*First Play Through*

[NubblyTheMoist]

As i play through the Demo 1.0.2 i will note things about the game that ether break the game or are minimal in a 5* rating 5 being unplayable and 1 being minimal

First of all ive played the game for 30 min and spent a lot of time just enjoying the game not rushing to the next event. and i have to say damn you guys are wonderful

i have played alot of romhacks, fanmade rpgs/jrpgs and none look as close to an official release classic rpg game as this i love the art style and the animations used in the game so kudos to all who have done work on this game so far thank you <3

Issues

* - The main character seems to "glow" when he sprints, this white outline makes it feel like he is doing something magical and it bugs me. though i do not know if it is meant to glow.

* - There was a non speaking NPC in the training hall before you find Kyle in the south outskirt.

* - The outskirt is BORING, though most outskirts are barren with not a lot to do i feel this outskirt needs ether more personality or more to do, what if there was half buried runes or statues that were mysterious or simple Easter eggs or once in a while an animal "non lethal" would poke it's head out of the sand or even a tumble weed! I know this is minor polish, but still...polish makes things nice

* - Tilesets do not line up nicely by cliff sides and looks just a little clunky

* - When you run diagonal into a different area the character looks weird he continues to auto run tell he reaches the corner

That is all i have for now i am now heading to the west cave to find kyle and the captain i will keep you posted on other minor/major things i encounter

also even though i only posted negative this game is still really fun so far

[Roots]

Thanks for the feedback and I'm glad you're enjoying it. This was our first attempt at a RPG with an actual story. The previous releases we did were only 1-2 maps and were basically "walk around, talk to people, and fight stuff". In response to your feedback:

- The "glowing" is certainly unintentional. I've never really noticed it myself, but maybe I haven't looked closely enough. Definitely something we should be able to fix, as only the sprite image would need to be updated (we aren't doing anything fancy or graphical).

- The non-speaking NPC was intentional. The idea behind this is that we want to have a lot of NPCs to make the cities feel more real, but attaching dialogue to each and every NPC I feel would be a negative because there would be a bad "signal to noise ratio", so to speak.

- Yes, outskirt was boring. It was designed just to allow the player to roam around and level up if they desired. Not a whole lot of thought was put into it. It could certainly use more art and more polish to keep the scenery from looking the same everywhere.

- The awkward running during a map change should be fixed in the release we're working on now.


I'm a little surprised you didn't bring up the structure interiors. I was not happy with them, as they are very large and quite barren (mostly just a bunch of wood floors everywhere). We definitely need to do better with our map designs, and I believe we have gotten better since that release. One of the major issues we didn't realize with our game design until we saw it in use is that our structure exteriors are much larger than you would find in an older RPG. Consider this from FF6:



Those buildings are really tiny, but when you go inside the interiors are very large. In our game, the exteriors and interiors are on the same map, but in different "contexts". So walking inside somewhere simply switches the context and doesn't load a separate map. This means that the exteriors need to be large enough to have reasonable sizes for the interiors. And so large structures can be impossible to see on a single screen.

In the beginning we displayed images in their native sizes and this wasn't a problem then. But people pointed out that the screen was too large, and you could see half of a dungeon in this view mode, and couldn't make out the details on the sprites well. So we zoomed in by 4x (doubling the width and height of all tiles and sprites). I'd actually like us to be able to zoom out programmatically during certain scenes, but it's still a wish list feature.


Sorry, I rambled on quite a bit there.

[NubblyTheMoist]

I actually did notice, but didn't want to address it cause it was more a replace then a fix. I did not want to come here and tell you how your game should look when im here to help.

I really like the idea of buildings keeping there size in cities it makes the game feel more fluent when you walk into a house and don't see a loading screen.

The negative side of having large open areas with tilesets makes the tiling very obvious. This can be avoided with "clutter" such as furniture and unique tilesets like rugs. If you would like my first task could be to attempt to create furniture sprites and tilesets. I was looking at the "To Do" and was going to start small and work on the animal sprites and maybe take a swing at lion demon mini boss

[Roots]

We already do have a lot of furniture and other objects now than we did for that release. Take a look at the examples here:

http://opengameart.org/content/stone-ho ... or-tileset

Those are all screenshots from home interiors in the latest release. Much improved, yes? If you want to do some tile artwork I certainly won't stop you, although we are hurting for sprites much more at the moment. I have to use so many placeholder sprites in our maps right now because we simply don't have them. The king, for example, uses the sprite of a common knight right now. I'd say start working on whatever interests you the most though. We still have much work to do with the castle interior tileset.

I can produce the latest build for you if you're interested so you can get a better idea of where things are currently at (as long as you're using Linux or Windows; I don't have a mac). It will just be pretty buggy and unfinished.

[NubblyTheMoist]

Well considering i am the only "artist" at the moment ill stick with what im most comfortable with until we can get more opinions flowing

I will work on the king, sounds like somthing i can at least start on. If you have any references you want me to use for the sprite please let me know.

i do have windows 10 and i could play the newest build if you think it will be benificial.

[Roots]

Awesome. There's not a whole lot of requirements on the king. He's late-middle aged, but not a frail old man. Anything else is up to your creativity. You may want to read the story to get some ideas and some imagery in your head about the type of game we're building, the characters, and the environment.



This is the knight sprite currently be used in place of the king. If you don't want to create something completely from scratch (using the sprite skins I linked to you), you can do alterations on this to replace the armor with robes and what not.


As for playing through the latest, let's wait until we have our development release later this month. Then things should be in a better state and allow you to play from start to finish.

[NubblyTheMoist]

Oh snap there goes the rest of my night haha

making a thread in the appropriate forum going to post progress on my sprites there

It might be a bad habit, but i like to make new characters from scratch imo it gives them more character!

I will use your sprites as a reference though so i can match the style

[Roots]

No worries, whatever works best for you. And having some deviation from our standard sprite models is a good thing. Just keep the same number of animation frames for now (we don't support variable frame animations for sprites very well at the moment).