Who wants to play a demo of an RPG I made in RPG Maker VX?

[Dollop of Mayo]

Hi! Remember me? You do? Oh, you wish I'd stayed gone? WELL TOO BAD

Anyway if you wanna play a game for me and are willing to download 180 MB, then go here : http://www.mediafire.com/?divqo3r09zptacp

(The above link is not the full game and you don't need RPG Maker VX to play this game)

If it gives you an error, download this : http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/download/run-time-package

Technical bits aside, this is a game I've been working on for a bit. It's on the silly side with some drama sprinkled in. The graphics are more or less stock, using an official Japan-themed dealy put out by Enterbrain, the people who make RPG Maker VX.

If you're comfortable and familiar with the RPG genre you should do fine. If you aren't, there are no tutorials or anything. The game is on the medium end of difficulty, in that it'll give you a little bit of a challenge but shouldn't be too awful.

If you do play, I'd love CONSTRUCTIVE feedback. It's fine if you just want to say "lol ur game sux" or "your game is good," but I'd much prefer if you can tell me what you liked and didn't like. Be brutal.

The game's very much a work in progress but I'm putting it out there to get feedback on whether it's any good and if people would be interested in seeing a completed product.

tl;dr PLAY VIDEO GAME PLZ

Also there's a save file that I forgot to delete when I zipped the game. Whoops. Feel free to delete it or ignore it or whatever.

[Dan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw_34U6Myos

e: sure I'll play it. I remember VX. I never got anything done and what I did do was godawful. Same goes for about 95% of their forum. I will give your game a try shortly I just wanted to have that in the first post

E2: I guess this would be the appropriate thread to plug one of my favorite LPs of all time, by our very own paste42. This unfinished masterpiece showcases the extremely low expectations everyone has for every VX game ever so I'll probably give your game a good review provided it's even marginally better than this.

You know, unless you want me to be a dick.

[Dollop of Mayo]

I want you to be honest about what you think as long as it's constructive.

Also I'm up to part 4 of paste's LP and I can't stop laughing

Also : UBIQUITOUS GIMMICKS

[Dan]

Oh wow, that was shorter than I expected. Well, let's get this over with. e: oh my god holy fuck ok I'm spoilering this

First, I have a confession. I hate RPGs. I love using RPG Maker, but I hate just about everything that comes out of it. Grinding is not fun. Every other game is a cliched mess. There are myriad reasons why I don't play them, but I'm just getting this out there because this is definitely a biased review and I wanted to make that known.

The game is okay. There were plenty of issues but overall I enjoyed playing it, which is saying something as demonstrated by the previous paragraph. I took great issue with the writing, first of all. The tone was the main problem. The game started out full of metajokes making fun of RPG cliches which were in all honesty very out-of-place. I think no matter what you do, you should remove just about all of those. One or two every now and then can be funny. Saturating the game with them makes it seem like a parody, which I thought was the case until after the first dungeon. That's what makes them even more inappropriate; the tone takes a turn for the super-serious right there and we dive into this web of intrigue with immortality and an evil emperor and all that jazz. The transition was very jarring and unnatural. Also, the lack of exposition was not good. I spent about two minutes in the village, even visiting every house and talking to every person. Some strange woman came into the village and this girl immediately accepted a dangerous quest without knowing the reasons behind it. Don't do that. If you're going to start the game without exposition, you actually have to start it "in the middle of things" - you can't have any BS segment before the action starts, like the village part. Expand on that or get rid of it completely and explain it later. I liked what you did with the boat scene but don't rely on that technique to inform the player. There are plenty of other methods of exposition.

