Catrina, Roxane, Melisenda and Fabia have been traveling for some time after hearing a rumor about a witch that can cure an illness that is tormenting their home town…
A Witch’s Crystal is a Tactical RPG in which you level up your team by feeding them, whenever a unit levels up stats like Hit Points (Hp), Strength (Str), Magic (Mag), Defense (Def) and Resistance (Res) will go up; and stats like Speed (Spd/Agi) will go down. Speed is a very important stat, is good for both offensive and defensive purposes, when a unit has 4 more speed than the opponent they will perform a double attack, it doesn’t matter if they are allies or enemies so keep that in mind.
When your units level up they also gets skills which might change how you play that unit.
There is only one map in this game (and it probably will stay that way), the objective is to arrive to the fortress that is on the right side of the screen and put Catrina over the throne to seize the fortress and complete the chapter.
If knowing that you still want to play, this are the controls:
Ok, Next Dialogue = Left click, Z
Cancel = X, Right click
Skip scene = space, Right click
If you want to know what skill/item each party member gets when they level up here is a list:
Catrina
Lv. 2 Confidence (+ 3 atk/def/res +10 hit/avoid to allies within 3 spaces)
Lv. 3 Exchanges warp for rescue
Lv. 4 Confidence + (+ 5 atk/def/res +15 hit/avoid to allies within 4 spaces)
Lv. 5 Self teleport staff
Roxane
Lv. 2 Sword Range +1
Lv. 3 Deadly blade (chance to ignore defense)
Lv. 4 Exchanges steal for looting
Lv. 5 Crit +30
Fabia
Lv. 2 Fierce Strike (+4 attack/defense when initiating combat)
Lv. 3 Ambush (always attack first)
Lv. 4 Smite (shove a unit 2 spaces)
Lv. 5 Exchanges ambush and fierce strike for come to me! (+ 6 attack and guaranteed double attack when you are under attack)
Melisenda
Lv. 2 Tome range +1
Lv. 3 Magic strike (+6 attack when initiating)
Lv. 4 Life thief (Steal your enemies hp)
Lv. 5 Tome range +2 (it doesn’t stack with +1) and cursed attack
Good Luck, remember you can save the game at the start of every turn if you click an empty space.
As a big Fire Emblem fan, I adored playing this game… right up until it crashed and I lost all progress in the first battle. I’ll give it another shot tomorrow, but a sudden error message closing the game is a bit saddening. Also, a quick few notes just so far:
It’s very very easy to accidentally skip the cut scene at the start, so many buttons do it, and not being able to return to the title screen easily is a bit frustrating.
More importantly, I have some comments/concerns on the combat/gameplay. The mechanics of each character and the items and enemies within the stage are left very much up to the player to figure out, which is cool, up to a point. My inventory being cluttered with those plant things? Less cool.
Leveling up our healer is neccesary, obviously, but difficult and slow due to her never obtaining food unless she earns a kill which is highly unlikely for a good while, requiring constant trading of food to keep her anywhere close to on-par level.
However, I was enthralled by the 30 or so minutes I played and hope it all works tomorrow morning for me so I can finish this awesome game.
Thank you for the feedback. Btw, when did it crash? Because maybe you just skip the one line of dialogue saying “hey, I didn’t had time to finish it, sorry” that I wrote in the last 30 min. But don’t worry, there is only one map. I really don’t know a lot about SRPG Studio so I though I shouldn’t mess too much if I didn’t knew what was I doing (I basically had to rework the whole system like 2 days ago because there were some really weird bugs). About the buttons skipping the intro, I have no idea how to solve that, while checking that everything was alright in the intro I may have skipped it easily 20 times.
Also, I don’t know if leveling up the healer is all that important. Her healing staff heals full hp and her warps get the same distance independently of her magic stat.
And the healing grass thing is because I wanted to give an alternative way of healing in the case you need to heal two units, I don’t remember having put any as dropeable items so you shouldn’t have that many. But yeah, maybe they are a bit unnecessary.
Oh, and also, did the unit that the commander was talking about appear while you were playing? I didn’t do a lot of play testing so maybe I gave the player a little too much time before they arrive.
And again, thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it. I wasn’t really sure of how the game would turn out.
