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Leave any feedback or issues specific to the RSW release prototype here! The RSW release ends once you defeat the demo's boss and it returns you to the title screen.

Posts

Pages: 1
Nice roll menu

Wonderfull title screen

Flare and Demi both are on two active skills slots (so 4 slots taken by only two differents skills to be more understandable); then properly works when you unequip reequip them

See active skills are limited too. I understand why you do that. That way each character will be specialized (and so has a proper identity/role/use in battle) contrary to FF8 where everyone has nearly the same sets of spells (and were polyvalent and overpowered).

Status window, miss the "r" of exterior in squall's description

Misson window is nice
all menus are nice too and customizables in options

Perfect walk animation in all directions
weird animation When running up on map

Nice new squall's faceset in battle

Do not like squall's attack animation, pose seems unatural and movement unadapted
Others are good (magic, guard, opening, standing (in my opinion, the small effect on the blade when squalls stands was not necessary))
A bug on squall's right shoe while standing in battle and also two occasionnal pixels near squall's belt right side
Perfect "use item" animation
Nice "weak state animation" but there is a bug with the blade which moves forward then back (in my opinion, blade should be better if not move at all on that pose)
Nice "death animation", maybe a bit slow

Galbadians animations are fine

Something wrong with "guard" command, using it grants you a complete turn so you can never be attacked when guarding

Bug with elixir reward for clearing map (infinite loop event)

Very nice fountain

Map event bug: when leaving galbadia station by the right side of screen you go to a road, leaving this road by the up of screen lead you to the ride side of the very beautifull Galbadia hotel screen (think we were intended to enter by the left side); leaving hotel's map by the way you used to enter it leads you to president palace left side map.

Just a though about mapping, original maps are well done, maybe just a little too clean.
According to ambiant sounds this is a battlefield, so it should be things like corpses, crumbles, vehicles, flammes
barricades, crates but i know this is just a demo for gameplay testing.

Amazing XATM09whatever battler

This boss is no match for me.

Yeah the facepalm pose. Excellent.

FEELINGS
That was great.
Seriously, call me a fanboy if you want but i get a small tear since the title screen and keep it until the end of the demo.
So thanks Kyrsty for that, and thanks as well to all those who help you on SLH, i saw all your names in credits,
Congratulation to all, it was good.
Puddor
if squallbutts was a misao category i'd win every damn year
5702
Wow, thanks for playing! This is all super helpful; some of it I knew about, some of it I didn't.

About attack: I will probably revise it slightly, but it is like that for a reason: The added cut ability will eventually fluidly chain into a multiple attack string, ending with his original FF8 attack. However, I'm seriously considering just switching to his FF8 attack sequence and only having the chained version play if Added Cut is equipped.

Some of the runs were hastily made; I will definitely be revising up and the 3/4 runs a bit.

A few teleports are weird; Deling City in FF8 is actually weird, too, but it becomes a lot more obvious in RM. Pretty much there's a map missing from the Galbadia Arcade which I will be adding when I have time.

I considered adding some events and other details but I ran out of time x-x; Galbadia Arcade has evidence of where I was going to add some evidence of bombing, but yeah time constraints =-=;;

X-ATM092 is actually from Cosplay Crisis and is going to be replaced with a new mech (X-ATM174) that's in the works and will actually be animated. It did get touched up a bit before being put in but yeah, OLD (and pixel traced orz)

But I'm glad you enjoyed this! It means a lot for other fans to get something out of this game ^^
Gosh, I... I loved this so much. I just have some sprite errors that I didn't like but they're pretty minor, and I also didn't like Squall's attack animation. His running up sprite is weird.
author=SorceressKyrsty
X-ATM092 is actually from Cosplay Crisis and is going to be replaced with a new mech (X-ATM174) that's in the works and will actually be animated. It did get touched up a bit before being put in but yeah, OLD (and pixel traced orz)


To animate this thing must be a nightmare, good luck.
But things will be more calm now demo has been realeased, no pressure, you have all time.

