MZ - Re Dreams Demo now available

while download the latest version, 2 parts in town was fixed I reported :D
1 thing does not, but checking more thoroughly and check each house, I try
to find more for you, but while inside Sylvia's house, I try to see if I can find
all quests available (as I had all secret rooms) :D

but here are some issues found (in spoiler).

I will continue the entire town and houses I can enter to report what I found for
the next update phase, so most of those are left out (if I really do hard glitching,
it give you the entire report if you like) but I have to ask, are roof B-E tiles or does
some of those require to be "passable" so you need to block it differently?
as the roofs are really stunning as I saw them before in a thread as you spend
quite some time to get it right.

Announcement - [NEW ALERT!] Resource Blacklist - The resources you should definitly not use

@oyajigari
I thought that I had removed all the problematic BenBen trees from my folder, leaving only the ones edited from Mack (which are okay to use with credit). Clearly I was wrong. Thank you very much for bringing this to my attention. It is much appreciated. They have now been replaced.

Such an excellent game. The dialogues are wonderful, and so are the battle animations.

@ShadowDragon You are a star for finding these. Those roof tiles are a nightmare to get right, so complex.

In answer to your question, the tiles are all B-E but sometimes the passability needs to change for particular tiles depending on where/how they are being used. Then I have to block them with regions. Clearly that particular configuration needed more adjustment.

anytime ^^

if do it by region, you might do so by each room, just for safety if you don't use duplicates
for passable tiles/blocking.

if done for each roof (even if it's correct) you safeguard it nicely :)
same thing for walls that has a different passable tile and blocking.

it's no must, but a feedback suggestion :)

I continue the game after dinner, so I can report what I found in the latest,
or while you safeguard those bits, I can look for other ones, but I do what I can.

I did find a few passability and dialogue issues, but I think they've all been identified. I sometimes encounter a lockup with cutscenes. It happened with the party in the passageway after being told to spend the night in the inn, and also in the cutscene with Emma leaving the inn to see Jack and Lily. It's possible that might have been continuing to press the arrow movement key and confusing the cutscene. When I tried to replicate while being careful not to hold any arrow keys down, I couldn't trigger a lockup. However...

I didn't visit Langley Farm before going to the forest. I didn't visit the farm until after Simon was on his way to see the guy about the origin of the medallion and Diane was in the party. When I first spoke to Sam, he warned me about the rabbits and Simon seemed quite surprised, said he'd keep an eye out for them. In reality, he had already seen those rabbits, so he shouldn't have been surprised. Then I went upstairs (and saved, that was a mistake). When I come down the stairs, Sam is there along with 2 other NPCs. Simon reaches the bottom of the stairs, turns to his right, and the game locks up. I repeated it 2 or 3 times with the same results. I restored back to my previous save, before reporting to Wulstan. I can leave town, again with Diane in the party because she doesn't leave until Simon enters the Item Shop, and I get the same lockup result at the farm. If I enter the item shop and let Diane leave the party, and quickly exit the item shop, not going to see Wulstan, I can exit the town, visit the Langley farm, have the same 'Beware of the Rabbits' dialogue with Sam, go upstairs, come down and no lockup. Except, without Diane in the party, when I come downstairs, there's only Sam there. The other two NPC's are not present.

As an aside, I didn't trigger any quest with Sam. I'll go back to the beginning before entering the forest for the first time, visit Langley farm first, and see if any quest gets triggered.

Nice mapping.

@Lady_JJ Thank you for such a detailed report. It's very kind of you to take so much time to write it up.

I got myself a bit confused at first, when you were speaking about Sam, as I thought of Wulstan's minion who runs down to the Inn! I'd never noticed that I'd given the farmer the same name. That will have to change for my sanity's sake.

It looks as if I'm going to have to do some more work on the dialogue and switches there. If you only visit the farm for the first time with Diana, you should only have Sam when you come downstairs. You need to return a bit later (roughly 800 steps, iirc) to find him with his lady friend.

Once again, thank you for your feedback. It's most helpful and I appreciate it.

I really enjoyed the playthrough I did... I played it more of an "actual player" than a 'game tester' when I did it to see if @Kes' time estimate was accurate or not, which it was.

To be completely honest I was already getting into the story a bit TOO much - when I got to the message that the demo ended there I was a bit upset that it was already over.

I had played some of the earlier versions of this game and helped debug some of the more major bugs (I ignored most of the main plot dialog in these runs so I wasn't rushing when playing the release version), but nothing like some of the people in this thread are finding.



I too felt the difficulty for battle sometimes was a bit too easy, but sometimes when the RNG wanted to get revenge on you, the fight (esp the Thieves + Leader battle) could really become a nightmare: When every single enemy kept attacking the same party member on the same turn instantly killing them before you could heal/react.

For the beginning of the game though I would say the difficulty is on par enough to keep you mildly engaged, but not so easy you never want to use any items... cant wait to try out the harder game options though.



