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A year after parting bitterly, a young woman called Antheia is convinced by her grandfather to pay a visit to her estranged brother, Soren, at the Temple of Koruna, where he has been studying to improve his healing skills. Having never left the village before, she obliges reluctantly.

However, she is startled to find upon arrival that Soren has already left with a mysterious woman.

In a desperate bid to reunite with her brother and make amends, she employs the drunkard mercenary Blanche as an escort and winds up in the affairs of two soldiers on the hunt for a kidnapped princess.

Meanwhile, in the capital city of Maeden, there are rumours of an uprising on the horizon …





The country is Elowyn, a land revelling in nineteen years of peace since the conflict with Zenmyr to the west. Despite the years of harmony, Greatlord Balthar, the country’s ruler, maintains an expansive army. His daughter, Katherine, acts as emissary to Zenmyr in order to preserve and improve the alliance.

In the years since the conflict, technology from Zenmyr has trickled over the border, allowing warriors to wield basic battle magic by equipping their weapons with arcanic Shards, where once they would have had to rely on arcanists, or those born with the ability. However, there are no Shards that can harness healing arcana, a rare gift. In spite of the popularity of Shards, healers and arcanists are still regarded with fear, although most towns employ a healer to take care of their wounded.





A respected general and the Greatlord’s Master of Arms, Garth, returns to his home village of Roe after the Zenmyr-Elowyn conflict to discover that one of his wartime flings has unexpectedly borne him twins and left them on his doorstep. Not wanting to leave them out in the cold, he takes them in, intending to take care of them for the night and then give them away in the morning. However, his father, Edda, convinces him to take a year’s leave from the army to look after them and promises him that he will raise them in his absence.

One year turns into seven, and Garth cannot delay his return to the army any longer. He leaves the twins, Antheia and Soren, in his father’s care and returns to Wendolyn Castle.

Despite being bitter over the absence of their father, the twins grow up well under Edda’s guidance. Antheia becomes accomplished with a short sword and bow and Soren attempts to teach himself to control his rare gift: the power to heal.

During their teenage years, the village is plagued by raids from numerous bandit groups. Antheia helps fight them and Soren heals the village’s wounded.

The bandit raids decline over the years, and then eventually stop. One evening, Soren, now eighteen, reveals that he is departing to live and study at the Temple of Koruna. He explains that he wants heighten his healing powers but cannot do this without guidance from another healer. Antheia accuses him of abandoning her just like their father, and Soren blames her for being selfish and holding him back.

The two twins part in anger, and do not speak for a year.

Latest Blog

Thanks for 100+ downloads!

Sooo I'm really terrible at updating things (total shocker) because I hate double-handling stuff and I already have a semi-updated blog (you can check it out in my bio), but I just wanted to say thank you to those of you that have downloaded and played the demo! It really means a lot to me. I'm also in awe that one of my screenshots is being featured on the main page. I have a wee bit of impostor syndrome so I find praise really hard. Thanks for diggin' what I'm layin' down, I guess?

I've done a lot of overhauling for the different systems in the game and rather than constantly reuploading the demo, I'm going to leave it as it is for now and try get something meatier out in the next year or so.
  • Production
  • AMoonlessNight
  • RPG Maker VX Ace
  • Adventure RPG
  • 09/12/2012 05:01 AM
  • 11/18/2020 05:20 PM
  • N/A
  • 107981
  • 69
  • 215

Posts

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You can move the pillar?! I kept trying to examine it and getting no result, but I guess I must've been walking to the left and breaking the grab every time. I thought it was supposed to display some sort of puzzle hint when you checked it.

As for the forest enemies, yes. I am running into loads of basiliks, but there's also flying enemies which I don't want to waste arrows on, so I use magic on them too.

The item I'm equipping for the percentage luck boost is the Copper Gauntlets. And I'm pretty sure the thing that's trivializing the enemies' attack damage is my Leather Cuirass.

Edit: wait, so is the pillar pushing puzzle unrelated to breaking the rock? I thought that was what the puzzle was supposed to be about, and that the black orbs would be bombs or something?
^I'm pretty sure you don't actually use up arrows in combat, unless things changed from the beta.
author=kumada
You can move the pillar?! I kept trying to examine it and getting no result, but I guess I must've been walking to the left and breaking the grab every time. I thought it was supposed to display some sort of puzzle hint when you checked it.