Remade some few runs and saw other minors things,
-Hit rate has been forgotten in "status" and "equip" windows, that being said it's not a problem for the demo

-Strange fact, squall can miss his target with 255% hit rate.
Don't know anything about RMVX ace but that reminds me some trouble i had long ago on RMXP; i tricked by creating and putting a special element on weapons designed to be gunblades, and add that element in the appropriate script as a condition for an auto successfull hit (to emulate the max accuracy) and an auto critical hit (to emulate the trigger effect). It worked and gunblade users were unable to miss their targets.

- Nice disigned save point.


Puddor
if squallbutts was a misao category i'd win every damn year
5702
Yeah I have no idea why that is and it's actually pretty infuriating. He has a Hit 100% permanent feature on his character profile in the database, and yet he can still miss? wtf RMVXA.

Hopefully we'll be able to fix that, since we've also fixed the pre-emptive and back attack functions now, and it's probably something like adding the ability to ignore the EVA stat of enemies in attack calculations.
author=SorceressKyrsty
Hopefully we'll be able to fix that, since we've also fixed the pre-emptive and back attack functions now, and it's probably something like adding the ability to ignore the EVA stat of enemies in attack calculations.


That's why we pay you the big bucks :D!

That's absolutely right, it's because the EVA of the enemies. The hit rate gets calculated first, if it's successful then the evasion is calculated separately after that. Which means if your hit rate is 100% and the enemy has an evasion of 100%, they will always evade!
edchuy
You the practice of self-promotion
1624
I just played the demo and have some additional feedback to it. I'll try not to rehash what others have already said:

- I like your choice of font since it has smooth edges making it very easy to read.
- If you go back to the screen just north of the one with the mech, you get this messed up screen:


- I found a few graphical artifacts in some screens: there's a line (white left, kind of of grayish right) in the lower left part of the screen where you have the first couple of fights; another line, mostly light green near the top of the savepoint screen; and, light green ones as well in both the right exits of the screen just west of the savepoint screen and the one just north the aforementioned screen.
- I really liked the lighting effects used.
- I like your choice of battle system since it makes each the choices for each turn truly strategic without the tediousness of waiting for the ATB to fill.
- I found it odd for your character to have two turns (or up to three turns in the messed up when attacked from behind) before any enemy's attack. While I have seen such a thing in other RPGs that have the same battle system, it isn't common for that to always occur in each round.
- Regarding the fight animations for the melee attacks it felt it awkward that the slashes were from back to front of the target. The natural motion for slashing, IMHO, is from front to back, up going downward.
- I also found the animation of the Galbadians' fire attack to be odd, since I would expect the fire to move from left to hit my party member in the front (instead of having his keister roasted!).
- I expected the magical attacks to have more flashy animations (Meteor actually met my expectations!).
- Regarding walking from one map to another, the demo violated what I consider a couple of my RPG pet peeves: if you walk back to the entrance of the map, you should end up in the map you just came from (except when some sort of puzzle is involved); and, when you exit a map you should enter the next map facing the same direction you had in the previous map.
- One thing I noticed is missing is Limit Breaks.

Overall, I feel the project has great promise ...



Puddor
if squallbutts was a misao category i'd win every damn year
5702
-I'll be redoing all the teleports, however so long as it is only 90 degree turns (say, running left and going into a downward or upward direction, but not right) I don't see a problem, and there's not much I can do about it anyway unless I'm expected to redo all those maps.

-Ok, thanks for that. Sometimes the parallax dimensions are a little off by one pixel (I don't know why) so I'll fix those up.

-???? is level 89 and intentionally overpowered for this sequence. The scene at the end resulted in him being de-levelled back to beginning-of-game status.

-I'm redoing attack, but the animation was based on his Dissidia opening slash; I.e if you attack as a battle starts he'll perform an upward swing.

-Animations are built for actor use, not enemy use; I'll need a way to get around that with direction specific animations (which will most likely NOT be 'redoing the whole animation and just flip every frame')

-Majority of animations were placeholder, the only one really not being so was the cast one (and that will be different for enemies).

-Death to Limit Breaks.
(his limit break skills are now regular skills with MP costs and cooldowns and etc. His build for this part is meant to have Beat Fang and Fated Circle, but neither animation is finished, nor is his victory pose.)


edchuy
You the practice of self-promotion
1624
Regarding the maps, the most annoying one for me is when you exit a map in one direction and end up coming out in the next walking in the opposite direction. Right-angle changes are less disconcerting to me ...

