I have come to drink this and review games. (The Captain is my distant third favorite rum, after Sailor Jerry and The Kraken .)



Forewarning: I swear like a sailor once I have a drop of alcomohol in me. And I have more than a drop.

Forewarning 2: This post will (hopefully?) get edited a lot. Um, by me, I mean.

Equilibrium: By Marrend


*Vaguely listening to Liberty's Stream: I thought Craze was like, dead or something.*

Amber Cocoon By Fomar0153


*Liberty continues to rage at bulmabriefs' installer.*

Danmension By Deaflopist


Godslayers: Kentrou to Skia By Delsin7


PROGRESS (Four Roulette Games In):


TO BE CONTINUED

Thanks for taking the time to play my game too Liberty.

Does the stream get recorded? (Secretly terrified that "partial" means Liberty lost patience with my game really fast.)

Anyway I'm looking to Rumview some games today. I'll take ... Metamorphosis, Equilibrium, Ninjutsu, Chainsaw, Utopia, Dimension, and ... Umbra's been one of my favorite words since I was an angsty goth teenager, so let's go with that.

Do me a favor, anyone who made one of those entries and gave it a gamepage, let me know, yeah?

So far Lib has streamed:

• Lib raging at Bulma's installation thingy for like 5 mins...
• 3F by Tale
• A Maidens Ballad by Starmage (partial)
• Amber Cocoon by Fomar0153
• Beginner by Mjshi
• Bounty Angel by Sidewinder
• Chapelwaite by Stormcrow (partial)

The stream is here by the way, if anyone is missing it right now.

Edit: The stream is now over for today, Lib says it'll be on again tommorow, it was great, see everyone then! :D

author=coelocanth
I'll make an update to make that less frustrating, thanks for the feedback.

It should still be difficult, but less so. If anything, I'd make it only slightly more visible (when I knew what to look for it was fine), because once I knew exactly what I needed to look for, it was easy.

Also, there ought to be something with the water in the cave (maybe the slime can swim), or possibly the rowboat is usable.

Thanks for the bit of feedback, mjshi! Taunt had, at one point, the normal attack accuracy rating. So, it would ultimately have no effect about 10% of the time. Maybe I should have kept it that way, but, I literally had no idea how counter-attacking in VX Ace actually worked until this game. Though, I kinda figured magic reflection would do what it says on the tin.

Funny thing about Abe, though. Whenever I fought the end-boss, he always took less damage than Zoe. Maybe I'm thinking of the earlier play-tests, though? I don't recall anymore. ;_;

author=coelocanth
>Slime Quest needs a walkthrough at some point. I never figured out how to catch the octopus.

There is a walkthrough option in the end credits. For ending A, you just need to escape by moving to the edge of the overworld map.

Octopus:

Show

There are two octopus swimming along the sea shore in the village.
Just use the action button to catch it when it's beside you.
It's intentionally hard to see, because I wanted people to go looking after finding the clue, rather than stumble on it. Perhaps I went overboard on this.
When it moves, it's a lot easier to see the shape passing through the water (and the eyes are non transparent)

What you could do is make it switch-based, unlocking it after the Sheep-Shifter mentions it. That way it's hard to find, but not frustratingly so, because after you have a hint, you're looking for it. As it was, I was mashing buttons and wasn't sure if I was even in the right part of the stream.

And yeah, I got to the walkthrough at the credits. It helped for everything but the octopus, which I didn't seem to see. I'll test it again, maybe.

Yay, I got the princess ending!

author=mjshi
Amber Cocoon by Fomar0153, Theme: Metamorphosis

Show

The game mechanic was really novel, and must've been hard to set up. I was never sure if I had enough fodder collected to save me from the dragon, though. Like an idiot the first couple times I played it I just rushed towards the dragon cause it was the only thing in the room but after dying 3 times I realized I was being stupid and needed to get more meat shields to protect myself with xD Enemy levels kept combat challenging, and while it would've been nice to have a couple more skills since I always had way too much mana and not enough health the whole metamorphosis theme thing was immediately apparent. Overall, a bit grindy but nevertheless really fun!

