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The rope winds from the clouds like the long-dried trail of a giant's tear. It whips in the arid wind, down the birdless sky, and into the open mouth of the ravine that splits the dead land. Down and down it goes, the sky darkening to a pinpoint of light above it. This is the sky that Ivy knows.

Ivy and her sister, Mint, peer further into the ravine. It has been one day since their father stopped moving. A dandelion sprouts from the parched earth like hands clasped together in prayer. It is the only living thing they've seen in this dead world. A growl echoes off the cliff walls. Maybe not the only thing.

Sometimes Ivy dreams of a sky that covers everything. When she awakes, she hates herself for still having the dreams of a child. She's fourteen, now, her sister twelve. The rope stretches up above them, up, up, up, further than young eyes can see.

Features:
-Character-centric storyline
-50+ hours of gameplay
-Challenging boss battles
-Original music
-Different equipment sets that modify the ways characters play
-A crafting system featuring over 100 pieces of unique equipment
-LOTS of side quests
-Puzzles that spice up dungeon design
-Recruit an odd assortment of townspeople and pass legislation to develop your own village
-Raise a pig to compete in the Pig Arena and win prizes
-New game+ feature that includes multiple bonus endings--a mechanic I blatantly stole from Chrono Trigger

Latest Blog

Major Update

I've been hinting here and there about wanting to update A Very Long Rope, and I finally got off my ass and did it. I made quite a few changes, and I'll list them below, but I want to talk about the most major one in depth. When I made A Very Long Rope, my goal was to make a game with a strong story, and a lot of the other aspects got brushed aside. This was going to be my way to segue into the community and hopefully find some other people interested in working together. Since then, I've shifted my perspective and focused more on things like design and aesthetics, which this game doesn't really care much about, unfortunately.

So, the update. The chief annoyance I've been hearing about A Very Long Rope is the dungeon design--mainly, levels are way too big, and the random encounters serve to make things worse. So, this update adds an item to your inventory that toggles enemy encounters. This item was available in the game before, but the only way to get it was to beat the game (players who have done this know I'm talking about the saecelium shield). Now, this item is given to the player at the very beginning, meaning you don't have to fight a single random encounter anymore.

Of course, since bosses exist, you'll still need to gain experience. In order to incentivize getting a good amount of experience before each boss, I've made several treasure chests need a currency called "victory points" in order to open them. Basically, you get a single victory point for every enemy you defeat in a battle (other than bosses). Victory points are dependent based on the dungeon, so the ones you earn in the first dungeon will only work in that dungeon. The cost of opening chests is higher depending on what's inside the chest, so you might need to spend between 2-6 points in order to open each of these special chests.

I've also doubled the experience, gold, and item drops from monsters. The net effect here is that if you open every single locked chest, you'll end up fighting about half of the encounters that you would have if you just left random encounters on. I did a full playthrough and felt that these locked chests provided short-term goals that kept me more interested while exploring; I hope they do that for you, too!

Here's the full list of changes:

-Reduced crit damage from triple to double
-Stat cap increased to 9999 (will mainly affect buff stacking)
-Berserk no longer sucks
-One-touch Sprint
-First agricultural upgrade requires three people instead of five.
-Escape rate now a flat 60%
-Added a way to get out of the Goddess Tower if you don't have a portable transceiver
-Fixed a few typos/graphical glitches/small things I don't remember
-Rare drop rates have been increased significantly
-Gold/XP/Drop Rates doubled
-Findable equipment that could be used in recipes is now sold as recipes in your town along with the regular recipes.
-Saecelium Shield now added at the beginning of the game. Players can use their old data and find a Saeclium Shield in a number of places within a blue chest (such as the entrance to your town, on the world map, or next to the save point in Old Town); the blue chests will disappear upon opening one.
-Most chests are now "locked." Gain Victory Points from defeating random mobs in a dungeon to open locked chests. Victory Points are specific to each dungeon.
-Locked chests are weighted based on how good the item is. 2 VP is a potion, 3 VP is gold, a good potion, or monster mats, 4 VP are great potions and large sums of gold, 5 VP are stat-boosting items or rare monster mats, 6 VP are equipment.
-Chests that aren't near easy grinding spots (e.g. chests in certain puzzles, chests in towns) will never be locked. Several other random chests in dungeons will also not be locked.
-Arena fights now give experience
-Can now use saecelium shield during soul tear scenes
-Only need to find the wolf four times instead of nine (what was I thinking?!) in Marina's soul tear scene.