Yeah, I had forgotten about those victory celebrations!

Having slightly more powerful skills with cooldowns does so like a good compromise compared to limit breaks. With those, you sometimes end up trying to survive just to be able to use them ...
Puddor
if squallbutts was a misao category i'd win every damn year
5702
Yep I hate those too, and I'll admit completely that the teleports are screwed up in this version (the deling path should lead to the shorter of the two Arch maps, since the long, downward facing road leads to the fountain.) I have to redo the teleports anyway (no choice! problem when a demo is developed out of the main game, hurr) so that and the right to left issue will be fixed.

Yeah I think limit breaks are kind of a standing point and representation of FF's broken nature as games. They've been slowly phasing them out or substituting them for high cost skills of the same calibre (Quickenings used an entire MP bar if done to the maximum damage point and things like Army of One and Highwind used 5 ATB charges in FF13). That's pretty much the same approach here, except they also have the additional cost of taking up one of your command slots.
@sorceressKyrsty: I want to ask you in your game is still have GF menu like the original final fantasy VIII because i don't seen GF in your menu of your game thanks
Puddor
if squallbutts was a misao category i'd win every damn year
5702
No, it doesn't. Different system.
author=SorceressKyrsty
-I'll be redoing all the teleports, however so long as it is only 90 degree turns (say, running left and going into a downward or upward direction, but not right) I don't see a problem, and there's not much I can do about it anyway unless I'm expected to redo all those maps.eginning-of-game status.


No need to redo those maps, they 're good as they are. It's just two map teleportation events errors
To locate them more easily:

Galbadia Hotel right side: Lead you to president palace left side in demo but must lead you to a road, then to Galbadia station right side

President palace left side: Lead you to Galbadia hotel right side in demo but must lead you to "Galbadia parade" (not present in demo), and then to Galbadia hotel Left side.

Another thing, it seems to have 2 different dodge situations in battle:
When ennemy is attacking squall
First: Ennemy attacks, Squall don't move, and a pop up indicates "Miss"
Second: Ennemy attacks, Squall take a nice dodge stance, no pop up.

Don't know if it works as intended, i notice some things about osmose
- Mp stealed seems to be a % of max mp (so you can obtain 128 MP evrytime you use osmose on xatm092)
- Monsters out of MP do not provide more MP when "osmosed" (Seems fair and logic contrary to FF8 where you could litterally steal them as much spells as you want)
May I just ask you what you used for the title screen?
edchuy
You the practice of self-promotion
1624
Another thing just occurred to me: For critical hits, it would be nice to have something other than a higher damage number. Either a different damage text color, animation or some pop up text indicating this would work ...
Puddor
if squallbutts was a misao category i'd win every damn year
5702
@Amaterasu: as kind of given away by the fact you can open the menu during the title, it's evented. The particle effect in the beginning was made with particle illusion and is 30 individual frames sequenced together.

There should only be miss with him dodging out of the way, since I disabled the miss pop-up all together I'm not sure why that's occurring. (it needs to be brought back for certain spells)

Osmose is working as intended :3 MP is a valuable resource...as with everything.

And with the teleports, because I didn't make the demo in the main project file the map IDs are different, so I have no choice in the teleport remaking ^^;

I'll probably add a sound effect to critical hits; shouldn't be too hard since I think there's a separate sequence for crits.
Happy
Devil's in the details
5367
Alright - I suppose I too should post my thoughts here:

- The project has a promising start, you're obviously seeing a lot of effort to pay respect to the original game concept that this is deriving from.

- I understand this is a very early prototype, so I don't judge you for any design choices made, but I am still going to be honest and give you my input on the most glaring issues I had with the game during my short session. (And few notes on where to focus on polish in the future.)

- Level Design: While I understand that these levels are majorly based on how they appear in the original game, I feel that as such they do not translate flawlessly from one engine to another.

The original game had a polygon-based actor, so when player moved from map to another, it was easy for the developers to change the viewpoint on the map, so that it wouldn't necessarily need to be from top down. (Not to mention the pre-rendered backgrounds.) Usually this viewpoint change made it obvious how the area design works, even if the point of the compass where you were headed changed.

