Hello, I’m back and testing the last version now after a while. With a fresh mind I can also tell you what issues I still notice or discovered due to not playing for a long time:
Setup
first, my game started 1 fight before the 1st boss, while I remember having defeated the boss and stopped soon after that last time.
in fact I just tried again after defeating the minions and I’m also back to before the minions! I’d rather be sure the save system properly works before going further before the boss takes quite some time to beat
the game’s maximum resolution is 1080p. On a 1440p monitor, the main menu (and the rest of the game) looks OK, but the settings menu itself still looks blurry. Maybe it’s due to the Unity default widget textures just being too lores, and it will be fixed once you fully customise the UI?
UI
the UI is still very raw at places (I mentioned default Unity buttons but there are also many buttons using primary colors that look proto), since release is approaching it’s something to work on seriously over this year. I see there is no UI/graphic designer in the team, that will be an important addition to the staff, not only for the overall in-game look (since it’s a VN / turn-based RPG you can say that UI is a big part of the aesthetics)…
… but also for promotional art. If your case I see you already got a Steam page with capsule art and all, but you can still improve things like the color palette. For instance, the blue of the BONDS in the MAGNETIC BONDS logo is bit dark. It’s not too hard to read but you want maximum clarity on the capsule art. If you find a good stylized Japanese font for マグボ, it will also help stand out (e.g. Freedom Planet’s katakana sub-title uses a nice font with a golden gradient - OK maybe the 3-level gradient is a bit too much and not that easy to read, but you get the idea)
on the same idea, a few messages (e.g. “Victory”) have very low contrast (yellow on white) making them hard to read.
Battle
dropping back into the game, I had forgotten about non-trivial inputs (namely E/R to switch character and boost, Shift to cancel). It would be nice to have a Help / Input reminder menu somewhere (in the Escape menu I suppose) or have the controls reminded in the PDF Guide (easier since no need to implement feature in-game). Personally when I don’t have time for in-game controls I write them on the itch page, which you can also do (but that won’t do for Steam, as people are less expected to read the Steam page while playing!)
… but to me, the best is in-game HUD indicators, namely showing the E/R keys near the character avatars and boost buttons to indicate E/R switches character or increases/decreases boost level
E/R effect actually depends on context and that’s a bit troubling at times: you want to boost and instead you switch character. More exactly, in the top battle menu and skill menu, E/R switches character (or fails with error if no character available, which can give the impression that Boost is not available when trying to boost). When selecting an enemy, E/R changes Boost level. It differs from Octopath which allows Boost level change on skill selection, so I easily mess up. I like however that unlike Octopath, you can Boost at the last moment during enemy selection.
=> in the end it may be better to allow boost on both skill and target selection. To avoid confusion completely and also allow player to change character during skill selection, you can also assign different buttons to character switch and boost level change. It would be more complicated to remember and use all these keys though (but if inputs are remappable, players can choose to either use contextual boost/switch character or dedicated buttons).
if you support gamepad (very recommended for Steam), I suppose E/R would become L/R triggers which is very intuitive (Octopath uses it for Boost already). Would could still use LT/RT on Xbox or X/Y to switch characters. Alternatively a Chrono Trigger-style left/right button to switch character from the top menu (then it’s better to show all character action boxes as in Chrono Trigger - it can be overwhelming to some, so there’s some UI decision to make)
the Escape pause to increase Boost indefinitely hack has been fixed!
otherwise my observations are the same as last time (too many OT, nice to defend at last moment…), and my strategy didn’t change (defend when enemy turn gauge or Rage approaches 100%, else use most powerful skill, consume all Boost when available - I’m considering to use 2 Boost instead of 3 since if I wait for 3 I will “waste” some Boost increase as it gets clamped on the max level)
I tried to use the mouse to inspect enemy status alterations/weakness, but I couldn’t see my cursor. Is it disabled during battle? I’d recommend PC-compatible RPG to support mouse, it’s very useful to hover all sorts of information (as in Darkest Dungeon). Otherwise you need a way to navigate through all UI elements to inspect them (I know, it’s hard to do, even Octopath doesn’t do it - I only know CrossCode to have a full help with navigation to get a hint on every element on screen, and that’s just in normal menus).