If you ask me, this type of game needs a good tutorial. My exposure to Fire Emblem and games like it amounts to a couple hours in Path of Radiance, during which I got Boyd killed in the very first mission. As a result, I had no idea what I was doing and lost the game twice within five turns.
You are right, I assumed the player would have some experience with these types of games which is probably not the case. I probably will try to edit the first post to give a more detailed explanation of how to play.
It’s an interesting concept, and one I’d love to see expanded further; it’s a shame that SRPG Studio is so rough and unpolished compared to tools like RPG Maker.
My only complaint so far is that while it’s clear that food helps power you up, there’s never a real sense of penalty for it. True, the characters’ speed drops as they level up, but there are enough weapons and skills giving double-attacks or first strikes that it doesn’t seem to matter much. Implementing a penalty to movement instead might’ve given a better sense of weight, especially with the urgency added by the demons ambushing from behind.
Unfortunately there was a plugin error that cause the game to crash shortly after the demons spawned; I’ll have to give it another go once I’ve downloaded the patch.
Also, I’m not sure if the cure leaf was supposed to function as a vulnerary type item, but it seems to be indexed as a class change item instead, which is a bit useless as no one seems to be able to promote.
I mean, yeah, I actually wanted to reduce movement in levels 3 and 5 for each character, but I didn’t know how to do it (and because the map is pretty big, If desert maps have teach me something is that low movement can get really annoying,but maybe if I spread out the food items a little bit more it could work). Actually a lot of the development time was spend trying to figure out how to do stuff. Like one hour away from the deadline I figured a way to do fixed growths with some variation between levels, but I couldn’t implement it in time, the good thing is I probably will use this knowledge in my big project.
Yeah, that was really fucking weird, I don’t remember changing what it was supposed to do at any point, but hey, I guess that is the problem with no play testing once you have added a bunch of stuff (actually is the exact same thing that happened with the demon, and like that one its fixed too in the patch).
Uhm… lolwut? Okay, the sudden demon squad’s a bit unfair… 1st turn, an enemy got lucky and crited Fabia, killing her instantly, so I was taking my time. I’m the kind of Fire Emblem player that plays on normal casual so I can take my time, and enjoy myself. Feeling like I’m stuck between two walls of death isn’t very fun…
I just will say that the fortress is safe zone. I should have checked that normal enemies don’t randomly crit player units, but you can save every turn anyway so I don’t think it is that big of a problem. Maybe I should reconsider in which turn the demon squad appears, I know if you go to the north you have enough time to get to the fortress before they come to beat you up but I didn’t check the southern path, sorry.
Maybe make that their appearance is triggered X turns after you kill a certain unit? I think that could work.
I will re-balance a bunch of stuff when I finish this game sometime in the future after the judging process ends.
I don’t know if this was fixed in the patch, but if you visit the witch’s home before you have the gems, she will give you a rod that allows for Catrina to do damage, but currently it seems that you are unable to revisit her home should you do that. Also there seems to be a bugged door in the fortress that I am unable to open. It is the door below the throne. I don’t know if I bugged the game out though because I was taking the southern path and the demons spawned, so to avoid them I used warping shenanigans to enter the fortress.
Oh, it seems that I forgot to put the event for that door. I guess it could be worse because you can warp inside, but it is still pretty bad. I don’t think I will patch that until tomorrow tho, I don’t have my pc with me at the moment.
Wait… did you walk all the way over there? I guess the event’s dialogue could have misguided the player to think that you should return to that house but the thing is I didn’t though the names through, the crystal she is searching and the gem you get from the guards are different things, I know they are synonyms but I didn’t considered those two items that are in the same by a similar name could have been a stupid idea.
Sadly yes, do you see the little dialogue box that appears when they level up? There were supposed to be little events in which the character reacts to their recent weight gain and serve as an explanation of why do they get the skills they get as they level up. Like Catrina breaking her staff by accidentally sitting over it, then repairing it just to discover that now it works backwards. The event is there is just that I didn’t have time to finish the dialogue (and I couldn’t figured out a way to explain that Roxane now knows how to throw her sword) so I decided to deactivate them.
My bad. I did skip some dialogue and might have missed something. I didn’t really walk though. Mainly abused the weapon repair item and the transport spell. In the end though currently for me the entire map is empty. Even lured the demons into a spot where I could easily kill them.
