Legend of Emilar

author=Prajna
First of all, the game looks very promising and I will keep an eye on the development process until the release.

The reason for my post is how you intend to handle the save mechanic. From my point of view, there isn't any reason not to let the player save anywhere in this kind of game (which is obviously supposed to be a JRPG instead of a hardcore ironman mode Rogue-like game). Being able to save anywhere always saves time (even compared to auto-saves) when something goes wrong, and it makes players more comfortable. They might even hunt for bugs, which they won't do without being able to save anywhere. Finally, if you don't allow manual saves everywhere, you will lose potential players, whereas I've never heard of players not playing a game because they would be allowed to save whenever and whereever they wanted.

Furthermore, there's a - not so obvious - reason why I hate auto-saves. As a save-scummer, I already spend way too much time in save menus, so it's important to me that saving the game doesn't take long. Usually, that's the case thanks to the save menu defaulting to the latest save file entry, but with auto-saves being implemented and active, the save menu defaults to the auto-saves most of the time, forcing me to manually scroll and check the latest manual save file entry (or constantly memorize it in advance). Of course, provided you won't allow players to save inside dungeons, an auto-save feature is better than not being able to save at all; still, for the reasons stated above, I prefer being able to save anywhere without being annoyed by auto-saves.

I don't know if my rant will make you change your mind - it's still your game and your design choice, of course -, but I wanted to provide some food for thought. Ultimately, the way saving is handled won't be a dealbreaker for me. If you really want to make sure that I won't play your game, implement features like day/night cycle or other direct/indirect time pressure elements, equipment durability, lots of permanently missable stuff, level-scaling and/or a low level cap. ;)

Yo, thanks for the reply! I have to be real with you, the game has some of those things. Let me address auto-saves first.

There will be an option to disable them entirely and allow you to save at any point you would like. It will also disable the save points in-game and any story/dialog related to them.

This is true of many of the systems in the game. I don't know exactly what will be optional and what won't, but if I have plans to add something to the options menu, I have been mentioning it throughout these game mechanics blogs.

Now for the rest.

There will be a day/night system though it is based on pacing in the story and isn't a real-time system. Some NPCs only come out at night and some of those give you side quests. None of the main quests nor major events require you to do them at a certain time of day.

The only other thing tied to it is that some monsters are nocturnal, they are mostly normal monsters though and for anything more specialized it's tied to a quest that puts you into night mode at the start of it.

Anything you could obtain from a night mode NPC can be gotten later; these quests just allow you to get certain things earlier.

There are no timed elements in the game other than the Lantern. One of my biggest gripes in Tales of Symphonia was that major plot points were locked behind missable events that you could only see if you followed a certain quest order.

None of that in the game. There may be times though that certain areas are inaccessible for a limited amount of time due to story reasons.

Certain equipment will have a durability system; this will be able to be disabled from the options menu. The system isn't something I have covered in these yet, but here is how it works.

Each attack used in battle removes a point. Once the durability reaches 0 the weapon damage output is reduced to 25%. Durability is upgrades with levels and refinements. Certain weapons, when synthesized with a weapon with durability, can remove durability from it entirely.

Nothing in the game is permanently missable so far; I can't promise things will stay that way, but I also would like to try and minimize the possibility of it happening. The only way I see this happening is if you are unable to unlock a story branch path because you don't meet the Anima System requirements to do so.

The Anima System is something we covered in Game Mechanics Part 5: https://rpgmaker.net/games/12774/blog/25313/

Even then, those branching paths should not lock off areas of the game, just the story elements related to those paths. Any items you and places you would otherwise go during those paths should generally be accessible at some point in the game.

There will be level-scaling on enemies. Most enemies have a max level cap though, so eventually they will stop. Bosses have level scaling as well, but a much lower max level cap.

I talked about this system before, but not about how the levels are determined I think, so let me explain that here. Generally, for normal monsters, I want them to have a max level cap of around +10 levels of what the player would be, on average, in that area during that part of the game.

The starting maps in the game, the max enemy level cap is 25. The player should get to around level 15 on the Novice class and start leveling their first standard class by the time the Prologue is done. Enemy levels are based on your current class too, so if you slap a bunch of new classes onto your party, you shouldn't get punished for it.

All non-boss enemies will be designed to be fightable with low level characters and then the level system brings them up to your average level. Enemy levels are based on your party's average level, so if you slap a bunch of new classes onto your party you shouldn't get punished for it.

For bosses, the scaling is +5 of the level you would normally be by that point. The first major boss in the game has a max level cap of 20. This means that if you're party is level 25 average, you are 5 levels above the boss.

The level cap for the game is 125 and all classes can and will have to reach that if you intend to unlock the Grand Classes. We covered the class system in the Game Mechanics 4 blog: https://rpgmaker.net/games/12774/blog/25286/

Whew, sorry for the wall of text. I wanted to address each one of the systems you listed because some of them are present in some form or another in LoE.