I have no time left to beat the boss now, and the save system seems to fail again so I’ll wait for your confirmation that it’s working again before I try to beat it again. Then I’ll continue the demo as much as I can.
Hey, I think it may have mistakenly said there was an update because the currently-available build is still around a year old. I didn't realize that disabling/re-enabling the visibility of build would tell people there was an update... Can you let me know what the first boss you're referring to is? The game only saves in the Hub areas, so depending on the story, there are sometimes multiple battles before the next time the game saves.
If you are interested in a new/updated build feel free to reach out to me in DevTalk. I appreciate the feedback though! I think some of it, like the use of Unity default UI assets, has been mostly taken care of. The battles are still KB-only though. I think that's the only part of the game that is not fully playable with either mouse or kb now. Since there are so many potential actions between boosting/swapping/polarity/etc, I was never quite sure how to handle the use of the mouse there.
OK, in fact I was looking at itch app Downloads list and I saw an update there, but I think it was just the old update that fixed the Boost during pause issue.
The first boss is the Imposter.
OK, I had the impression the game was saving at every step since I was seeing a mini-transition screen after each scene, but I suppose it was just a loading, not a saving screen (it appears and disappears super fast).
If you can implement auto-save after each battle / important decision it would be great! Like Darkest Dungeon (I think?) or Healer’s Quest. If the game is using manual saves on selected slots rather than auto-save on the same slot then you could allow manual save after each battle or something (but I’d need to be reminded of it… unlike Renpy games which are standardized I may not think about it).
OK, I’ll reach you on DevTalk, although I’m mostly interested if there is either per-battle save or a good difficulty balance because currently the first boss battle is quite long so I’m worried about losing it, closing the game and having to redo the minion and boss battle again.
OK, full keyboard is good for me but there was that bug where you lose focus when you press Escape and so you need to click once (although you don’t see the cursor) to grab focus back so it wasn’t totally full keyboard either I think. As long as I have ways to learn what the status icons mean, it’s OK (for instance Octopath on Switch works well with just the gamepad, but there is a status tutorial (which could be replaced with the PDF guide for this game - or additional text on status change).
Hi again! Totally unrelated meta feedback this time: I noticed the Unity build for Linux takes 4GB (resources.assets.resS taking 3GB). Do you use 4K assets everywhere? I suppose the very big enemy sprites + different unique poses on attack and hurt contribute to this quickly too? I’d expect BG and BGM to take the most space in a VN but maybe due to battles, the balance is quite different?
The space could probably be optimized better, but I'm not really sure how - the technical details of optimization are definitely my strong suit. Most sprites are '#' x 1500 though all the character sprites are individual files than some kind of conglomeration. There's about 1GB of sprites, then around 650MB of sound (which will increase once the rest of the game's audio is in). The sprites for the particle systems/attack effects in battle are pretty sizable, past the 2GB point. I could probably reduce the file size if I changed them from PSDs to PNGs. Probably worth experimenting with once I'm done with the game's content. Since the battle effects are something I purchased from the Unity Asset Store and not something I made myself, I was hesitant to change anything and mess things up.
OK, what do you mean by “’#’ x 1500 though”? 1500x1500? To support 1440p screens?
1GB of sprite doesn’t look that much… or you’re talking just about characters, and FX and backgrounds add much more? (I felt like characters were the biggest, but it’s true that FX frames can quickly add up).
On my Renpy project I encore most sounds to .opus and pictures to .webp max quality for high quality and low space usage. However, Renpy uses assets directly. Unity compresses them with its own algo, so I’m not sure it will make a difference in build. Import settings, esp. format, and texture packing settings probably make the biggest difference. But I’ve never worked on a game with so many assets (except in an indie studio that was making a HD 2D game with many backgrounds and detailed props at 4K res - probably the 2D game that took the most space I have ever installed on Steam!).
It is possible that Unity tries too hard to keep layers on the PSD, though. I would imagine that it renders to a flat picture on build, but I’m not sure. You can try and export some of the biggest PSD to a flat format (png or webp) and then see how it affects build size.
For the battle FX I can’t tell, but you can evaluate their size in build by building a sample project just with them. Same remark for your PSD / flat PNG. Assuming they are packed on different spritesheets so there is no interaction between them.
