Random Mid-Month Update

Two big things happened over the weekend so I wanted to do a quick update to talk about it instead of waiting to include them in the end of month update.

First, the project has added an artist: Zutte. They are stepping in and doing character art which mainly consists of getting the headshots that appear in dialogue boxes but for companions would include full body sprites as well for reference during H-scenes. I'll also be getting their help redesigning some of the simpler enemy sprites as well.

They have already come out of the gate charging as we have 3 characters done with a 4th on the way. I'll be doing some character profiles with the art as part of my slow moving information series.

They also work with Live2D and have offered to do animated H-Scenes which is pretty exciting. Right now we're focusing on just getting the characters together but we might have to experiment with a scene or two in the near future. Just to see how it comes out.

Second, over the weekend I did a big playtest of the game in its current state and can say the game is playable, but flawed...obviously. We're still early. There were 3 big fields that I need to make adjustments to: difficulty, enemy variety and loot. Considering its my first time designing all this, that's pretty standard and should be easy enough to fix.

They all kind of go hand-in-hand with each other. Enemies aren't too tough as I tried to keep them simple at the beginning to help the player get adjusted to the maps and game. Problem is that you can quickly outpace the enemy and the battles become pretty boring after an hour. I'm going to try and find some free-to-use assets for RPG Maker that can help fill out the enemy rank a bit for the time being. And then the rest is just tweaking some of the values around. The big question being: Should the battles be quick but the enemies hit like a truck? Or should they take less damage and each battle be drawn out a bit more? I always like quicker battle but see the merit in both sides. I'll fiddle around a bit for now.

The Loot problem ended up just being a bit funny. When I originally designed the maps, I put places for treasure chests to be found and just threw in some health potions as not much was added to the game at that point. Later down the line, I decided to add items you can forage (it is a forest after all) that heal and you can barter with the various factions for potions as well. Add in the fact that you get a healer as your second party member and her mana pool is WAY too big and you see the problem. In 30 minutes, I was drowning in health items and the game's difficulty is out the window hahaha

The solution is simple enough, replace the treasure chest items and lower everyone's mana pools. I'll also cut back on some of the foragable items per map too to make resources a little more scarce. To replace the health items in the chests, I'm going to create a bunch of relics and items you can find that would fit with the game's lore that the forest was once the centre of a war. Items that can be traded in for cash, mid tier unique items that can be appraised in town to help kit out your party. Stuff like that.

With these two fixes, the difficulty problem will balance itself out. When creating games it's easy to either make it too hard or too easy at this stage and I dove head first into the too easy pool this time. Hopefully by my next playtest report, I've gotten it up to "fair and fun" at least.