Trials and Tribulations [Complete]

Hello everyone, this is my first game ever, I have little experience with RPG maker, as a developer, but I've played quite a lot of games, and I am always happy to try something new made with this great medium. I hope you guys give the game a try and share your impressions of it here.


Synopsis

Trials and Tribulations is set in the world of Arum, in the country of Westercrest, located in the Northwestern Continent. 
A prosperous land, full of perilous places for brave adventurers, with many legends of ancient times. 
Of all the legends of Westercrest, perhaps the most well-known is the one about the Cave of Trials. 

"It is said that the one who can face the Trials to the end, before going insane, or worse, will have the Water of Life bestowed upon them. 
The mystical water can cure any disease or curse known among those lands. However, not many return from the terrible cave." 

The story begins as the protagonist Kato and his wife Emilia return home from an expedition to the village of Wyvernholt. 
In their last adventure, they fought a terrible demon, which cursed Emilia with its dying breath. 

As his last hope, Kato follows the legend, to discover the truth behind it. 
He must face the Trials alone, and find a cure for his wife before it is too late.

Main Characters




 

Often the rational, calm type, Kato is a reliable addition to the exploration teams he leads when adventuring about Westercrest.

He was born in Eastern lands. Not much else is known about his past, as he is quite reserved about it.

A talented swordsman, rivaled by none of the Wyvernholt village.

Kato met his wife Emilia when he led the exploration group she was part of, and have been together ever since as an adventuring pair and couple.

 



 

A light humored native of Westercrest. Emilia was born into a family blessed with magic, influenced by the cracks in the Rift around that region.

Ever since little, she has shown affinity to healing magic. Opposing her family's plans, Emilia left home to join a group of bandits, escaping the fate of becoming a temple healer. 

A few years later, seeking to redeem herself, she joined the exploration group of Wyvernholt, a place she learned to call home.

Features

Screenshots

























Credits

Download

Contest Page: http://contest.rpgmakerweb.com/game/view/id/433
You can also find the game's download links with and without RTP files here.

Great game ! I'll give it a try when i'll have more time

Thanks, let me know what you think of it, if you'd like :)

Completed it via livestream. Alas, forgot to do a local recording -_-

Anyway, it's a pretty good game - the puzzles were fun and interesting, and there was a nice sense of backstory to the place with the fallen adventurers. However, it started to drag on at the lava scene, where an excessive number of loops of the map had to be made to progress - I think I spent seven minutes on that, even with running all the time! 

Some of the puzzle answers were a bit too obscurely-hidden. The solutions could do with a sparkling animation over the usable objects. The desert one was a sneaky one, and the forest one was funny :p

I liked the humour near the end, though the gold riddle didn't make much sense with one of its reasonings.

Also, the ending felt a bit strange. 

The mapping was generally nice, though some of the maps could do with tweaking in terms of where the shadow pen is used, since it is not always clear what is on what layer. The lighting was nice.

Overall, I enjoyed.

Ahh where was your livestream at? I missed the one for my game but perhaps I could follow the next ones.

I'm glad you played and enjoyed it. There were some scenes which I knew how to handle or portray my ideas better, I will make notes about it and learn for the future. Thank you very much for your review :)

As for the ending... that is open to interpretation, heh.

Oh by the way, another thing I noticed: You tended to use a lot of words to explain things that would be better shown via move routes, especially the collapsing scene at the start.


I figured the ending was open to interpretation, lol.


Here's my livestream for reference: http://www.twitch.tv/streamlegend

Your game definitely needs more views. I'll boost it.

Thank you! I am pretty happy that it got a few reviews, but I would love to hear more about what people think of it.

There are nearly 700 games in this contest. Hard to find good ones and gems. :D

Constant promotion would be only way to survive. lol

Indeed. I shared it on Facebook, Tumblr and such, but I don't want to bother people too much about it. Hopefully they'll find it, heh.

Okay here were my thoughts as I played the game:


The music that plays in the first area feels a bit too dramatic for just dungeon crawling. It's not like I'm in the last dungeon or anything.


Okay the game has crashed 2 times so far. If I get a third, I'm quitting. (I have a screenshot of the second: http://prntscr.com/47eg0a )


Invisible mazes aren't fun. Please don't use them again.


Anyways that was one of the shorter entries I played, but at this point I'm not complaining since the last 2 I played really dragged on longer than I wanted them to. The puzzles were neat and not too challenging, so good job there. Just be sure to try to have it tested lots prior to release to try to catch any bugs/crashes, because those are no fun.

Ahh sorry to hear you crashed, I haven't had those problems when testing, or the other people who tested for me. I suspect some crashings might be caused the light script. But not on that area as it doesn't use lights around it... that's weird.

Did it only crash around there? I'm going to see your livestream video, I was too tired to stay awake and missed it :p

Thanks for the feedback, and sorry again about the problems, they weren't reported before.

I picked up the game to fix a few things and hopefully release a post-contest version sometime around next month. Starting with the maps, I want to get rid of those familiar blocky edges of RTP.

Here's a progress screenshot if anyone is interested. I'd love some feedback too!

The area under the red line is the old part which I have made little to no changes yet. I'll need to figure out how to use the transparent cliff edges tiles made by Grafikal that I found after reaching the tileset limits on dungeon maps.

Here's my very quick and sketchy take on the game (link for info on why it's so short and all that jazz)




I don’t have much to say about this one. It has nearly no plot, and the gameplay is not particularly appealing either, nor is the presentation. While no elements are horrible, they lack polish and…are just not that good.


One thing I particularly noticed is that nearly all situations where you CAN do something optional it ends in negatives. This is silly, if all of the “choices” are negative, it deletes any sense in actually taking the risk: if some of them had positive outcomes it would be more of a “do I want to risk it?”, but as it is it just feels like the game is trolling me and it’s just frustrating.


Combat also goes largely unexplained and I wasn’t too sure of what I was doing. The puzzles were okay, but pretty basic and with no real context other than “continue” there was no real appeal to them.


Overall the game lacks a good solid base that makes you WANT to keep playing. It doesn’t really have a strong point to serve that function.

Thanks for the feedback Indrah! I will take your opinions in consideration when trying to polish the game for a last version before I move to another one.

I really don’t like how the narrative tells me what’s going to happen next. It’s jarring. It should focus on just showing than telling. But ont he bright side, it has a lot of customized materials that really brings life to the game. I appreciate the small animations, poses and face changes. The mapping could really use some work. I’m not buying the whole romance, however, despite being the central point of the plot, the game is focused on telling a story than being character centric. So forgiven.

 

This game shines on gameplay, even if the puzzles were simplistic. The only thing I really disliked about it is the final trial with all the memory-dependent questions (like how many trials you went before getting there) and riddles. With the savepoint being far away, getting to this point was pretty stressful. Had I failed, I hate to redo all the things I did before getting to the dragon.

 

It was fun for the most part! It’s not irritating or anything. I think it's a good first game (If it's your first).