Hi, I’m still playing the demo as part of some study for the Battle Action Fantasy VN jam. It’s got very interesting animations, plot elements to start things very quickly and lively characters!
Battle design
Battle is a bit brutal after the first fights but much easier when you understand how to defend, then attack at the right time. I like how defend can work at the last moment (and in general I think that in ATB all actions should be instant; but it’s the first time I see an interrupt like this!). I wanted to play expert and wait before the last second the hit lands to determine which character is gonna be targeted and defend that one: unfortunately it’s too hard to quick switch and defend (also you can’t cycle between commands so you cannot press Up to go from Attack to Defend in situations where your turn gauge is ready at the last moment to Defend). But when one character is alive, it’s useful to avoid Defending when opponent is doing a non-offensive move.
Having the boost gauge shared is interesting, but since Recover (esp. with Overtime) heals most HP, you generally don’t need to boost that. So I just boost the attacks of the fighter (Isaac).
Overtime seems to have a very high ceiling so you can stack it and it feels weird at some point (OT at 22? I might just spam skills with or without boost now)
UI & Issues
I found many bugs, or rather UI inconveniences that make interactions more difficult, esp. in battle. I seem to lose focus after pressing Escape (it took me a moment to find Shift button was used for cancel, as I reflexively used Escape). I don’t have too much time now to list all issues found, but I can do this after the jam maybe. If you got a list of known issues, you can send me the link or add it to the description so I know I only need to report the unknown ones.
Oh, there’s that one I can report now: a bug you can exploit to your advantage, boost gauge filling in menu even when pausing time in the options. You can fill boost to max level every time with that…
I hesitated leaving the game as I wasn’t sure how saving works, but since there was no prompt and I saw my current save updated, I assume it’s full auto-save.
I don’t know if you intend to do a special update for BAF VN Jam or if you just have the tag as a general thing, but I’ll be checking the game again!
Hello! Thank you for taking the time to play the game!
I'm glad you found the Defend aspect useful. A feature I could possibly add in the completed game is a way to have all party members capable of performing an action Defend with a single button, since there's not enough time to cycle through everyone as-is. Boosting with recovery skills may be more useful as you get further in the game, but right now it's primarily an offensive mechanic. To be honest, it's been a while since I played my own game since I've been occupied with writing and art for so long, but I think as HP and enemy damage increases, healing doesn't scale proportionally and so using Boost with Recover becomes a bit more viable.
I think Overtime caps at 50 or 99 (I don't remember which, exactly). I'll have to see if I give it a lower cap or instead give enemies skills that change your OT cap to a lower number.
The game saves automatically every time you enter the Hub area (where you can speak with characters or access menu options). There should be a icon displaying so, but maybe a bug is stopping it from appearing. I'll need to examine it. Regardless, a "This game autosaves..." when you first start kind of message may be useful.
Thanks for reporting the Boost bug and sharing your difficulties with the UI!I don't have a list of known issues since the game. Really just adding things that I encounter on my own to a Trello since not that many people have played this, haha!
I wasn't planning on submitting it or a variant to BAF VN jam, since it's my primary project and been worked on well in advance of the jam announcement - though I did add the tag when Arimia created it and posted about it in DevTalk earlier this year. Again, thank you so much for not only playing the game, but giving me such great feedback and things to look into. If you return to the game, I hope you enjoy it. I'm hoping to finish this project this summer - or at least have all of the content done so that I can focus on bug-fixing, adding additional ingredients, improving UI/UX, etc..!
Good luck with your project for the BAF jam! I remember seeing your posting for Spirit Link and hope it all goes well!
Thanks for the reply. About balancing, yes it may make sense over time. You could do like Octopath and reduce healing power to 30% so boost is always useful for it, but with the current enemy power it is easy to lose 70-80% of HP in one non-Defended attack. This means you often need an emergency heal and therefore being able to do what without boost is useful (but if you make enemies attack a little more often but with weaker moves, this issue may disappear).
