The lost progress is not a problem for me, I can play it again, thank you for answer my question.
What’s the reason behind changing cost and resource of Mari’s skill for more money? Now when you become strong enough to handle monsters in a few turns, you can’t even use it anymore.
I know it’s good skill if you use it over and over again, but 80TP? It would be fair if it was 80 mana, but 80TP is too much to rely on this skill, i usually don’t even get that much during boss fights, because i grind enough to have easy boss fights and this skill was what made it easier for me.
Aside from trying to move non-magic skills away from using MP, the cost of it was way too low - there are a total of two monsters in the game that give less than 30MP back when killed, and one activation of the skill will likely last long enough for multiple battles as it’s based on steps taken rather than the number of turns or battles. I wanted a little bit of a combat penalty for using it, and made an attempt to make it less than 100% uptime, but if the consensus is that 80TP is too high I might consider dropping it back down to 40-50ish.
The main thing is that grinding monsters is basically the only effective way to get money and making that grind harder isn’t really enjoyable.
Though technically you can easily work around this by just using the hearty ability and stalling until you just cast it.
As a side note is there a way to increase how much money you get from the part time job? If not I’d recommend making that a higher reward since the amount I have received from doing it is less than like a single battle’s worth of money.
1 Like
Oh also in the 3rd area, called ruins I think? The cracks can be traversed like stairs and it lets you walk on the ceiling wall tiles. Should be an easy fix but maybe double check all your tile sets to make sure you don’t have anything else that does that.
I think this is probably the most universal RPG Maker issue lol.
1 Like
What’ the exact penalty for accuracy, if you’re on fifth level of weight?
Erika has 113 agility and Mari has 121 or 123 (i don’t remember exactly), but i still miss half of attacks in 4th dungeon.
I know game explains that it lowers your accuracy, but i had LOWER agility at the beginning of game and i was hitting enemies more often, it makes me feel like i have about 50% flat chance to miss every attack and that chance ignores my agility stat, i especially grinded lvls and money for wind chips, to negate penalty for girls being obese, but i don’t feel like it makes any difference.
I’m fairly certain agility doesn’t actually factor into the Hit Rate calculation in RPG Maker, or at least not with the formula the VisuStella plugins overwrite it with, although I could be incorrect.
The default hit rate is about 95% for both characters - Erika has a default 100% hit rate but starts with a one-handed axe, which has a -5% hit rate (axes in general have -5 or -10% depending on whether they’re described as an axe or a ‘battle axe’, which should be a two-handed weapon but that still needs working out; I need to update the displayed stats for equipment to actually show this) and Mari has a flat 5% penalty because her class is a very basic edit of the default Bandit class, which also has that penalty.
The hit/evade penalty also scales with weight level, but not quite linearly - it’s 0% at the base weight and -1/-2/-5/-10/-20% to each at weight levels 1/2/3/4/5 respectively.
Enemies also have an innate 5-10% evade rate, not counting any effects from skills that increase evasion or lower player hit rate.
So yes, at the beginning of the game, you’d have a successful hit rate of 85-95%, whereas the highest possible penalty without skills or temporary states like Blindness should be (-10% from battle axe + -10% enemy evade + -20% at WL5) = 60% hit rate.
I say should because the Visustella plugins have their fingers in everything and they’re poorly-documented, highly-obfuscated nightmares. Sanely, I can assume that dual-wielding weapons means that each individual hit of the two in a standard attack only counts the penalty of the weapon being used for that hit. But what about single-hit skills? Does that add together both weapon penalties? Average them out? The vague “Accuracy Boost” function enabled by default just says “Boost HIT and EVA rates in favor of the player”, with absolutely zero further documentation anywhere on the internet as to how it actually works, and I have so many better things to do with my time than de-obfuscate the code and try to reverse-engineer it from the output.