Glad you liked it, I simply ran out of time. The Metamorphosis system just took me far too long to get anything else finished. My idea for skills was that you would get access to any skill that was duplicated across the souls you gathered. Thanks for the feedback.

author=mjshi
Kill the King by Sam, Theme: Royal

Your game was a lot more futuristic than I expected! Normally it'd be a lot more magic and swords than guns and clones.

A lot of the combat was up to luck. I barely avoided dying thanks to the King deciding to use "knife slash" instead of his HP-demolishing "full clip" >.< Attacks miss left and right. The King missed a reinforce once ._. Well, I wouldn't've had died or anything but still, it was kind of funny. Story-wise, I got both endings. Pretty straight-forward, kill the king, things are good. Let 'im live, he wrecks the world. Standard stuff. Also, the chasing is a bit clunky, I avoided the entire corridor of enemies leading to the King simply by dashing. Nice going on the original art though! Your game was visually very put-together.

Thanks for giving it a playthrough and giving your thoughts, Mjshi. I'm glad the setting surprised you. When things like this get announced I always think "Yay! A chance to get away from typical fantasy RPGs!" and then I got handed Royal as a theme and thought "F**k!"

I admittedly spent too much time on an initial prototype that was a lot more like Resident Evil in nature. It used top down shooting mechanics similar to my 2k3 game, Fenrir. I originally used Galv's Map Projectiles plugin with Yanfly's Self Variables and Button Common Events but ran into issues with that setup. I then tried QABS which is... way more involved than I could initially wrap my head around! Finally, I tried an event based system based on how I built Fenrir but for some reason the bullet collision wouldn't work.

At that point, I had used a good week of the already limited time so I fell back to MV's default battle system. The missing attacks issue was frustrating. Most skills were initially set to a success rate of 95% but kept missing so I cranked it up to 99% and yet they still kept missing left, right, and center! I don't suppose anyone more familiar with MV can tell me what's up with that?

The end boss, admittedly, is kind of broken and that's my fault entirely. I balanced him for the player being at Level 3 but there were guards in the final corridor that would chase you into the "throne room" and mess up the cutscene so I removed them. Doing that meant most players would only be Level 2 unless they fought every single enemy on the way to the King.

What really broke that boss though, is a late addition where I didn't think the consequences through. I felt he didn't interact much with the supporting soldiers so I added Rallying Cry. It meant he would do something other than attack relentlessly and it suited his character as a leader. I forgot some key things though:
1 - All Allies buffs also buff the caster
2 - Buffs stack
3 - He already had a low HP desperation attack

That meant Full Clip went from doing 60% damage to 90% after 1 buff and well over 100% after two buffs! You sort of have to hope the RNG doesn't pull a Rallying Cry, Rallying Cry, Full Clip combo.

Balancing also suffered from only having one playable character. One character was a hold over from when I was initially making a top down shooter. Ideally, when I gave up on the shooting system, I should have added at least one more character - preferably a medic with heals, buffs, and debuffs. Maybe that should have been my priority at the time?

I'm glad you liked the artwork! While the tilesets are MV RTP, the on-map sprites for the characters are made from scratch by me, as are the in-battle graphics for the enemies, FPS POV pistol, shotgun, etc. Admittedly, I had to fall back on MV RTP for a lot of the battle animations though. I ended up with a lot of unused assets from the shooter prototype - such as on map bullets, the protagonist carrying a shotgun, firing animations for the pistol, etc. and in hindsight I wish I could have used that time for a wider variety of enemies, for example adding some soldiers with AK-47s instead of everyone having pistols.

If I were to ever expand upon and re-release it, I think those are all things I'd love to fix, in addition to adding more levels and bosses. I'm glad I entered though, I learned a lot about scoping, time management, and the difficult decisions behind cutting / changing content.

I will be streaming these games starting tomorrow (I would today buuuuut I got shit to do sadly). I'll drop a line here and in the discord chat when I pin down a time, but know that it will be on the RMN Youtube channel, not my own.

>.<)b

Also, woo, 26 games! Good job all!