with the HP/MP and items you had at the beginning. Any cut scene will not be repeated.
• The actors do not learn tiered skills. Skills are powered up by finding Skill Orbs.
• Each character has tiered bonuses depending on how many each one personally defeats.

General

• 6 characters. The title screen updates each time a character joins, plus at certain late game events. The title screen shown here reflects the fact that the demo only has 4 characters.
• If you hate exploration, this game is probably not for you. Many items and gear, including some of the best, are found this way. EXP can also be gained.
• Secret Rooms : number still open, but 30+
• Side quests (of course) with the choice of small stat bonuses for each character for every 3 quests completed.
• Accomplishments: a Trophy Room awards you a piece of gear on completing certain actions.
• Player's Perks awarded at level 10 (so outside the scope of this demo) with improvements at levels 20, 30 and 40.

CURRENT STATE

This is a demo of the first town and dungeon, where you collect your 4th party member. If you do everything it will take between 1 and 1.5 hours.



You can download the demo from here.

I hope you enjoy it. Please note the point about which difficulty mode to pick. Hard and Veteran could well be unplayable yet.

Changelog
9th Dec 2024 passability errors and typos fixed.
12th Dec 2024 Bug fixed and passability errors.
24th Dec 2024 Bug on reentry to Silverley fixed. QoL additions: Player notified when a quest is added to Quest Journal; all passive skills, not just some, invisible in battle.

Oooh, looks interesting. The artwork is very lovely :wub
Your download link leads me to an error page though.

@slimmmeiske2 [link] to game until he fixed it :)
he made a typo somewhere ^^

@ShadowDragon Thank you for stepping into the breach until I could fix it. Much appreciated.

@slimmmeiske2 link now works.

Few issues, on after the into to gain control.

while playing Veteran difficulty) Hard mode has many key featurs 115% - 125%
while veteran is all 110% to 130%, but the font is cutoff.

same on MANY message boxes, the font is off (using rockwell font), but based on
font checks, I assume MANY get this problem with cutting out words!

the option setting on OK, Buzzer, Select? etc is a nice touch to do, I like that to
set your own sound on it.

when I play through it, I give more feedback, just wanted to let you know about those.

As I suggested twice in the opening post, do not play veteran or hard mode. They have not been tested, there will be all sorts of errors. I don't know how it will affect the font - this hasn't happened on any of my playthroughs, but note, I did not install Rockwell font, so I don't know where you have got it from.

it's in the options to choose though, so I cannot tell.
and while HardMode/Veteran isn't tested, I try it anyway :D

I can always switch to normal, but as for fonts, I just pick it from options menu.

@ShadowDragon Ah, I see. I'll try and find a way of removing it from the options. It must be some sort of VisuStella default that they just dropped in.

while playing around, I found 3 issues so far before I got to Raven Woods as it
said east, so when down from castle I think, I went down to the bridge which
was closed.

than farmer south, but you can walk around to get to the bridge you cannot cross,
than I had Dianna talking which wasn't in my party, and on the side to a map, it
crashed (no message, just a retry button).

pressing F5 autoSave was ON again while I put it OFF, as I like it to be OFF at
all times, so maybe look into it why it turns back on?

another issue is found around town:
the top is missing a bit of wood part? as its the only spot I saw.


the 2nd one is on a church, the same thing happen on the left side from the middle tower

which is only a small passability issue, as the rest didn't had it so far I could test.

after a while, I found the Raven Wood North-East from where you exit, so I continue
from there, but maybe block the world below the farm off, or unable to walk there,
as I know its under construction.

@ShadowDragon I'm very sorry, but I'm not able to follow your directions.
Where was this? You mention the bridge you can't cross, but there is no dialogue for Diana on any page of the bridge event, so I don't know where this happens.

On the side where? Obviously you can't describe the map as I assume it crashed before you could see it, but could you describe the entry point to it? If it would help, I have put a reduced image of the relevant part of the world map in the spoiler below.


You've got me on the autosave F5 issue. At the moment I don't have a clue, so it may take me a while to sort that out.

Thanks for spotting the 2 mapping errors.

I say leave the options. You said clearly in the opening post they are not tested, and if someone wants to ignore clear directions anyways that isn't your problem.

I may need to check this out soon too.

even world maps can be cut off.

@Kes the path to the far east is further down on the screenshot you show to walk around,
than go east (near the castle up and some cliff side next to it where the message happens.

but aside from there, here is a list of issue in spoiler.