For an RTP-based game it looked pretty nice. I'm glad you used a little more than the standard graphics. That said, how you use them is much more important. Your mapping was okay. You could have improved on the interiors of the houses, for example. The village as a whole was bad. It was rectangular, lacked detail and character, and had some kind of gamepad thing floating above it. I'd be happy to show you specific examples if you'd like but I didn't take any screenshots ahead of time. The cave was very well-mapped. The water looked strange, although I don't know how to fix that, and there was little detail on the ground. Add more detail and you'll have a very solid dungeon. The tower was pretty good - detailed, interesting, not too huge and empty. I didn't like that it was a rectangle but I guess it's a tower so what can you do? And I think you should get rid of the parallax in the background. I don't have much of an opinion on the world map because I hate world maps in general. It looked like a world map. That's all I've got.

Random encounters are the worst thing ever so yes, I'm going to complain about those. They're fine in the dungeons, but too common on the overworld. Now, this may be because I'm not good at managing my characters because I never play RPGs, but I found myself completely reliant on potions to advance. The enemies were omnipresent in the second dungeon and hit pretty hard. I needed those potions. There were none to be found though! The ones in the treasure chests were quickly depleted. In order to progress I had to basically save every few steps in case I died and had to start over. I guess what I'm saying is make drops more common or tone down the enemies. I'm not very well-versed in this area so I don't know. As for the rest of the gameplay, it was pretty good. Standard RPG fare. I'm just going to nitpick for a second here; "viscious" is spelled "vicious" and if you're referring to a city then it's always "capital," while the building itself is the "Capitol." Also, there were a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes in the battle system which is the fault of the translators. You basically have to go through and proofread every item in the database. Overall, the game was pretty solid. I think the most pressing issue is the writing, which is easily fixed. I give this demo a 7/10. Hope this helped.

[Dollop of Mayo]

Reply to Mr. Zanevsky

There's actually a reason behind why everything is so sudden and this girl just accepts this random quest out of nowhere, and why everybody in the village is so immediately accepting of outsiders, but I could see how it could be offputting initially.

You're not the first person to complain about the random encounters and I've already toned them down, as well as the overall strength of the enemies. I didn't have any trouble with them really but I also made the game, so I know what to do with any enemies that pop up.

The lack of exposition stems from my hatred of having to wait through pages of dialogue or 40 cutscenes in games to start playing. You're the first person to have brought that up, so I think in this case it's just a matter of preference. I feel the game is exposited just fine as you play it. It's quickly explained that the village has been isolated for a long time and as you play you'll find out more about it and the other characters. I'm in no way comparing my game to Bastion quality-wise, but almost every single drop of exposition is done in-game, as you play, so I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the way I'm doing things.

I'll admit with the starting village I didn't try very hard. I went for convenience of movement rather than much of anything else. Also it's the first thing I ever designed in VX so that probably has something to do with it. I'm working on another town right now and it's turning out more interesting. That being said I don't really like designing villages because they're a ton of work for how long the player ends up spending in them. That's not really an excuse for making them badly, but it's how I do. Oh and that gamepad thing is a placeholder so I know where to put the player's starting position.

The parallax background in the tower was meant to show that you were getting higher and higher up. I'm not really sure what's wrong with it and you're the first to have had an issue with it.

As for my spelling mistakes, I'll correct those. I honestly thought of "capitol" as a city and "capital" only in regards to money. And yes, the horrible grammar crap in the system is annoying and I'm just too lazy to fix it for the moment. If I finish the game it'll get a total overhaul.

Anyway thank you for the critique and for taking your time to play the game.

[Dan]

Get on IRC more so I don't have to write in this thread

[Cobalt]

I quit as soon as i realized i wouldn't be able to get past the first dungeon without grinding
I mean yeah the basic gameplay flow is
leave town
kill things in overworld
use potion when health is low
go back to town to buy more potions if needed
repeat until able to beat stronger enemies
Personally i hate games like this mainly because you can literally do it with your eyes closed and there just isnt any satisfaction in exploration or anything so sorry

[Dan]

Sounds like an RPG

[Dollop of Mayo]

I'm not going to try to win you over to the RPG genre since you clearly didn't like it before you played this game (is anybody who actually likes RPGs gonna play this thing?) but just FYI

if you go south of the starting village there's a rather obvious clearing in the forest that you can enter, and you get an accessory that would make grinding entirely unnecessary. It raises your stats up quite a bit for a low level; about the equivalent of 5 levels or so. I'm not sure if that counts as satisfaction from exploring but there would've been a definite reward and it would've given you an advantage in the dungeon, which btw, provides several healing items along the way.