Rants aside, yes, the balance is still garbage - most of it came from thinking ‘hey, this might be neat’ while I was throwing the game together, then dumping it with near-zero playtesting on an unsuspecting internet. The very little that’s come in the way of tweaks since is just stuff that’s stood out to me as obviously broken during a full playthrough this last week, and shouldn’t be considered as serious attempts at balancing. Between enemy/EXP scaling not working quite as well as I’d have liked and endgame gear being dumped into chests at level 20-25 or so, there’s a lot that needs to be done, and better gold gain is certainly up there. And while I like the idea of Marshan Industries just not giving a shit and selling whatever gear to anyone who’s got the cash to pony up for it, I think it does place a bit of undue focus on rushing high-level gear even when it’s not necessary.
This is something I’ve been debating about how I should handle too. Obviously making $50-100 a week working part time is enough to cover a meal out or doing a bit of clothes shopping, and thinking about it now it’s about half the payout it really should be, but it pales in comparison to the thousands of dollars of high-end combat gear Marshan wants to sell you. I’m almost wondering if I shouldn’t separate the two - make the currency you get from killing enemies into something like ‘Marshan Loyalty Points’ you can trade for gear or a bit of real-world cash at a much lower ratio. That’s not to say that there shouldn’t also be promotional opportunities, or at least a system that lets you earn a few more bucks a week after working enough shifts, but realistically (as if realism hasn’t already been chucked out in half a dozen other aspects) there’s only so many opportunities for advancement in a 6-12 month period.
2 Likes
Are you eventually going to add any kind of items, that may somehow negate penalty for accuracy? You kinda surprised me with saying that agility does not affect accuracy, i used to think that accuracy affect hit chance, dodge chance and general speed (how often they can attack during fight).
I know that you’ve a lot of to do, i just want to know if you were thinking to somehow balance accuracy penalty in future too, since you said yourself that balance is one of biggest problems currently.
There’ll probably be magichips that have some level of boost for hit rate and evasion, and probably some spells that more directly target those as well. I’ve also toyed with the idea of a general light-armor class of equipment that boosts agility but has little defensive capabilities of its own, to make larger characters a bit more of jacks-of-all-trades rather than just tanks.
I don’t really know that the equipment alone should be enough to negate accuracy penalties entirely, though, as it’s a trade-off that’s supposed to encourage casting spells rather than hoarding mana, since magic should be outside the traditional hit rate formula.
I feel like a hit penalty for fatness is kind of unnecessary anyway, conceptually it negates the benefits of higher defense because the fight is taking longer now. I get wanting to have some consequences to hapless weight gain or leaving all the foes unfought (I do wonder how much the math checks out in terms of enemies left versus MP stockpiled, I tend to fight every foe for the mana build, kept the girls fed as best I could, and ended up with 400lbs for Erika and 365 for Mari at the end of my (v1.04) playthrough, pretty sure a long way from immobility for each), but I feel like there needs to be a bit more thought.
Is it to be done or is it not to be done… |:/
In theory you’d be correct except the RNG for RPG Maker is absolute ass. You can have what should be a 70 percent hit rate feel like it’s hitting most of the time while a 95 percent missing more than you feel like it should.
I’d recommend fine tuning not by what in theory would make good balance but rather by what actually feels good to play.
I don’t find the current system all that bad, but I’m also someone who min maxes RPG’s fairly regularly. Most people will not know how to do that.
But equally it’s all entirely up to how you want your own game to play, you aren’t charging for it so you have zero obligation to change it.
Oh also before I forget, I did have positive feedback that corresponds to something you said earlier.
In terms of motivating the player to use magic I personally feel motivated to use magic due to the magichip level up system. It feels good to use magic and level them up. If more was done with that system I’d enjoy that very much.
At this time, it doesn’t seem worth it to use the early game magic because it’s so weak. And when you’re motivated to fatten the ladies it doesnt help. Later when upgrades to magic items started appearing that do better damage and have better effects, and the ladies were at their max weight stages and I just didn’t want a game over, then I started using magic.
Just noticed something that likely isn’t a bug but probably isn’t working as intended. You can stack magichips of the same type and level. For example you can stack multiple Inferno’s thus making your attacks hit massively hard.