Otherwise you can go the I Am Setsuna way, using boost to give a qualitative extra side effect, such as continuous regen or status healing. This way boost is useful for the impact is not quantitative on healing. Note that I Am Setsuna actually uses “Momentum”, which is what you call Overtime; so you could use Overtime for those extra qualitative effects instead. The main difference I noticed in that I Am Setsuna’s overtime is manually triggered).
Speaking of which, I Am Setsuna’s Momentum is limited to 3 full spheres, to prevent stacking and encourage player to regularly use them. Again, the difference is that your Overtime is auto-consumed, so a small number may be too limiting in case player consumes a little inadvertently.
I don’t have the detail for focus lost bug, but trying to play the entire game with keyboard only, or gamepad only, is a good way to verify that focus is stable. You can even click outside buttons and stuff to make sure you still don’t lose focus (btw a Unity setting can prevent focus lost on click outside, but I didn’t test that so maybe it was already enabled).
Wow, you remember my post on Spirit Link! Thanks, we’ll do our best!
Thanks again! I really like the I Am Setsuna way of handling side effects for healing moves you mentioned. I'll have to experiment with that.
Since OT takes the place of MP/SP, and there is no item system to "replenish" resources, a cap is a little tricky. Right now, the strongest offensive skill requires 40 OT and the strongest defensive skill requires 35 OT. However, a cap to "natural" OT gain, but still allowing characters to use their OT-passing skills to bypass that cap could work. I'm not sure how far you've gotten, but Isaac and Jean have a way to share or distribute OT with others while Sparta transforms it into bonus damage. Other characters will be able to utilize it in a similar manner as well.
Also, do you mind letting me know which fight(s) you felt the game spiked in difficulty? I'm interested in knowing which encounters players found most difficult for balance purposes.
Hm I see, Jean was definitely always on the edge of OT (well, generally not, I admit it happened after Isaac died). OT sharing would be helpful. And the cap is high to allow other skills to use it. But I admit, considering OT charge speed, max OT requirement would be 10-15. Unless OT charges faster with level? Just be careful with scaling over factors of 10 between skills: it will make the first skills work with super cheap OT, and player won’t be able to compare skill values reasonably in advanced game, possibly leading to useless skills (in RPG it mostly happens with items, such as Potion healing 50HP in end game where you have 9999HP) or OP skills. But I’d need to see the whole system and skills to be sure. You can have a non-spoiler playtesting with people by having them play advanced battles without story context (the difficulty is that they need to learn all the systems and skills to be able to test properly).
The difficulty spikes were the first mini-boss where you learned Rage (maybe it’s a good thing? you have to Defend properly both normal attack and Rage to go on) and the boss after that (although that’s to be expected).
My biggest issue was the battles getting longer and longer: if Jean dies, you will die soon unless boss has little HP left, but if Isaac dies, you can survive by using Jean to heal herself, Defend, repeat in a survival way, and doing little damage. So it’s not very interesting and I gave up and allow my character to die. This is because there is no way to revive an ally, which is also true in early game of many JRPG but those have items to revive instead: this gives you a few chances to revive other characters, and once you consumed all revive items, this time you generally die pretty fast even with a healer left.
Even if you did things properly, battles were quite lengthy. After 3 loops I get the system, it’s all about repeating the same things without losing my concentration. Since the enemy HP is not displayed I don’t know how much it will last and so the battle gets more tiring until I accidentally do some mistake and lose a character. So I’d rather have short battles that ensure you win if you understood the enemy patterns correctly and did the right thing 3-4 times. Of course, with a deeper system, more characters and skills, and more boss phases you can justify a longer battle, so maybe later in game.
I do see in the Tactical Guide that there are boss phases, but to be honest I didn’t grab the subtleties of them. Real-time battle makes it harder to pause and think of course, but I do remember that even Chrono Trigger had very clear boss phases. This may require more budget with dedicated boss sprites, but I think it’s also design and UI/text indications that made them recognizable (counter-attack was very clear although not super interesting, Juggler switching between physical and magical stance was done via text but graphics could help too, Magus switching elemental barrier via an actual skill use + text).
If there are only meant to make the boss a little stronger and not meant for the player to react in a particular way, then I suppose subtle “mini-phase” changes are fine, though.
Thanks for the detailed response! OT charge remains the same, though skills increase in power every 10 levels. The majority of skills cost under 10 OT, with those exceeding it being really powerful skills that you are encouraged to be using the distribution/manipulation skills for in order to use.