However, with RPG Maker's view point, where you're locked to single perspective, you can't copy these map designs directly - It makes absolutely no sense that when you're walking north and enter a new area, that you're actually supposed to go south to be still actually walking north, unless the view point changes accordingly. Most people playing this game have probably played the original game to understand the area design regardless of these logic-defying design choices, but you can't use that as an excuse for illogical level design because these choices will still ultimately be a distraction for the player.

To counter this problem I would recommend to design the levels by keeping RPG Maker's perspective limitations in mind and adding to the levels accordingly. I can understand if you're worried whether this will derive the game too much from the original, but I think you could probably achieve close enough resemblance to the original surroundings, even if you designed the levels to support the RPG Maker viewpoint. I think the most important factor in the design choices is that this game would work well independently too, and wouldn't need to lean on the original game when defending unpractical design choices.

This is not the only issue with the levels. I also feel that the sense of space is skewed. In the original game you have to actually run for a while around the level to get from the other end to other, but in the Rpg Maker counter parts you just have to take a few steps to cover the same distance. The issue with this here is that if you copy the maps exactly as they are in the original game, it might result in very small and linear maps in your game that don't really have much room to move around, which in turn wouldn't really encourage for exploration and interactivity.

Now, that was my biggest problem with what you have so far. Other things I would like to point out is the need for consistency and polish on graphical bells and whistles, but considering this is very early prototype, most of those issues can be forgiven here, but not forgotten. I'd just like to say about the graphical design choices in general that you should prioritize that you're first and foremost producing something that works well independently, and only then be concerned about it matching the reference material. The fact is, it takes far greater effort to copy pre-existing material with great detail, than creating something that gives the same idea through emphasizing the accents that refer the to the original source material.

Here's some examples where I think you should take a closer look at these priorities:
- The title screen looks pretty terrible because of the rough orange outlines. It may be similar to FF8, but it doesn't look good as it is. Also the drawing is sketchy, while yes it still has a similar style.
- Everything I mentioned about the level design above.
- Interface design to some degree. The menus look good and are very reminiscent of the original, but I feel some menus are bit hard to navigate, like the battle menu when choosing targets for items and the Command menu in the main menu. for example.
- What's up with the bridge map in Deling City? It looks like it's graphically unfinished as there's black space in it even though it's out doors.

For last, here are some random problems I encountered:

- Defending in battles currently is useless. Whenever I choose to defend it won't move onto the enemy's turn. So the battle won't actually advance unless I choose another action than defending, so basically it makes defense command unusable. If I always get another consecutive turn for the same character for choosing to defend, what am I defending from?

- Difficulty balance currently doesn't exist. First two fights you can defeat by pressing 1 button. Third fight enemy deals more damage than you can heal. Somehow in the boss fight I got onto a situation where I had about 1700 health, boss hit me for 700 - 800 and I usually used a Hi-Potion after this to prevent myself from falling under 1000 health. After a while I ran out of Hi-Potions because usually there were 6 turns, of which every second turn was mine and every second turn was the enemy's. Only every six turns or so I had two turns in row. Well, after I ran out of Hi-Potions, my Potions healing 500 point just couldn't cover the amount of damage the enemy dealt and I died very quick.
Sure I could probably learn to use some skills that could actually do significant enough damage to the enemy, but the room for mistakes here was very very small, while in the preceding fights the game wasn't as punishing. I just felt the difficulty spike was extremely uncomfortable this early in the game.

It might help if you gave the player more room for mistakes in the first boss fight as it's still part of the learning process and getting used to the mechanics. There wasn't really much time to get know your skill arsenal, other than the two previous fights, but they didn't exactly call for anything else than spamming the basic attack. So, I feel that because of this much of the learning of the mechanics actually happens in the boss fights because it demands for it, but the demand is very punishing if it leaves room for no mistakes.

- While enemies and player characters are animated in the battle scene, I am wondering if you're planning to extend this to every enemy of the game as the boss (at least in my version of the game) wasn't animated. (afaik?) If you're going to do it, I'd recommend to keep in mind consistency and covering the entire area of the field with it, or none at all. (In case it is too tremendous effort.)

