MV - Titans of Illumia (15+hrs Non-Linear RPG)

Synopsis

Explore the mysterious island of Illumia with it's many secrets and treasures. Non linear interactive gameplay allows you to choose how you play with different routes and endings. Progress is determined by the treasure you collect allowing you to clear obstacles and beat bosses without grinding. Summon abilities of fallen heroes by embracing the power of the contracts and possibly even brave the dark depths beneath the island!

Story:

Four strangers are brought together and given a second chance when the borders between life and death are tampered with. In doing so the world they knew now seems unfamiliar to them and they must overcome themselves in order to find the man responsible for their shared misfortune. This man with dark ambitions betrayed his kingdom and released four powerful titans that had enslaved humanity in times past. In the ensuing chaos he plans to rebuild the world for his own sake, one without death or suffering. Will you decide to confront the titans, prevent the dawn of a new world, or explore the island to uncover it's dark secrets?

Features:

Inspired by the early Zelda and Final Fantasy games, this game has a heavy emphasis on exploration and strategy. Your strategy in battle including whether to run or fight will determine the outcome of each battle and being unprepared for difficult encounters could be costly.

• Buy, craft or scavenge for equipment to keep upgrading your party. Collect recipe books and rare minerals to create equipment from the menu. Visit different stores across Illumia to find the best deals and exclusive items.
  
  
• Keep track of quests and achievements from the menu to track your progress. Over 40 quests to complete including a mark system for tracking challenging foes.
  
  
• Uses Yanfly's Charge Turn Battle plugin inspired from Final Fantasy 10 as a departure from typical turn based battles. Manipulate ally and enemy turns to create advantage in combat.

• Clear obstacles with swords, bombs, pickaxe, shovel, ocarina, lantern, and zephyr boots to explore dungeons and the overworld. You may even find random loot or new dungeons as a result!
  
  
• Each character has their own good and bad ending, completing each character arc grants a powerful exclusive accessory as well as several story changes.

IMAGES/SCREENSHOTS

DOWNLOAD LINK v1.0.15

CREDITS


This is the first project I've completed and I'm happy I get to put it out there for other people to play. I'd love to hear any community feedback in terms of what works and what I could have done better. Hope you check it out and have fun playing!

Taking a look at your game, you don't seem that hopeless. It looks way bigger than I'd expect from a first project. I'm impressed. Maybe you should consider calling yourself "Hopeful Dreamer" instead or is that name already taken? I feel that I'm far more worthy of the hopeless part of your avatar name in comparison.

Thanks, hope you enjoy the game! Can't say usernames are my strong point but Hopeful Dreamer sounds quite nice in comparison. Just listened to some of the music below your post, is it yours? It sounds fantastic!

The music isn't mine. I'm totally hopeless at music. It's just that the musician had recently offered to compose free music for people on this forum whom included his Halloween event image link in their signatures along with a link to his music. Seeing that Halloween had passed, I decided to remove the Halloween image but I thought I might as well leave the link itself in my signature.

Ohhh, still that's cool of them. Is there anything you're working on?

I've got most of my story planned out in an (perhaps overly) ambitious story-rich RPG that I intend to call "Asearia Chronicles: Twisted Fates." I'm very slow with computers and to hinder progress further, I've also recently agreed to help someone who's native language is not English to proof-read what she wrote as well as rewrite her story for her game she is developing. We haven't even thought of a suitable title for the game yet though. The game will probably only be a few hours long. She intends to finish the game in a few months time. I have no idea how long it's going to take to finish my own first game though.

I think with computers it all comes down to practice. Like the name, it can be hard when you're passionate about something to not get carried away. Definitely do that myself... Only finished Titans of Illumia by breaking it down into smaller jobs and chipping away at it a few hours each day. It was nice when it all came together though.

I only played for a few minutes or half an hour or probably a bit longer than that... but the game already annoyed me enough to never try it again.

At first I picked the path of the survivor, picked all the gold up ~640 in the house and a bit more lying around and than I bought as much equibment as I could.... than I encountered the enemies.

It felt like battling level 15 enemies at level 1. It isn't balanced at all and I lost some money. I mean alright I thought I used a wrong strategy. So I tried again. Must have been about 20-30 times and I tried every different enemy. Can't beat them. Whatever I do. I bought 2 iron rings and a mage's hat. I tried to spirit shot or normal attack... which didn't work out well for me. The plants use earth (100% chance to stun for a turn it seems) 90% of the time ( sometimes something called Pollen though I dunno what it does and they counterattack) the spiders have some insane defense and they can make you fall asleep and poison and slow you enough so that you can't outheal them anymore (I think my spirit was 70 at the time). What I want to say short:
It's not fun or interesting getting my butt handed to me however much I try it. Maybe there is some hidden secret super weapon that lets me do damage to them... but I don't think there is. It's just plain and goddamned annoying and it's something I hate the most. Luck based win chances (and i didn't get one win out of over 30 tries...)

1/5.

I played some of the game (up until after the prologue), and I left a rating, review and bug report for you over at itch. I'm going to have to reduce the rating to 3 since they game is just incredibly unbalanced. Fooljastic is right in what he says - the game is just too difficult. The odds are completely stacked against you. Now, this game does have some real potential - but I think you should start making heavy changes to the balance in order for the game to feel fun.