Busy week for real-world stuff, but I’ll have the beginnings of a balance patch by the weekend, hopefully. By request I might also add a ‘free play’ mode, letting things continue indefinitely after the epilogue scenes with a warning that there’s no further story content.
I’m also going to be putting up a poll shortly about gameplay/story interaction for the next chunk of the story - I have to concede that while I liked the idea for the post-epilogue scene, there’s no good way to implement picking up from there in a way that everyone is going to be satisfied with. I still wouldn’t expect any major new story content any time soon regardless - right now, my focus is balancing, implementing the chat system, fleshing out the weekday/weekend events, and implementing the bond scenes, roughly in that order, although it might make sense to delay the max bond scenes until later in the story, even if it might technically be possible to grind to max bond already.
I definitely toyed with the idea of locking down magichips pretty hard - to the point of the entire party being limited to owning just one of each chip - but beyond disabling selling chips, I didn’t implement that in the end because the time crunch meant I couldn’t balance-test the game and wanted to give players ample means to power through. In the future, though, I suspect I’ll limit things to the point that only one of each chip can be equipped by a character at a time, but multiple chips from the same family will probably be stackable if anyone really wants to go all-in on a specific stat at the cost of spell diversity.
Personally, I just want more weight stages and maybe a immobilized thing thrown in
Other than that, we golden
2 Likes
Just started this, and the bug with the schedule UI appearing when exploring on the first week is still present in 1.0.5 (or re-introduced? Idk if it was fixed previously).
Edit: I reloaded an earlier save and now it doesn’t appear? I’m blaming magic on this one.
New build is live! I haven’t actually had time to do much but it does at least implement an infinite mode after the epilogue, assuming I didn’t massively break things again. Check the itch page for more details.
I also have a poll for you! Please note that it contains spoilers. This will help me figure out what I should prioritize working on and how to best handle that clusterfuck of an “ending”.
As always, feedback and bug reports are more than welcome.
9 Likes
Good point:
-Interesting story and development at the end of the demo makes you want to know what happens next.
-Good system between missions and everyday life.
-Honorable playing time for a game that was supposed to be for a Jam.
-Review point:
-Difficult to appreciate art at first but over time you get used to it.
-When you enter the dungeon the room interface can sometimes remain in the background.
-Mari’s art sometimes appears to have 2 eyebrows
-Why Long sword and bardiche are stronger than falchion and mithri axe but cost less?
-Grind makes the game too easy
-Need option to drain mana easily (if you dant want to use magic)
-Combat animation too long!
-The game would benefit from having its own combat system.
-The basic balancing of Rpg maker is not good. The calculation of damage needs to be reviewed.
-At a certain point the enemies no longer do damage.
-It is necessary to limit the resources gained after the fights and the fights themselves.
The game has good potential for all the parts that do not appeal to Rpg maker. The story is coherent and the characters are well written. The art is weird at first but you get used to it. The dungeons are very basic which is quite a shame when you see the care for the decorations outside the combat zone. The game itself is correct but your combat system…
I have nothing against RPG maker, it’s also the engine I use! But the combat system is outdated, the damage calculations have not changed for over 15 years. This leads to an unbalanced combat over time and enemies that gradually become useless. The level system is also a problem. And the grind can totally destroy the balance of the gameplay. Even with a plug-in that makes the thing more enjoyable in the end it’s just a cover-up. I’m not targeting your work, but the basic combat system of Rpg maker (and classic Japanese Rpg) and their tendency to make the hero overpowered to the detriment of entire sections of their games. Your game deserves better. No need to remove the turn-based aspect. It’s not the one that counts, but you can make it something more dynamic and more personal. Your game has an identity but its combat system leads to comparing it to any other Rpg maker game. I’m not talking about the spell animations that have a timeout at the end of each animation and that waste a monumental amount of time each time you use them. I preferred to activate the auto-combat mode. However, the idea of mana is well thought out. But it made it very cumbersome to use.
I still had fun on your game, even if I faced the final boss fully equipped and lvl 43/41 + full inferno to only do auto-attacks. I don’t forget that in 2 weeks it’s still a hell of a lot, your work is still good!
Thank you for your work.
1 Like