rzuf 2015-12-16 09:24
;hmm I suppose this is some kind of bug
http://i.imgur.com/YNIheXn.png
There is no text at all in the whole game. :P
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD34 → LOAD"KHOMODORIA+2.RPG",8,1
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coolness | 3 | 57 | ||
| Audio | 223 | 3.54 | ||
| Graphics | 275 | 3.88 | ||
| Mood | 397 | 3.35 | ||
| Overall | 414 | 3.42 | ||
| Innovation | 415 | 3.28 | ||
| Humor | 550 | 2.60 | ||
| Fun | 701 | 2.92 | ||
| Theme | 990 | 2.80 |
;hmm I suppose this is some kind of bug
http://i.imgur.com/YNIheXn.png
There is no text at all in the whole game. :P
Ok, nevermind, fount the readme and the font!
PLayed the entire thing. It was nice, a jrpg without exploration, just story and choices. What is your plan on expanding this? No grinding either? It will be also hard to come up with interesting battles with the current mechanics methinks.
Congrats on the game!
Great game. Impressive graphics, did you do them from scratch? The storyline seems interesting, I want to know what we did wrong! The battle with the Earth Golem felt very generic thought, I think you should drop the two button control if you want to push this further.
I had a difficult time getting this to run, but I eventually got it working by:
1) Install the font as described in the readme
2) Install RPG Maker XP RTP
3) copy move1.ogg to move.ogg in Audio/SE
This game has a solid and cohesive graphical environment, an interesting story, and good audio. The only thing it's missing is gameplay. The two-button path choosing might have been better with more interesting choices than "find the key first or the locked door first." Really, there wasn't a point where I understood the impact my actions were going to have on the game. If I get hit by the fireball traps, what happens? Is there a strategy in combat, or do I just hit things until they die? What, if any, impact will my choices have? I'm glad there wasn't grinding, though. As a tech demo, it's excellent, but it needs something else to be a fun game.
[Lazarus-omin from Creative Sectors]:
@rzuf: Thanks for the kind words and the playthrough!
We definitely didn't plan grinding in this one, but a lot of other stuff was in mind at start. For example, you've mentioned the battle mechanics. Yup, those are pretty much basic, we planed a couple of other buttons in use, for combo possibilities, magic, skills and items. But unfortunately, we run out of time, so none of those are present yet. Bummer. We're kinda happy though that we could even include a single battle. Lesson learned: we need to focus on our schedule.
[Lazarus-omin from Creative Sectors]:
@Bobsleigh: Thanks for your kind words, and advices.
The "Two button controls" theme was an interesting one, that I really wanted to tackle. Little did I know, how much time will it cost us. My dev partner even warned me about it, but I was too stubborn. My bad, next time I'll be more cautious. However, in a post jam version, we won't have to keep it all the way. (Maybe at some places it could be interesting) Oh, and the secret behind the story is nifty one. :) Stay tuned!
[Lazarus-omin from Creative Sectors]:
@sim9: Thanks for your work, and play.
As you can see, we managed to repair the flaws, as indicated in the changelog.
[Lazarus-omin from Creative Sectors]:
@Piscythe: Thank you for your kind and constructive words!
In my opinion, the stuff, first of all needs to be a game to be... a fun game, eh? :)
We planned a lot of interesting choices (in fact: locations, dialogues, mini-games, battles), but we managed to do the work much slower than we excepted. It's scary how those 3 days disappear in an instant, really. It was my first full-timed Ludum Dare, and I'll admit I f*cked up way to much time on some things. Lesson learned, I'll try my best in the next challenge!
To give you some more exact answers: the fireball mini-game would damage you before the battle, and you would start the boss fight with less health obviously. But, a nasty one liner even managed to kill this possibility, as you start the fight with a full HP-bar anyways. So, yeah... Messed up again. Lame.
As I've mentioned before in one of my comments, we planned to use more buttons in battle, for combo, skills, magic, and item combinations. Unfortunately, we don't have those features yet, so it'll take a tonn of work, to make this project into a full-fledged video game. Hence we announced it as more like a tech-demo. I feel that this is the truth.
As for grinding, we didn't planned that.
Thanks again for your questions!
[ETC from Creative Sectors]
@rzuf: It's a pleasure to see you finally get it working and I feel a little bit better since we finally get rid of game breaking bugs. I think we continue and keep it an interactive fantasy game, with more possibilities on story telling, battles and more interesting decisions.
[ETC from Creative Sectors]
@Bobsleigh: I see you like this art. I tried to aim for a Commodore 64 visual style: use a 16 color palette (contains the original VIC-II colors: http://www.pepto.de/projects/colorvic/) and the graphics are based on RPG Maker XP RTP (RunTime Package) graphics. My original plan was to create a somewhat Commodorish art style on PC as close to the original as possible. Personally I tried to find a solution between the default resolution (640 x 480)and keep the original Commodore 64 limitations. What you can see is a middle ground between the two at halfway, for example: I didn't had enough time to follow the 8x8 cell standard on coloring, while I used the multicolor graphic mode (original: 160 x 200 resolution, and 4 color in one (8x8 size) attribute cell). I still thinks I have to make the graphics more close to the original to have the intentional Commodore 64 feeling both in audio and visual fields.
As others have remarked: nice, C64-ish visuals, music got on my nerves a bit quickly. Given that I had no real agency in the game, I skipped most of the dialogue and the battle was also a bit stale. If you develop this further, I would indeed drop the 2-button limitation.
I think you got quite far with the RP part, now just the G part :)
Wow, tons of content, great job on that. Very ambitious project, as an RPG needs a ton of writing and branching choices to really be compelling but there are the seeds of something really cool in here.