I really appreciate the amount of effort you're putting in this here, but I sincerely wish that you first and foremost focus on creating something solid and enjoyable, and only then referring to some other work. Let's face it - your resources aren't as extensive as Squaresoft's were at the time they were creating Final Fantasy 8, so chances are you aren't actually able to reproduce something they have done. What you are able to do however is a solid, fun and consistent game. (Look at Hero's Realm, for one example.)So when you're making design choices I hope the first thing you consider is, "is it enjoyable?" and only then "was this how they did it in FF8?" I think you have carried that out well in some fields so far, but I hope that in the future I could say it about this game in general.

That's all I can think of now! Thanks for your time and keep it up Kyrsty. I can come across critical, but I wouldn't be writing you this long unless I felt your project has a lot of potential to it.
Puddor
if squallbutts was a misao category i'd win every damn year
5702
At the moment Deling City is genuinely suffering from bad level design, and it doesn't transition well because of it. There are two maps missing, in essence; the connecting map between the two arches, and the lower parts of the arcade. As a result there are about-face teleports, not to mention some of the locations to the teleports take you to are messed up. There's no way I'm going to leave that as it is.

I'm definitely not a level design pro, but I know I can't just duplicate exactly; it's an impossible task along with being a silly one. It was something I kept in mind and took steps with regarding Winhill; the original map with the item shop got broken up into three maps, which in total are about 70-80 tiles in length. I don't think it feels painfully long, and the maps serve a purpose (there are residencies in both) but weren't present in FF8; I couldn't do it because of perspective, and I wouldn't even bother to try.

That said, I'm going to try to take this to heart as much as I can; there's still plenty of mapping to be done and I don't want to leave the player with a linear experience. I do prefer cosy interiors, but some current maps do cross the line and I would like to remap.

Other points:

I do agree the brush strokes could use some refining in the logo, but I don't believe something very crisp would look right. I made the decision a while back of what I wanted for SLH's logo, and this one pretty much reflects it; it's a design choice for consistency's sake with the original game. My own art does differ in ways from Nomura's, so I'm not going for complete emulation here, just enough to get the vibe right.

Interface...I didn't get a chance to run through the Command menu with others since the remake of the system took place over a few days, so I'm curious as to what made it hard to navigate. The menu wasn't designed for FF8 emulation, it was designed to serve its purpose; you equip your commands and you can see the result of doing so directly via the statistics displayed up the top. In the original menu I found myself going back and forth between Command/Status so I recognized the issue and took steps to alleviate it...

There's no real point in completely emulating instances which aren't relevant anymore. The 'Skills' menu mockup looks nothing like the one in FF8 since you only use it for the purpose of curative spells; it's designed for that purpose, nothing else. Your skills are displayed in the command menu and will most likely be viewable alongside other stats inside the Status menu, so showing the list again would be pointless.

Battles are still very much in refinement stage, but I'll keep that in mind about navigating targets. I have experienced some dissonance there so I would like to fix it and aid battle flow a bit more.

Difficulty isn't final...and I did not have a lot of time to test the boss. The difficulty curve you see here is a result of undertesting rather than deliberate decisions made to make the boss hard. In fact it should have been easy; this level is, as you said, designed to introduce the player to the operation and mechanics of the game.

The boss graphic was actually a very old, pixel traced battler from Cosplay Crisis; which was not animated. This game is. The actual boss for the segment isn't fully designed yet, let alone pixelled, so a placeholder was in order.

I'm going to keep what you've said here in mind, definitely; I too want this to be an enjoyable experience without solely relying on nostalgia and I've said it to my coder several times; we're not going to be able to fly on 'nostalgia' for an entire game, it just doesn't work like that. The gimmick will wear thin and when it does I want there to be a solid, well-written and fun game underneath it. I want to take steps in making my own design choices and thinking about what fits and what doesn't in the overall scheme of the entire game as a whole and not just one demo or one 'disc', and not just in regards to FF8. I don't want this to be a game that lures in players and gives them nothing decent in return, that relies on ancient design and nostalgia gimmicks to keep it afloat.

Thank you for playing and giving fair, honest, and detailed critique; I love critique and know it's one of the most valuable parts of the design process. We've knocked heads a few times in the past, but I think that's mainly because I'm a stubborn goat and got defensive, and in reality I wasn't satisfied 100% with what you were pointing out, either. Which is probably why I got defensive in the first place! I'm bad like that ^^;




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