This is the usual Kes game though, beautiful mapping, well thought out scenes with some witty banter in several locations, kind of light hearted at the start but WILL eventually get into deeper thought and emotional moments later on.

Like their other games, which sadly I have not played them all... but should, honestly... I look forward to see where this little gem goes and what kind of story they come up with in the end.
I know a small amount of the future story and I am eager to see how it gets implemented! :D



(I know, not much of a useful post, but I wanted to help out with another thread reply since I had no bugs myself besides some of the graphical and pathing ones pointed out already!)

I found 2 issues, 1 passability NW of raven wood


Not to mention a GAME BREAKING point when back to town with the teacher,
as this keeps looping over and over.


which means, you cannot bring the teacher back or your basicly stuck.

Edit:
Empty Cabin map, has more passibility at the start on the cliff, and on the back,
2 ways access on the cliff. (you might block this too if you do all sides to be save
with the region or otherwise :)

I also found bottom left corner, on the cliff is missing a corner on the cliff,
you cant miss it as I reported 1 more to the east :)

@Ahuramazda Thank you for your thoughtful review.

I really am in two minds about the difficulty for those opening enemies. If the player gets all the items and exp + Accomplishment gear in the town, then, yes, they will be starting with a significant advantage. But do I balance on that basis, or on the basis that the player won't get at least some of what's available?

@ShadowDragon Can I have a bit more details on the bug? I'm trying to think of all the options & switches to see which combination is causing the problem. It looks as if you haven't collected Diana yet. Is that correct? Did you collect The Chaotic Child quest? Although, having said that, this very first bit of dialogue is not dependent on anything except finding him. It is simplicity itself.


There is nothing there to loop, so I am perplexed at what could be going on, and why it has never surfaced before.

it say's Quest completed, than restart from there, no movement possible.
so when I got diana, and to town, I could increase my stats, repeat 2x no more text,
but locked movement, so still "Game Breaking Point" on saving the teacher.

last issue on skill attack (sword, claw, staff).


best to fix this issue, making weapons transparent and this issue is solved :)

if you want, I can give you my save file :)

My approach has been to balance around the player doing 50% of it on a normal difficulty playthrough. That way if they don't complete it, get stuck and can't find some of it, or just totally miss some of it, they can still proceed.

That would be helpful, as I am having trouble recreating the problem.

How would I do that?

@bgillisp Thanks for the suggestion.

I restarted the demo from the beginning and went to Langley farm before going to Raven Forest. All went well. My only additional thoughts are

1. Consider moving Henry's NPC down a tile in his house. He kinda looks like he was just visited by a gang of thuds who left him 'pinned to the wall.'

2. Any chance achievements can have an additional line with a running total? Example
EFFICIENT FIGHTER
Get Robert's EXP bonus 25 times.
18/25

I truly enjoyed the dialogues. I'm always fond of your characters being just decent, respectful, ordinary folks who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. Such a nice change from those heroes who are full of both themselves and their own obscene language. I'm looking forward to continue beta-testing if you'll have me.

@Lady_JJ Thank you for your appreciative words.
I think both your suggestions are good ones and will implement them for the next patch.

I would be delighted.

while I need to Jedria, the 3 spots you could enter gives an error (map error),
it's probably wiser, that it has a message "we don't need to be here" or
"this area is not available in the Demo" or something like that.

aside from that, Sylvia has a name typo:


not to mention, while you have enough gold, you can clear the quest by going out
and going in, why not ask if they want to pay or not if they have above 100 Guilders?

I didn't found the last quest yet, but do my best.

as for transparent, just delete the weapons from the weapon file and save.
alternative, see what draws those weapons, and create a function below it
for opacity = 0 or something like that, so it need a small snippet.

I don't know how MZ handles opacity though or if its the same as MV.
create a backup before testing :)

Edit:
Seems Jedria cannot be accessed as all 3 points leads to an error (just a button retry)
that does nothing, so I don't know about the last quest.

so I think it's the end of the demo =)

@ShadowDragon The quest you are missing is The Chaotic Child and that was available in Silverley. And this has made me realise that I shall have to write a whole new set of dialogues to cover the possibility that players will pick this up after the teacher has been found. Looking at the structure of the quest, though, I may have to make this one unavailable instead. We'll see what I can come up with.

And yes, I'm definitely going to have to amend Silvia's dialogues.

As for the Jedria, the demo now won't let you get near that part of the map. And the 'error' is because I have deleted every map after the demo ones, so any transfer events on the overworld map go nowhere.

it was a very nice game, and story is very interesting, I keep an eye out
on further release of this demo/game.

it was quite polished aside the game breaking bug, and passabilities I found.

Keep up the good work, some of "Silvia" was written "Sylvia" so you might
need to correct those as well.

I've uploaded a new version which fixes the bug identified by ShadowDragon, removed the default weapon animations that had sneaked into my battle animations, tweaked some dialogues and finally, I hope, nailed those passabilities on the town roofs.

It should be a smoother experience.