I'll have to experiment with giving Isaac a Revive skill - maybe changing the 'Survival Skills' skill to have an alternate effect if the ally is KO'd since Jean doesn't get her Revive skill until 10 - though that doesn't solve situations where he's KO'd. Maybe Jean's Restore can revive an ally if they're KO'd as an additional effect. Perhaps I can change Jean's Bio Seeker effect to make an enemy's HP permanently visible if the OT gate is met (with it not affecting damage otherwise), rather than have it only display in a message after using the skill.
There's definitely a lot of things I haven't considered as I'm sure I play the game "optimally" and so don't really know how others play or struggle with it aside from 1-2 playthroughs with the modern system I've seen. I'll have to look into setting up some kind of non-spoiler battle playtest build. Right now my priority is just putting everything together and then balancing it.
Regarding battle length, I'm concern that if battles are too short, I defeat the purpose of having them, since each encounter is fixed rather than something that occurs randomly multiple times in the field. The game's biggest inspirations are Yggdra Union and Etrian Odyssey, which are both pretty challenging, though because they're turned-based it's easier to take a breather and assess the situation, rather than using the 'Pause' overlay, which may feel like an inorganic method of accomplishing that.
The "phases" are mostly weakness shuffling/Guard Point changes. There are some "phases" like bosses gaining additional actions or changing their timer after being Dizzy'd a certain number of times. Maybe I can modify part of the UI to make these changes more visible. Since the game is so fast, sometimes those messages aren't retained because the player is busy choosing actions.
I finally played the third episode, a lot of story unfold, that was very interesting to learn more, the amount of artwork you made so far is impressive.
The tea and cooking part is fun to play with, looking forward to the last chapter. 💜
Thank you so much for your kind words! I'm glad you've found the story interesting and appreciate the artwork!
Once the final version of the game comes around, I'll be adding more ingredients to both the cooking and tea minigames, so I hope that makes them even more fun!
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Hello, I’m back and testing the last version now after a while. With a fresh mind I can also tell you what issues I still notice or discovered due to not playing for a long time:
Setup
UI
Battle
I have no time left to beat the boss now, and the save system seems to fail again so I’ll wait for your confirmation that it’s working again before I try to beat it again. Then I’ll continue the demo as much as I can.
Hey, I think it may have mistakenly said there was an update because the currently-available build is still around a year old. I didn't realize that disabling/re-enabling the visibility of build would tell people there was an update... Can you let me know what the first boss you're referring to is? The game only saves in the Hub areas, so depending on the story, there are sometimes multiple battles before the next time the game saves.
If you are interested in a new/updated build feel free to reach out to me in DevTalk. I appreciate the feedback though! I think some of it, like the use of Unity default UI assets, has been mostly taken care of. The battles are still KB-only though. I think that's the only part of the game that is not fully playable with either mouse or kb now. Since there are so many potential actions between boosting/swapping/polarity/etc, I was never quite sure how to handle the use of the mouse there.
OK, in fact I was looking at itch app Downloads list and I saw an update there, but I think it was just the old update that fixed the Boost during pause issue.
The first boss is the Imposter.
OK, I had the impression the game was saving at every step since I was seeing a mini-transition screen after each scene, but I suppose it was just a loading, not a saving screen (it appears and disappears super fast).
If you can implement auto-save after each battle / important decision it would be great! Like Darkest Dungeon (I think?) or Healer’s Quest. If the game is using manual saves on selected slots rather than auto-save on the same slot then you could allow manual save after each battle or something (but I’d need to be reminded of it… unlike Renpy games which are standardized I may not think about it).
OK, I’ll reach you on DevTalk, although I’m mostly interested if there is either per-battle save or a good difficulty balance because currently the first boss battle is quite long so I’m worried about losing it, closing the game and having to redo the minion and boss battle again.
OK, full keyboard is good for me but there was that bug where you lose focus when you press Escape and so you need to click once (although you don’t see the cursor) to grab focus back so it wasn’t totally full keyboard either I think. As long as I have ways to learn what the status icons mean, it’s OK (for instance Octopath on Switch works well with just the gamepad, but there is a status tutorial (which could be replaced with the PDF guide for this game - or additional text on status change).