That's it! Oh, and make sure to subscribe to my new project: Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass.
  • Completed
  • Housekeeping
  • RPG Maker VX
  • RPG
  • 11/26/2013 04:56 PM
  • 05/29/2023 03:05 PM
  • 12/01/2013
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Posts

@Mizushimi: I never noticed that it doesn't put those graphics in the folders with the default rtp stuff before. I don't personally know of a way to separate that kind of stuff from the game file after it's been exported. My guess is that it's not showing up since I encrypted it; I'm sure there's a way around that, but I don't know it. I don't think there's anything that can reduce that lag, but I could experiment with some anti-lag scripts or just straight-up deleting some of the events on the lagging maps.
Sorry for the double-post, but I didn't make an official blog post about this and thought it would be good to notify interested subscribers (mainly you, pthariensflame). I added some merchants; check my edited blog post for details.
Thanks, Housekeeping! I'll update tonight, and head back through the castle to restock. :)
I'm having way too much fun trying to
recruit people for Sanctuary.
:D I think I may just spend over 100 hours talking to everyone I see, just in case! ^.^
I think the town is the thing I'm most proud of design-wise. Glad you're liking it!
kasey, im having trouble at
right bottom path inside the floating teleportation in the center of lake near beriall brymme. which is in order to get the blue fire.
but i cant find the blue fire as i search the whole area.

From the entrance, head right next to the water. At the next fork, go right, then up at the next fork, then down at the next fork. You'll be at the flame. From there, go down over the gap, right (at the fork, just like the rest of the directions), right, up, up, down, left, down, right, and you'll go over the gap by the entrance.
@kasey:
im stuck at silver spring's prison maze 3rd floor. can u help me to get pass? thanks!
@Mizushimi Housekeeping already posted a solution for that earlier in the thread. :)
oh, thanks. i didnt notice. my brain stopped working...
Bug report!

Going back through Solomon's Trail looking for extra goodies, I walked through one of the ordinary office doorways and the view crashed. Completely black screen, no tiles, no character, but the "Esc" info screen still showed up. Sadly, I didn't think to get a screenshot, but it wouldn't have showed much anyway (the screen was literally completely, uniformly black). There was nothing I could do but quit; I'm loath to try it again at the moment, in case it happens again.

I don't remember which doorway it was, but it was
somewhere close to the exit to Sylvia's room.


EDIT: I figured out which doorway it was:
it's the one that leads to the single saecelium crystal record in which Solomon talks about apologising to the "other" Sylvia.


EDIT 2: I just tried that room again, and it worked, so whatever bug I ran into isn't constant.
Thanks for letting me know! I'll do a stealth update here in a sec. Here's a boring factoid as to why this problem wasn't consistent:

I set aside twenty switches in the game as sort of "general" switches that I can activate and deactivate within the level (to the uninitiated: a switch is just something you set to on or off in order to control the events of the game, e.g. if a person walks off screen, you would turn a switch on so they wouldn't be back in the same position when you returned). I tend to use these for puzzles or series of cut scenes (like when you're hanging out with Deidre in Dragon's Mouth). This allows me to use way fewer switches and save RPG Maker's set number of switches for more global things (such as changing the town). I'll just deactivate the switches when you leave the dungeon, which allows the puzzles to reset and me to have more usable switches.

So, in this dungeon, I assume you turned the speedup/slowdown puzzle to normal, which activated switch 1. The room that you later entered fades out when you go in, then makes Solomon's hologram fade out so you don't see it prior to the lights coming back on. Nobody's caught this yet since I'm guessing everyone (including me) put the puzzle on FAST instead of normal, which would activate switch 2. This is what I get for being too impatient, haha.
Wow! From your description, I'd say you ran into something we programmers call an active memory reuse error, which is exactly what it sounds like. Having never worked in RPG Maker myself, I couldn't have guessed it had a limited number of global flags (what you, and presumably RPG Maker as well, called "switches").

In light of that, I'm just glad the process didn't segfault entirely! I suppose RPG Maker might have some kind of standard mechanism for raw memory protection, so that badly scripted games don't just crash the user's system, but still...

Thanks for figuring this out! Now that you've clued me into the problem, might I suggest taking a look at how the "general purpose" switches are used elsewhere in the game? If this happened once, it could very, very easily happen again, with no-one the wiser until something breaks. :/
They're pretty ubiquitous, unfortunately, so retesting all of their uses would take me quite a while. Luckily, I tested them pretty rigorously (three full play throughs myself in addition to the standard testing I did as I made each area and the full test plays of two friends), so it's unlikely that that kind of issue will show up again (...except in weird cases like this). If they do, though, I'll be quick to fix them!
housekeeping: i skipped the dialogue (im sorry i didnt notice. lol)where you have to recruit peoples for sanctuary. where should i go and recruit now?
You can recruit people from just about every town and a few dungeons. I'd start with heading to Nexus (the area with the teleporters east of Avishun City). Once you get Gunther, you'll get something that makes traveling around the map a lot easier. After that, anyone with a character portrait is fair game, but some just require building up your town before being able to recruit them.