Also a large part of the RPG genre is the story, which you won't get much out of if you close your eyes the whole game.

[Aposke]

Hi, I played your game.

Well, part of it, that is.
For some odd reason, my savestate at the end of the first dungeon (where that cat girl joined my party), got glitched out and when I loaded it one day later, it dropped me off right in front of the final portal that leads to the Overworld out of that water cave and shows me the ending.
That's just odd.
I don't have the drive to start over right now either, so I'll just talk about what I've seen from the game so far - the first dungeon and the prestory.

Unlike Wareng, I actually enjoyed the metahumor quite a bit and I don't think that it's misplaced or overdone either. Most of it can be found within the first 5 minutes of the game, and that's totally acceptable in my opinion, since you don't forcefully draw it throughout the entire story. The first few minutes in RPGs are mostly getting familiar with stuff and getting to know the characters, it's a lighter atmosphere that you won't find again once the story takes a nosedive down into seriousness, and so I think it's totally appropriate to have some "4th-wall-humor" there.
Also, I guess I'm a sucker for your kind of humor. Heh.
Aside from that, the story seems pretty solid (albeit a little clichéd, but well, it's an RPG, it'd be hard to avoid that) and leaves enough open endings for me to look forward to seeing more.

Gameplay-wise, I didn't get the impression that the game was "too hard" either, I made it through the first dungeon without any grinding and without even knowing of that "thing" you mentioned in your last post and there weren't that many OW encounters either (although I would probably limit them to separate spaces such as only meeting enemies in the woods, and not on open flatland).
Granted, I haven't played the second dungeon, so I wouldn't know how that relates to the difficulty curve, but I'm actually pretty pleased by it so far.
That said, the game IS a little potion-heavy, and there are no skill-upgrades so far, most of the fighting is just "ATTACK" "WAIT" "ATTACK", which can admittedly get boring pretty quickly.

Keep in mind that I don't ever play RPGs normally, so all this is coming from a guy who has no idea of the medium and may thus be pretty naive towards obvious pro/con points.
But in general I'm confident I can say that I like it so far, so keep it up!!!!11

[Dollop of Mayo]

@Aposke

I'm glad you mostly enjoyed it. Everybody who's commented on this forum and another I posted the game up on has had a wide range of opinions on what they liked and didn't, so I'm beginning to understand what professional game developers are up against

As it is the healing in the early game is potion-reliant. There will be healing magic later, of course, but basic resource management like using potions pretty much comes with the RPG territory. I could make it so you get healed at the end of every fight, as has been done by some games in the past, but in return the general difficulty of battles would have to go up to the point where every single encounter would have a chance of killing you, and that comes with its own issues.

As for putting encounters only in the forest tiles, with RPG Maker VX that would not be impossible but it would also be a ton of work. As a compromise I'm just reducing the encounter rate in general, as even I felt it was a bit too high before releasing the game, but I figured I'd see what other people thought. The encounter rate is pretty much the one universal thing people agree on.

The glitch with the save might have been due to the fact that I accidentally left in a save file from when I play tested the game and forgot to delete it. Something may have fucked up and the game didn't properly overwrite that save file with yours?

Anyway glad you had fun, sorry about the glitch, and the fact that you look forward to more provides me motivation to keep working.

[Dan]

Speaking of the overworld the enormous trees not only look out of place but in fact were left out of the overworld tileset for a reason

But yes I too await more updates of this game. Probably the first RPG I've had fun playing in a long time. Although that might just be because I know you I'm not sure but keep us posted anyway