Hi again! Totally unrelated meta feedback this time: I noticed the Unity build for Linux takes 4GB (resources.assets.resS taking 3GB). Do you use 4K assets everywhere? I suppose the very big enemy sprites + different unique poses on attack and hurt contribute to this quickly too? I’d expect BG and BGM to take the most space in a VN but maybe due to battles, the balance is quite different?
The space could probably be optimized better, but I'm not really sure how - the technical details of optimization are definitely my strong suit. Most sprites are '#' x 1500 though all the character sprites are individual files than some kind of conglomeration. There's about 1GB of sprites, then around 650MB of sound (which will increase once the rest of the game's audio is in). The sprites for the particle systems/attack effects in battle are pretty sizable, past the 2GB point. I could probably reduce the file size if I changed them from PSDs to PNGs. Probably worth experimenting with once I'm done with the game's content. Since the battle effects are something I purchased from the Unity Asset Store and not something I made myself, I was hesitant to change anything and mess things up.
OK, what do you mean by “’#’ x 1500 though”? 1500x1500? To support 1440p screens?
1GB of sprite doesn’t look that much… or you’re talking just about characters, and FX and backgrounds add much more? (I felt like characters were the biggest, but it’s true that FX frames can quickly add up).
On my Renpy project I encore most sounds to .opus and pictures to .webp max quality for high quality and low space usage. However, Renpy uses assets directly. Unity compresses them with its own algo, so I’m not sure it will make a difference in build. Import settings, esp. format, and texture packing settings probably make the biggest difference. But I’ve never worked on a game with so many assets (except in an indie studio that was making a HD 2D game with many backgrounds and detailed props at 4K res - probably the 2D game that took the most space I have ever installed on Steam!).
It is possible that Unity tries too hard to keep layers on the PSD, though. I would imagine that it renders to a flat picture on build, but I’m not sure. You can try and export some of the biggest PSD to a flat format (png or webp) and then see how it affects build size.
For the battle FX I can’t tell, but you can evaluate their size in build by building a sample project just with them. Same remark for your PSD / flat PNG. Assuming they are packed on different spritesheets so there is no interaction between them.
Hi, I’m still playing the demo as part of some study for the Battle Action Fantasy VN jam. It’s got very interesting animations, plot elements to start things very quickly and lively characters!
Battle design
Battle is a bit brutal after the first fights but much easier when you understand how to defend, then attack at the right time. I like how defend can work at the last moment (and in general I think that in ATB all actions should be instant; but it’s the first time I see an interrupt like this!). I wanted to play expert and wait before the last second the hit lands to determine which character is gonna be targeted and defend that one: unfortunately it’s too hard to quick switch and defend (also you can’t cycle between commands so you cannot press Up to go from Attack to Defend in situations where your turn gauge is ready at the last moment to Defend). But when one character is alive, it’s useful to avoid Defending when opponent is doing a non-offensive move.
Having the boost gauge shared is interesting, but since Recover (esp. with Overtime) heals most HP, you generally don’t need to boost that. So I just boost the attacks of the fighter (Isaac).
Overtime seems to have a very high ceiling so you can stack it and it feels weird at some point (OT at 22? I might just spam skills with or without boost now)
UI & Issues
I found many bugs, or rather UI inconveniences that make interactions more difficult, esp. in battle. I seem to lose focus after pressing Escape (it took me a moment to find Shift button was used for cancel, as I reflexively used Escape). I don’t have too much time now to list all issues found, but I can do this after the jam maybe. If you got a list of known issues, you can send me the link or add it to the description so I know I only need to report the unknown ones.
Oh, there’s that one I can report now: a bug you can exploit to your advantage, boost gauge filling in menu even when pausing time in the options. You can fill boost to max level every time with that…
I hesitated leaving the game as I wasn’t sure how saving works, but since there was no prompt and I saw my current save updated, I assume it’s full auto-save.
I don’t know if you intend to do a special update for BAF VN Jam or if you just have the tag as a general thing, but I’ll be checking the game again!
Hello! Thank you for taking the time to play the game!