@Fooljastic @Elyswer
I'm very sorry that your experience with the game was soured by the poor balancing, it's mainly down to my inexperience as a developer. It's something I'll try to fix to prevent others from having a similar experience so any information is a big help.
I'll tweak a few of the exploration areas in the prologue to have different encounters for that period during the prologue.
Thank you both for your feedback, I'll upload another version of the game later today with fixes to these issues so that any one else who picks up the game doesn't have the same issues.

It's great you're doing something about it ^^ I actually really enjoyed the game, but I'm stuck on it due to everything hitting too hard! Once you've finished with that, I'll start playing again.

@Hopeless Dreamer

My problem is simply that there is no balancing and that fighting in the prolog seems to solely rely on luck, I don't even want to know how fighting enemies would be without the healing skill on any of the other paths... it seems like you didn't test it and simply ran it trough a damage calculator without taking into account the various status effects they deal and expected us to heal when stunned (nevermind that shell and the other buffing skill were not the key to victory as I hoped)
Take for an example the spider: The spider does more damage than you and if you get unlucky (which was for me every fight) it slows you down taking your only chance at beating it away or makes you fall asleep which has the same result.
A single time playing trough this would have made one notice it. It's not hard. It's plain unfair and luck based and if someone in over 30 tries didn't manage to take a single enemy down.... than something is wrong. I tried to play around with "sets" (I even restarted and tried different equibment... which didn't help). If you are told you are not supposed to win and that you should avoid encounters it's one thing... but if you are clearly supposed to win those random battles than something is wrong. They are way to hard! It's like you played trough it with a level 10-15 character and didn't take into account that not everyone will start that high! Also take stone... it stuns you for a turn and does ~450 damage.... healing does ~600-700 (if i remember right) basic logic tells you that the stun can kill one without getting a turn (happened to me eight times give or take one or two). This is not balanced or tested correctly.

The beginning shows the path you take as a game... i fully expect bosses to oneshot me with what you showed me so far.... which doesn't sound like a lot of fun. I may have been a bit to harsh, but I was seriously pissed at what you did with the "balancing" after fighting enemies so many times without a positive result...

Your game may seem promising story-wise, but if the gameplay is a nightmare nobody will be overly interested in seeing the story either (at least in my opinion).

@Fooljastic,
You're completely right, the beginning of the game should ideally let you know how the rest of the game will be. I assure you bosses early on shouldn't be able to one shot even an unprepared party but I certainly need to do a better job in tweaking and warning of difficult encounters. The problem is that some enemies which I've unfortunately neglected here are better handled in a party. I did intend for some difficulty but the plant and spider based enemies for where they are in the game are certainly in need of change and have already been tweaked.
Thank you again for your feedback.

@Hopeless Dreamer
I may give it another shot after the tweaked version is up... also take into account if the other pathes have monsters you can encounter, that they will probably not be able to heal and hand out items accordingly....

Well if you are supposed to fight those enemies in a group, than it makes more sense...^^ I was wondering how one could screw up that badly right at the beginning.

Thanks for all of the feedback, I've just put up a new link with the following fixes:
- Tweaked stats of prologue enemies
- Changed basic elemental skills to remove crippling status effects
- Changed slip damage rules to prevent death by poison
- Tweaked the frequency and appearance of certain enemies

Well I went trough the prolog and i noticed several things:
Elfenheim

unlimited sleep tomes where you can borrow them. (please leave it.... would be a nice shortcut to grinding money... which would be very nice... xD sadly I feel obligated to tell you that)

Guy in the smithy says you find good bows, but doesn’t sell bows.

Mage

Can get stuck when completing the red flower side quest

Knight

Some bandits in the cavern can deal a ~900 damage attack almost oneshotting someone

End of prolog

Only knight and guardian contract (on Alice) available, mage and saint contract is gone (come on... you should have noticed that one, I still had all three of 'em in the boss battle knight was just the last one I used.... maybe because of that its the only one left?)

I will say more once I have played more

@Fooljastic
Thanks again for bringing this to my attention. I'm honestly quite frustrated with myself as I've done many playthroughs and spent a lot of time testing. That being said in future I'll definitely have to outsource my testing as developers will often play much more differently than the players.

I've made the suggested fixes apart from 1.

Regarding the contracts I wanted each party member post prologue to only have access to 2 classes and at that point the game handles contracts a bit differently. Do you not have the contracts in inventory or is it that Alice can no longer access Saint and Mage as intended?

[Edit]: Found where you got stuck on red flower quest.

@Hopeless Dreamer

You can get stuck if you deliver the red flower from the left side, because the man simply spawns beside you making you unable to move.

Oh i didn't know you intended to only have 2 contracts for each... i thought alice power was to have access to every contract (which I thought an interesting idea) I had hoped she would be that versatile and I just wanted to keep her as a second saint or mage instead of knight/guardian.

I didn't play any further so I don't have anything new yet.... got stuff to do, will play further tomorrow.

No problem, you really should ask other people to test your game before you release it.(Because they play differently than the developer that knows whats going on. As you said already xD)

@Fooljastic
No worries, thanks again for the feedback. New version up soon!

I'm two hours into the game and so far I'm really enjoying it. But right now I'm pretty sure I soft locked the game. After the prologue, I went to the front of the castle In the same city as Gelhar's church is, and after the interaction with the mage and the guards, I can no longer walk on the bridge that is attached to the platform in front of the castle. So if you could fix this I'd really appreciate it.