As for the forest enemies, yes. I am running into loads of basiliks, but there's also flying enemies which I don't want to waste arrows on, so I use magic on them too.

The item I'm equipping for the percentage luck boost is the Copper Gauntlets. And I'm pretty sure the thing that's trivializing the enemies' attack damage is my Leather Cuirass.

Edit: wait, so is the pillar pushing puzzle unrelated to breaking the rock? I thought that was what the puzzle was supposed to be about, and that the black orbs would be bombs or something?

Yeah, you don't use up arrows in combat, they're just in the field. I'll make that a bit more obvious.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'breaking the rock'?
RE: Breaking the rock in the forest cave.
You need to get further in the game and come back to it, Kumada. You should be able to know when. O:
Oh yeah, forgot about that. Yeah, the rock is something different, as Knightowl said.

I've updated the demo with a fix for the parallaxes not animating, so hopefully that's all good now.
Got a crash when walking near the weapon shop in the second town. Music file apparently missing. :<
author=Liberty
Got a crash when walking near the weapon shop in the second town. Music file apparently missing. :<

Do you have version 1.3? That should have the missing file.
More feedback:

-Guarding in general seems to restore a bit too much HP. If the Wyvern spent its whole fight just guarding, I would never be able to bring it below 75% health.

-My saber seems to be the reason I'm not taking much damage. When I swapped to bow during the wyvern fight, I started taking almost reasonable amounts. Still not enough to put me in danger of having to use an item, since guarding is so strong, but the balance felt a lot better.

-World map speed is even slower than regular walk speed. It feels really ponderous.

-Names fading in and out over map locations (like fort Engel) as you approach or pass by is a *really* nice touch. This makes the map feel a lot more immersive.

-Shortly after entering town, while walking down the street past the weapon shop: Unable to find file Audio/BGS/tm2_river002

I'm pretty sure this is the crash liberty got, and I think I'm on version 1.3
author=kumada
-Guarding in general seems to restore a bit too much HP. If the Wyvern spent its whole fight just guarding, I would never be able to bring it below 75% health.

-My saber seems to be the reason I'm not taking much damage. When I swapped to bow during the wyvern fight, I started taking almost reasonable amounts. Still not enough to put me in danger of having to use an item, since guarding is so strong, but the balance felt a lot better.

Cool, thanks. It's only 5% but I'll reduce it to 3% and see if that's a bit better.

The bow reduces your defense, so that could be why. I've increased the attack power of the forest monsters slightly.

author=kumada
-Shortly after entering town, while walking down the street past the weapon shop: Unable to find file Audio/BGS/tm2_river002

I'm pretty sure this is the crash liberty got, and I think I'm on version 1.3


Pretty sure it's in both 1.2 and 1.3, but I'll make a 1.4 shortly.

Thanks for your feedback!
More feedback!

-Resource scarcity is really pronounced when you hit the first town, but that's good. It makes all the things you might want to buy seem that more appealing/worth working for.

-"Did you know that the princess in Maeden is transgender?" transgender as a word feels a little weird for the character to say. Transgender as an English word feels a bit academic-y and new, and in contrast Vermillion's society feels like it has been able to openly talk about transgender for a long time. I'm not sure what to suggest here, but I feel like either they'd have their own common word for transgender (trueform or something like that?) or they wouldn't really find it remarkable enough to gossip about (although the princess' wardrobe, or her hair, or her retainers would definitely still be gossip fodder). Take everything here with a huge grain of salt, since I'm making this suggestion based on world-feel, not actual lore, and transgender might be a new thing for the setting or I might have gotten something else totally wrong.

In any case, I'll try to play a bit further into the game tonight or tomorrow.
author=kumada
More feedback!

-Resource scarcity is really pronounced when you hit the first town, but that's good. It makes all the things you might want to buy seem that more appealing/worth working for.

Ooh yay, I was hoping you were still playing! Thanks for your feedback. Yeah, I was aiming for resource scarcity, think I've got a good balance this time.

author=kumada
-"Did you know that the princess in Maeden is transgender?" transgender as a word feels a little weird for the character to say. Transgender as an English word feels a bit academic-y and new, and in contrast Vermillion's society feels like it has been able to openly talk about transgender for a long time. I'm not sure what to suggest here, but I feel like either they'd have their own common word for transgender (trueform or something like that?) or they wouldn't really find it remarkable enough to gossip about (although the princess' wardrobe, or her hair, or her retainers would definitely still be gossip fodder). Take everything here with a huge grain of salt, since I'm making this suggestion based on world-feel, not actual lore, and transgender might be a new thing for the setting or I might have gotten something else totally wrong.