I'm glad you found the Defend aspect useful. A feature I could possibly add in the completed game is a way to have all party members capable of performing an action Defend with a single button, since there's not enough time to cycle through everyone as-is. Boosting with recovery skills may be more useful as you get further in the game, but right now it's primarily an offensive mechanic. To be honest, it's been a while since I played my own game since I've been occupied with writing and art for so long, but I think as HP and enemy damage increases, healing doesn't scale proportionally and so using Boost with Recover becomes a bit more viable.
I think Overtime caps at 50 or 99 (I don't remember which, exactly). I'll have to see if I give it a lower cap or instead give enemies skills that change your OT cap to a lower number.
The game saves automatically every time you enter the Hub area (where you can speak with characters or access menu options). There should be a icon displaying so, but maybe a bug is stopping it from appearing. I'll need to examine it. Regardless, a "This game autosaves..." when you first start kind of message may be useful.
Thanks for reporting the Boost bug and sharing your difficulties with the UI!I don't have a list of known issues since the game. Really just adding things that I encounter on my own to a Trello since not that many people have played this, haha!
I wasn't planning on submitting it or a variant to BAF VN jam, since it's my primary project and been worked on well in advance of the jam announcement - though I did add the tag when Arimia created it and posted about it in DevTalk earlier this year. Again, thank you so much for not only playing the game, but giving me such great feedback and things to look into. If you return to the game, I hope you enjoy it. I'm hoping to finish this project this summer - or at least have all of the content done so that I can focus on bug-fixing, adding additional ingredients, improving UI/UX, etc..!
Good luck with your project for the BAF jam! I remember seeing your posting for Spirit Link and hope it all goes well!
Thanks for the reply. About balancing, yes it may make sense over time. You could do like Octopath and reduce healing power to 30% so boost is always useful for it, but with the current enemy power it is easy to lose 70-80% of HP in one non-Defended attack. This means you often need an emergency heal and therefore being able to do what without boost is useful (but if you make enemies attack a little more often but with weaker moves, this issue may disappear).
Otherwise you can go the I Am Setsuna way, using boost to give a qualitative extra side effect, such as continuous regen or status healing. This way boost is useful for the impact is not quantitative on healing. Note that I Am Setsuna actually uses “Momentum”, which is what you call Overtime; so you could use Overtime for those extra qualitative effects instead. The main difference I noticed in that I Am Setsuna’s overtime is manually triggered).
Speaking of which, I Am Setsuna’s Momentum is limited to 3 full spheres, to prevent stacking and encourage player to regularly use them. Again, the difference is that your Overtime is auto-consumed, so a small number may be too limiting in case player consumes a little inadvertently.
I don’t have the detail for focus lost bug, but trying to play the entire game with keyboard only, or gamepad only, is a good way to verify that focus is stable. You can even click outside buttons and stuff to make sure you still don’t lose focus (btw a Unity setting can prevent focus lost on click outside, but I didn’t test that so maybe it was already enabled).
Wow, you remember my post on Spirit Link! Thanks, we’ll do our best!
Thanks again! I really like the I Am Setsuna way of handling side effects for healing moves you mentioned. I'll have to experiment with that.
Since OT takes the place of MP/SP, and there is no item system to "replenish" resources, a cap is a little tricky. Right now, the strongest offensive skill requires 40 OT and the strongest defensive skill requires 35 OT. However, a cap to "natural" OT gain, but still allowing characters to use their OT-passing skills to bypass that cap could work. I'm not sure how far you've gotten, but Isaac and Jean have a way to share or distribute OT with others while Sparta transforms it into bonus damage. Other characters will be able to utilize it in a similar manner as well.
Also, do you mind letting me know which fight(s) you felt the game spiked in difficulty? I'm interested in knowing which encounters players found most difficult for balance purposes.
Hm I see, Jean was definitely always on the edge of OT (well, generally not, I admit it happened after Isaac died). OT sharing would be helpful. And the cap is high to allow other skills to use it. But I admit, considering OT charge speed, max OT requirement would be 10-15. Unless OT charges faster with level? Just be careful with scaling over factors of 10 between skills: it will make the first skills work with super cheap OT, and player won’t be able to compare skill values reasonably in advanced game, possibly leading to useless skills (in RPG it mostly happens with items, such as Potion healing 50HP in end game where you have 9999HP) or OP skills. But I’d need to see the whole system and skills to be sure. You can have a non-spoiler playtesting with people by having them play advanced battles without story context (the difficulty is that they need to learn all the systems and skills to be able to test properly).