I'm not sure about the open door where the 2 guys went too, but when saving Diana, the door
was closed, or after I went upstairs (not sure if they could leave or not).

I got Diana in party and need to depart North East to her house, so I continue tomorrow with it.

so far I played the game, it was really nice, and I love some dynamic aspect that you don't see much,
I love the mapping you did, but not really game breaking (aside the missing maps I think on the east).

Edit (no Diana in party)

@ShadowDragon I now know where you mean. When I updated the demo file to put in the character art, I forgot to block off that whole area. I'd only done it in the original version.

The colour change of the morphing bunny is quite intentional (think of the Weeping Angel Statue). When you look directly at it, it's a soft white fluffy bunny, but behind your back it changes into an aggressive stalker. If you'd gone and collected the quest from the farm just south of the town you would have heard a bit about them.

Thanks for finding those further passability issues.

I wasn't sure, but the farm didn't give the quest, but it looked weird,
but you did an awesome job so far, I might bugtest it again in a new update.

keep up the nice work.

@ShadowDragon You only get the quest from that farm if you go upstairs and do a minimal amount of exploring. Look in your Quest journal and see if you have "A Home-Alone Farmer".
Thank you for your kind words. And your bug testing was much appreciated. I'm relieved that all you found were passability issues.

I played this demo, here's some comments [CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS]:

Nice mapping, and character art and I like how music is used in the game. Some of the sideways building entrances where a bit "difficult" to spot though. The story/writing was interesting enough, though for me the character attitudes are a bit too "nonchalant". I mean like the characters (who aren't trained fighters) just casually joking when ambushed etc. And I'd expect a bigger reaction from Diana in the thief intro, since they did kill her parents. I liked that there were some internal comments by the characters and comments on object interactions.

The battles were ok and the enemies hit hard, but it was too easy to just beat the enemies with standard attacks. Like (at least after gaining a couple of levels) the treants could be killed by just attacking them with all my 3 character's standard attack, before the enemy got a turn. Also, all my characters seemed to have higher agi than any of the enemies.
*Note: The character attacks where showing the rtp weapon animation swing underneath them. Also when jumping back to base an active battler might appear on top of another for a short time.

I like that you find stuff and get simple quests in the houses, that gives exploring some purpose. Like I "hate" games that have big towns with buildings where there's basically nothing inside.

-Sylvia's quest says that I don't have enough money even if I did, unless I go outside first and return
-why did the game ask me if I want to try again when I beat the bandit boss fight?
-after recruiting Diana again and leaving town, the game allows you to continue to an unfinished area where it goes to a black screen if you interact with different stuff

Passability errors and spelling errors in spoilers:


Good luck with the project!

@rpgLord69 Thank you for your detailed comments. I appreciate your time and effort.

Because a player might win, but at the cost of too many items; they might not have successfully stolen the skill "Thief's Blessing" and want to have another try; someone might end the fight dead and they want all actors to get the EXP, or other possible reasons like that.
You're right that dialogue will need tweaking. I need to take account of the fact that most players will get this before leaving the town for the first time and therefore I'm encouraging them to spend it on gear or items, rather than this quest at this stage.

For the treant (Angry Ash) I'm really encouraging the player to steal the skill and if Robert, who is pretty weak at this stage, gets killed off every time before getting a chance to do that, then he will be without one of his few damage-dealing skills.

I have uploaded a new version with the access to those places blocked off. I forgot to do it in the rush to get the page live.

tbh I hadn't noticed that. Using Action Sequences for most things should prevent that happening. Particularly for e.g. Robert who has a casting animation for all his skills. Can you remember more specifically when it happened?

Just to give me an idea of player completion, you should have been able to get
3 completed quests
3 secret rooms
2 stolen skills
1 certainly and possibly 2 achievements
Did you get all these?

Thank you for that very comprehensive list of passability and typing errors.

Your feedback is much appreciated.

Hmmm, I did find 3 secret rooms, 1 stolen skill (but I didn't steal the bandit skill). I think I completed 3 quests (the chaos kid quest was still left open at the end, I think?). Don't know about the achievements.

I noticed the weapon swing animations pretty late, after I had recruited Diana for the first time. I was just using basic attacks at that point. Didn't check if it was happening with skills. It did show with the old man's basic attack also.

There is a gab message telling you when you get them, but also if you use the Achievement item that takes you to the Trophy Room, you will see trophies lit up if you've got them, and they give you a reward if you interact with them.

Congrats on the demo release! Been interested in what you were cooking up in MZ. Will definitely give it a play!