Although it's a pain to say, as you had such little time, but a little more variety in the music would make the whole thing a little less repetitive ;) But that's the most obvious advice ever. The boss fight seemed very arbitrary too, I had no idea what would do damage and when. It seemed that pressing Right > Left was the only reliable way to reduce the golem's health bar but that might have just been coincidence.
Once again though, good work!
RE: Slum Runner. I maaaay work more on it. I had another mechanic (access cards) already built but didn't have the time to make levels for it, especially as each level had to continue the story somewhat. Unfortunately the way I built the game (super hacky) made each level a real pain to build, and then with the story interludes I'd have to refactor to allow multi-stage levels or write content between each level for the foreseeable future :P
So we'll see, it depends on how it's received and how much work it will be to probably code the whole thing again and perhaps see if a real artist is interested ;)
Well-well, okay, here we are. This is a huge project, I know that quite well.
First of all, let's skip Overall. It depends on everything else.
Innovation: While the game plays in a unique way, it reminds me of quicktime events. The reason is clear as it is given by the LD theme and at least it's not some "press wrong button for game over" style of thing, but its clearly the weakest point of the game. The implementation is good on the other hand.
Fun: Having fun is subjective for the avarage player. As for myself, I know better, a game can be fun in different ways. It can be action-packed that turns your mind off or relaxing or it can even be something like a good book. This is an RPG and it is best rated similarly to a book. As such, the background and story is as much as you can expect from 72 hours of development, but it has the potential to be more and the characters are quite good.
Theme: 2 button controls, 'nuff said, the theme is correctly implemented.
Graphics: The art style matches the game perfectly, the visuals are not missing anything. It looks like as it is meant to be looking.
Audio: Even better than the graphics, the sounds and the music fit perfectly the art style.
Humor: Again, something slightly subjective, but in a serious RPG the amount of humor this project got is quite close to optimal, so it didn't break the mood.
Mood: As I mentioned, it's quite serious. Politics, black magic and stuff, I love this kind of stuff, the mood was built up, too bad the story was cut short due to the limited amount of development time.
Overall I find this project awesome, I wish I could do something like this within the same timespan...
- Kardfogú
[Lazarus-omin from Creative Sectors]:
@zenmumbler: Thanks for your kind comment!
Music-wise we had two options: none, or one. I had a couple of songs planned (5-6 sprouts), but we only had time for one. So, that's one thing that went wrong. And yeah, the gameplay is unfortunately kinda' slim, so that's the main aspect, that we need to work on. To have solid "G". :)
[Lazarus-omin from Creative Sectors]:
@Warboys: Thanks for the kind words!
Nowadays I think, that the idea was way too big for a 3 days game-making event, so yeah, to finish this story properly, tons of content creation will still be needed. That's especially true in the case of music. (Just mentioned that part in my previous comment) The battle is pretty much basic too, but as I've said previously, we planned more buttons, combo & magic possibilities, etc.
Thanks for the info on Slum Runner, I've read your article on it today too. It was a good choice to release it as a Jam entry! :) Best of luck!
Can't play windows games, which sucks because this entry looks really cool!
Amazing game I love it
nice game. it was more like an "interactive story", you had barely a few decisions to make, but thats the best way to make an rpg two-button-controlled. Good work overall, but maybe dont try an rpg for two-button-control-theme next time :D
Nice game. Very retro - brought back some good memories of my old C64. Also nice to see the Giana Sister's loading thingy again! :)
[Lazarus-omin from Creative Sectors]:
@kardfogu: Thanks for the meaningful comment Dude! :)
Yeah, we have some quicktime eventish stuff in place, because they don't need a lot of buttons, and if they are planned right, can become fun interaction points. There are a couple of games, that prove that. Unfortunately, skim content, or story makes things duller, and slower, so we'll be more careful with decisions like this.
Obviously, we could show only the first segment of a much greater story, and that's quite the shame, as we've prepared a lot of interesting stuff. However, a post jam version can fix that.
Graphics-wise we can do some adjustments to emulate the Commodore-era standards even more properly. ETC mentioned that in one of his comments above.
I'm a little disappointed in our music department, as I've only managed to write one song, because we ran out of time. I had a lot of ideas.
Humor-wise we didn't go too far, everything went, as expected.
We aimed at a lil' darker, more serious tone, and we managed to keep it under control, but again, with more content, more of the story, it could've been better.
I appreciate your comment pal, and wish you best of luck!
[Lazarus-omin from Creative Sectors]:
@Rex Peppers: That's a pity. What about some Windows emulation?
[Lazarus-omin from Creative Sectors]:
@drinkadriu: Thanks for your kind words!
[Lazarus-omin from Creative Sectors]:
@Markus Brand: Thanks for your comment!
We too gave it's style the "interactive-story" appellation in our description. The "Two button controls" theme is a pretty big challenge in some genres, but in our case it was worthy of a try, I think.
[Lazarus-omin from Creative Sectors]:
@Moebius: Thanks for your kind comment!
The Commodore-era was an outstanding opportunity, so I feel lucky, that I could be a part of it as a child, every time, it pops up. I guess, it was a main reason, that my focus turned to game development. As for the Giana Diamond: we're sneaky lil' bastards. :D I'm glad someone even noticed that part!
Given that my game is also a C64 parody, I appreciated this. (I even already had the font downloaded! Ha!!) Very charming graphics. The music got irritating fast, though if it wasn't looping for ten minutes I'd love it.
[Lazarus-omin from Creative Sectors]:
@Thingo Studios: Thanks for your kind words!
Yeah, the decision about the music was problematic. Either we go without any, or make at least one tune. We decided at the latter.
+ nice atmosphere
+ good idea
Well done! Great story telling and graphics/audio to boot.
Nice game! Well done art and storyline.
man, I love the look and feel of this game, great job!
will definitely continue playing this in times of boredom :)