The difficulty spikes were the first mini-boss where you learned Rage (maybe it’s a good thing? you have to Defend properly both normal attack and Rage to go on) and the boss after that (although that’s to be expected).
My biggest issue was the battles getting longer and longer: if Jean dies, you will die soon unless boss has little HP left, but if Isaac dies, you can survive by using Jean to heal herself, Defend, repeat in a survival way, and doing little damage. So it’s not very interesting and I gave up and allow my character to die. This is because there is no way to revive an ally, which is also true in early game of many JRPG but those have items to revive instead: this gives you a few chances to revive other characters, and once you consumed all revive items, this time you generally die pretty fast even with a healer left.
Even if you did things properly, battles were quite lengthy. After 3 loops I get the system, it’s all about repeating the same things without losing my concentration. Since the enemy HP is not displayed I don’t know how much it will last and so the battle gets more tiring until I accidentally do some mistake and lose a character. So I’d rather have short battles that ensure you win if you understood the enemy patterns correctly and did the right thing 3-4 times. Of course, with a deeper system, more characters and skills, and more boss phases you can justify a longer battle, so maybe later in game.
I do see in the Tactical Guide that there are boss phases, but to be honest I didn’t grab the subtleties of them. Real-time battle makes it harder to pause and think of course, but I do remember that even Chrono Trigger had very clear boss phases. This may require more budget with dedicated boss sprites, but I think it’s also design and UI/text indications that made them recognizable (counter-attack was very clear although not super interesting, Juggler switching between physical and magical stance was done via text but graphics could help too, Magus switching elemental barrier via an actual skill use + text).
If there are only meant to make the boss a little stronger and not meant for the player to react in a particular way, then I suppose subtle “mini-phase” changes are fine, though.
Thanks for the detailed response! OT charge remains the same, though skills increase in power every 10 levels. The majority of skills cost under 10 OT, with those exceeding it being really powerful skills that you are encouraged to be using the distribution/manipulation skills for in order to use.
I'll have to experiment with giving Isaac a Revive skill - maybe changing the 'Survival Skills' skill to have an alternate effect if the ally is KO'd since Jean doesn't get her Revive skill until 10 - though that doesn't solve situations where he's KO'd. Maybe Jean's Restore can revive an ally if they're KO'd as an additional effect. Perhaps I can change Jean's Bio Seeker effect to make an enemy's HP permanently visible if the OT gate is met (with it not affecting damage otherwise), rather than have it only display in a message after using the skill.
There's definitely a lot of things I haven't considered as I'm sure I play the game "optimally" and so don't really know how others play or struggle with it aside from 1-2 playthroughs with the modern system I've seen. I'll have to look into setting up some kind of non-spoiler battle playtest build. Right now my priority is just putting everything together and then balancing it.
Regarding battle length, I'm concern that if battles are too short, I defeat the purpose of having them, since each encounter is fixed rather than something that occurs randomly multiple times in the field. The game's biggest inspirations are Yggdra Union and Etrian Odyssey, which are both pretty challenging, though because they're turned-based it's easier to take a breather and assess the situation, rather than using the 'Pause' overlay, which may feel like an inorganic method of accomplishing that.
The "phases" are mostly weakness shuffling/Guard Point changes. There are some "phases" like bosses gaining additional actions or changing their timer after being Dizzy'd a certain number of times. Maybe I can modify part of the UI to make these changes more visible. Since the game is so fast, sometimes those messages aren't retained because the player is busy choosing actions.
Hi Magbo :)
I finally played the third episode, a lot of story unfold, that was very interesting to learn more, the amount of artwork you made so far is impressive.
The tea and cooking part is fun to play with, looking forward to the last chapter. 💜
Thank you so much for your kind words! I'm glad you've found the story interesting and appreciate the artwork!
Once the final version of the game comes around, I'll be adding more ingredients to both the cooking and tea minigames, so I hope that makes them even more fun!