Yeah, I did consider having a different word for transgender, but one of my trans friends suggested that having the real word would be better. I was trying to find a balance between making it obvious that she is transgender and not dropping it as an aside every few sentences, you know? Hopefully more trans folks play the game and give me feedback about that particular aspect.
I would 100% trust your trans friend's feedback over my feedback. Depending on how central of a character the princess ends up being, if the plot spends a lot of time with her you might be able to roll the information out a bit slower (Free Spirits is a good example of a game that did this, and also a really good game in general), but I would not worry about it otherwise.

Anyway, more playthrough feedback:

-A marigold potion 1 costs 7 obols to buy, 4 to sell, and 2 to craft. This means you can generate a lot of cash by melting your herbs into potions and your potions into obols. I'm at 105 obols in the first town without doing any grinding. Granted, I had to melt nearly all of my potions for it, but it let me get heavy cuirass 1 and sabre 3 basically out of the starting gate. Don't need heals if you can't take damage.

-It occurs to me that the above plus herbs constantly spawning could trivialize money if people just camp for herbs.

-Your town design is really top-notch. Even little things, like the house where everyone has been traumatized by a bandit attack, are really striking.

-Adorable little rabbits I will chase you!

I'm kind of sad there's no reward for catching up to these, since I do it every time I see one.

-Enemies don't spawn in Koruna Pass/Koruna Pass Cave. Is this intentional?

-oh god walkspeed in dungeons is so slow

-Floating box puzzle, top right rock has a passability glitch on the right side.

-Top middle rock has a passability glitch to the north of it.

-Hey I found a battle! I'd been exploring the pass/caves for about ten minutes without encountering one. I think the encounter rate got screwed up here during the global encounter rate change.

-At a defense of 33, bats deal 1 damage to me on all attacks.

-Okay, encounter rate seems to pick up a bit once you're deep enough in, around Koruna Pass Cave 5.

-In Mountain Beast's fight, I feel like there should be some signs that it's getting anxious/ready to run. Otherwise it's easy to feel like you just went in with the wrong shards equipped, load, and try again.

-Climbing a ladder after getting the warning that an encounter's about to happen seems to prevent that encounter from happening.

-Did not need to heal once during Mountain Beast II's fight. Just attacked with sword every round.

-Genbu are pretty frustrating. Only magic really hurts them, and even then it does hardly any damage. Maybe they have an elemental weakness, but not being able to switch shards mid-battle makes that challenging to find.

-I wish there were more options for increasing your damage output. As is, even if I optimize for it, combat is still super slow.

-Okay, I'm stuck outside the sealed door. I've turned on all four obelisks. No idea what to do from there.
author=kumada
-A marigold potion 1 costs 7 obols to buy, 4 to sell, and 2 to craft. This means you can generate a lot of cash by melting your herbs into potions and your potions into obols. I'm at 105 obols in the first town without doing any grinding. Granted, I had to melt nearly all of my potions for it, but it let me get heavy cuirass 1 and sabre 3 basically out of the starting gate. Don't need heals if you can't take damage.

-It occurs to me that the above plus herbs constantly spawning could trivialize money if people just camp for herbs.

I think I increased the cost for the potions and then forgot to change the cost for making potions, oops. Thanks! I'll make the herbs spawn less often as well.

author=kumada
-Your town design is really top-notch. Even little things, like the house where everyone has been traumatized by a bandit attack, are really striking.

-Adorable little rabbits I will chase you!

I'm kind of sad there's no reward for catching up to these, since I do it every time I see one.

Naw, thanks! Yeah, I did consider doing something cute with the rabbits ...

author=kumada
-Enemies don't spawn in Koruna Pass/Koruna Pass Cave. Is this intentional?

-oh god walkspeed in dungeons is so slow

-Floating box puzzle, top right rock has a passability glitch on the right side.

-Top middle rock has a passability glitch to the north of it.

-Hey I found a battle! I'd been exploring the pass/caves for about ten minutes without encountering one. I think the encounter rate got screwed up here during the global encounter rate change.

-At a defense of 33, bats deal 1 damage to me on all attacks.

-Okay, encounter rate seems to pick up a bit once you're deep enough in, around Koruna Pass Cave 5.

Cool, I'll up the encounter rate on some of those maps. The encounter rate is a random number between a and b, so I think I've just made those too far apart.

