Assembling the Void

I was skeptical with the pixel art in general, I mean the concepts were really good just some of the art could look a bit better with some practice. This did not really hurt my image of your game. You were right when you said the game looked better in motion for instance. I don't know, action games are hardly done right and I wanted to see how your game would look in motion.

You don't really have to talk to express your ideas as I understand a lot of the design decisions you've made simply by watching the LP video.

Rm2k3 is a tile-based editor with a lot of limitations (patches + scripting things help I guess). Point is, a tile-based game with no pixel movement will ALWAYS feel clunky.

There are ways to get around that but it's almost always too much effort and not really an effective solution. Still, I really liked how you setup your battles. You had the heroine position herself around the enemy by detecting where the enemy is present. From there the character strafes and it appears you can then even pick the direction the character is faces during the strafing. This is brilliant and a really creative way to get around the tile-based limitation. If you wanted to do a pixel based movement it would obviously be smarter to use a different engine.

Another thing that impressed me was your 2nd and 3rd character's A.I. They are actually MORE intelligent then the Secret Of Mana A.I which is a game some people compared your game to.

The caterpillar system is great, the characters lag behind a bit unless you're walking slow and not running. It really looks like Chrono Trigger caterpillar system which is phenomenal.

I really liked how the fairy keeps her distance and uses projectiles while the brown melee imp is a bit more aggressive which is fine for a melee champ. He essentially acts as a tank as well by doing this. At first I thought there was an aggro system but the enemies seem to lock onto allies within a certain distance. I could be wrong.

I absolutely love how the enemies fall when you hit them, this is a lot like Secret Of Mana.

Still this is some really creative work, keep it up man. The game looks aesthetically pleasing too, the leaves falling was a nice touch. It really looks likes a polished game with some minor flaws. I skimmed over the story, I actually thought the game was more about putting the world back together. I was kind of disappointed it wasn't that lol but yeah, the story still has a lot of room for character development and good scenario writing.

Some of my thoughts for improvements:

- When your cast members die, they should stay dead until all the enemies are cleared. This is needed for attrition, if there are no penalties then there aren't many risks. The game becomes easy mode. It's even more weird that they get up (after that bar fills up) with like 2 hp and die two seconds later.

- It's nice that you're limiting the amount of enemies on the field, the more events the more likely the game will lag. Lag absolutely destroys real-time games...

However, make the battle maps bigger, tight maps aren't good for action-based battle systems. Seiken Densetsu 3 (snes game) did this and it was impossible to avoid hits. The player should be able to avoid hits if they are good enough.

- Battle animations are good, I can at least tell what's going on. Maybe make the spell animations a bit clearer.

- The LPer mentioned the skill system, don't make magic overpowered.

- You could probably even go a step further and make it so your heroine has to position herself on the map to avoid projectiles etc. This could be great for boss battles and their respective patterns, this is often seen in online games but they make it really gimmicky lol.

- I really laughed when you said you could map the controls for the second character. It's a bit clunky in rm2k3 but it's still option haha! It's strange I was actually going to do something similar for my game.