I'll look into those passability glitches as well. Are they both on the same map, the one with the floating puzzle?

Cool, good to know about the bats. I'll see what I can do. Balancing is hard, haha.

author=kumada
-In Mountain Beast's fight, I feel like there should be some signs that it's getting anxious/ready to run. Otherwise it's easy to feel like you just went in with the wrong shards equipped, load, and try again.

Not quite sure what you mean; did you reload and fight it again after it fled?

author=kumada
-Climbing a ladder after getting the warning that an encounter's about to happen seems to prevent that encounter from happening.

Yeah, ladders are an encounter-free zone. I think it gives you a couple of steps' respite and then the encounter should pop up again.

author=kumada
-Genbu are pretty frustrating. Only magic really hurts them, and even then it does hardly any damage. Maybe they have an elemental weakness, but not being able to switch shards mid-battle makes that challenging to find.

They don't have any elemental weakness. You can check by hovering over them during the selection screen and pressing Shift. Best to just run until you get someone with a heavy weapon.

author=kumada
-I wish there were more options for increasing your damage output. As is, even if I optimize for it, combat is still super slow.

I'm going to overhaul the skills for the next release (whenever that may be) and look into giving each character a few more skills from the get-go.

author=kumada
-Okay, I'm stuck outside the sealed door. I've turned on all four obelisks. No idea what to do from there.

There is a sign by the door that gives you a hint.
The sign lists four things that provide light (which correlate to the position of the pillars). One of those things does not generate its own light.
I think just having the herbs spawn once and then not again would put scarcity back into potions/obols/the game economy. Dropping the spawn rate just turns alchemy into a thing you'd only do rarely, and that's kind of a shame, since it's a cool sub-system.

Both passability glitches are on the same map, the floating box one.

As for the Koruna cave spawns, they're totally fine once you get to the outside of Cave 5. There's just zero spawns up to that point.

For the first Mountain Beast fight, I almost quit out of it on the fourth round after testing all my attack options and finding they did nothing. Also, there isn't really an in-game explanation for why it's weaker the second time around. Having the monster act kind of cagey and then run--only to show up the second time looking kind of wounded--wound add a little more narrative to this creature, and would make it clearer to the player that their goal for the first fight is just to hold out. Incidentally, even with my armor cranked, it hit relatively hard, so I think maybe a dedicated mage would've gotten massively stomped.

I started running from Genbu some of the time out of convenience (I can lame the fight out with single-target elemental spells, but it takes a ton of time and the time/exp ratio isn't worth it). Maybe it might be worth having a weaker form of Genbu here, since the player doesn't have access to a heavy weapon when they enter the zone and it makes for a pretty frustrating encounter. Alternately, have a bit of text before the Genbu start popping up remind the player that they should run some of the time.

I would never have figured out that puzzle except by brute force.

Edit:

More feedback

-Encounters are working just fine in Koruna pass on the second time through.

-Spell damage is really low. I tried to cheese my magic attack as much as possible, putting a Greater Conduit, level 3 glaive, green scarf, and level 2 multi-target air shard on Blanche and then having her cast pressure on a pair of genbu before hitting them with the multi-target air spell. She still only did about 100 damage per cast to each target. If spells are intended mainly for a support function/getting around a monster's resistances, this makes sense, but as is they don't feel very powerful. Just like a thing you sometimes have to resort to when a monster requires it.

-Further spell testing: Pressure's air vulnerability effect does not appear to have been hitting the genbu. I have been able to get it to hit bandits, though, with a roughly 50% damage boost.

-Further further testing: green scarf does nothing. It does not buff your air damage by 50%. It simply lowers your defense by 15%.

-Combat with the bandits feels good, challenging, and well-balanced. Damage is high, all weapon types hit, and potions actually matter.

-Targets in the bandits' lair don't properly let you collect arrows from them. The rightmost one has a single arrow already stored in it, but any extra arrows you shoot into the targets are not remembered by the game.

-Also, shooting the targets does not deactivate the spikes to the right. Not sure how this is supposed to be done.

-Demo cleared, by the way. This game is very carefully, very deliberately designed, and it feels very polished to play. Every critique I had was basically a small tweak to the design, and overall the demo felt very professional. I super like this game and would like to see more of it, especially since it feels like it's just starting to get its feet under it in terms of gameplay, subsystems, and world exploration. Thank you for making this.
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