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In the small village of Woodspell something is about to happen that will set into motion the events that will change the fate of the world. A strange man has arrived to talk to the village elders, what does he want, and who is he? Why would he come to such a small village?

And just what is the importance of these crystal fragments?

Join a minstrel from the small village, and her friends as they travel to the edges of the kingdom of Amara and across the length of the continent of Vallenfell on a quest to stop the wizard Lucian from wreaking devastation on the world.

The Legend of Amara is being made on my twitch stream and is kind of being co developed by the viewers. This game isn't going to be any master class of story telling, but I do hope you will enjoy playing it.
-LS

Latest Blog

Brief fix of a bug.

Just a quick update, apparently, Ace decided not to save some of the changes I made to the demo just before release. I fixed this and everything should be working as well as possible . Continue on.
  • Production
  • LorSquirrel
  • RPG Maker VX Ace
  • Adventure RPG
  • 09/16/2014 10:44 PM
  • 02/08/2019 12:49 PM
  • N/A
  • 97866
  • 25
  • 293

Posts

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Its all good. Mistakes happens. as long as you keep at it.
Of course I would forget to save that change _-_ I'll add that in next update.
I just went back, and checked. That merchant does NOT sell fire Balms.


He does however have the soothing balms.
I'm toning down the cost a bit to compensate for this.

Every character will have moves like that at some point.
A limited amount though. If monsters don't respawn. We don't get enough money to afford more.


Speaking of balms, and such. How many characters are you going to have for your game? If it's more than 4 I'm replacing Lillian immediately. I don't want to use a character that can run out of supplies.


Bye Lillian!

There is a merchant in the woods who sells fire balm and poison flasks...
I'll just add the font in the font folder next update.

I thought you mean the smithy I have fixed that and it will be in the next update.

Neither does anyone else I've asked about :/

The game seems to stubbornly refuse to change it, so I'm just going to change it back to TP.

I'm adding it where spiders are slightly nerfed (on top of being changed to Wisps) and where Malory gives you some Fire Balm and Poison Flasks when you get the medicine.

I am also looking through the spelling errors you supplied me and I will be correcting them. Thank you by the way.
-LS
Mind you the balms are a tad expensive, and with no opportunity to come back to the town once you enter the forest. even having 3 isn't much.


Maybe if she had like 3 fire balms, and 2 vials of poison in her room. It would give us more of an edge in the spider fight.


I think we should be allowed to return to town, and the monsters should re-spawn.
A shop is really necessary in terms of preparations.


It might just make it a tad easier on the player. We don't want to keep dying to them spiders.
As promised, here's another runthrough of things now that I have the correct font installed.

* Monotype Corsiva isn't a standard font, or at least not in my version of Windows 8.1. Consider either making a note on the gamepage or including a README with the fact that the font is required. Or include it in the fonts folder, one of the two.
* Check your PM's for the spelling/grammar errors I've found.
- You say the item shop is accessible and that you've tested it extensively. Try entering it before going to the marsh or to the forest. I'm pretty sure this is not intended behavior. Thinking on it, we may have a bit of a misunderstanding because when I say item shop I mean the place on the map marked with the item shop insignia, and not the actual merchant in Malory's hut.
* I have no idea what's causing this to happen during battles on an enemy's turn. Something to look into.
- The bars in battle say "PHP" and is referenced as such in spell descriptions but the resource is called "TP" when choosing to use a skill.
- The battle against the spiders is a pretty difficult one even at the recommended average of 5, especially if the player misses the availability of Fire Balm and/or the Poison in town like I did on my first save. Consider giving a gentle nudge from Lillian about either of the items or potentially both when she first joins. "Are we going hunting? I need some balm for my bow" or similar when she first joins, maybe?
This may seem like a long shot, but why don't you make Elena go to the building that's on fire to help rescue those who are trapped inside?



If the masked villain is able to summon creatures. Why not make Elena, and Lillian fight wisps. That way you can show off her ice magic, and collect fire balm for Lillian. Now the ice spider Will be easier to deal with cause of the abundance of FIRE BALMS!!!



Once you go into the woods to pursue the masked villain. Elena could be level 4, or 5, and you can make Lucas start out level 5. BOOM Lucas's level 1 problem obliterated!!!



That way you don't have to grind for a Half hour as well.


Sometimes I'm scared of my genius.
I'm rebalancing the slimes and hornets as we speak, er, type.

Elena starts off a jack of all trades and then shifts into a support/magic damage later on.

He lives in the woods with incredibly agitated hornets. It's just something he learned to do so he could push through the poison.

I was thinking more Ballads for the ice spells, but I like the rest.
I honestly think freezing whistle sounds good. It plays more to the muse character theme you have with her.

I hate that you have 4 slimes, and one hornet in that group. To be fair it takes one spell to kill one slime, but takes three hits to kill that hornet. You're looking at 4 turns per battle, or five if you missed an attack. That seems legit, but all those slimes makes Lillian, and Lucas look pathetically weak in comparison to Elena.

It's kind of why I'm not a big fan of jack of all trades characters. They show off early game, and then fail late game.

When I saw the Purge technique on Lucas. I was really confused as to why a wood cutter would have such an ability.

Lucas: After all these years of living in the forest, and cutting thousands of trees. I have finally trained my body. I am no longer weak. I AM IMMUNE TO MOSQUITO BITES!!!

With Elena you could make her channel her spells through vocal, or musical means.

Chilling Etude/ Icy Etude/ Freezing Etude
Fiery Concerto/ Flaming concerto/ Eruptive Concerto
Aria of wind/ Aria of gale/ Aria of storm

Just to make her minstrel persona more alive in combat.
A wild Xemeth has appeared! Nice to see you again, man.

NITPICKS:

Opening Story Crawl: The reasons for why this is absent are as such: 1, I just don't like opening story crawls. I always feel like they just go on forever. 2, Even considering this I still wanted to put one in, but I couldn't find a place where it felt natural.

Pre-Boss Fight Message: It is mostly for demo purposes, and because I noticed that a few people that I had play the game blind ended up stumbling into it while exploring and got destroyed.

Going After Lucian: Patience padawan. :)

ISSUES:

Ice Spider is a Jerk: It's weird. Some people have problems with that fight all the time, others don't. I think I need to lower the frequency of Ice Breath to avoid that happening, or maybe I should set it up to where it only does it on certain rounds.

Slime Weak Points: Is that seriously still happening? I could have sworn I changed that to where they weren't weak to any physical attack.

Overhead Bash: I would play the "There's a character whistling ice over there. Get over it." card, but I have honestly been wanting to change that skill to something more plausible, but I'm coming up on a bit of a blank. I guess I could call it Power Bash, or something like that.

Positives:

Battle system and new sprites: Thank you. But I also have to give credit to one of my viewers, and fellow streamer, Huntingswan. He helped me through installation.

Forest Popups: It's really only in there is because my viewer Taurelith pointed out that I was missing collectible plants. I honestly don't know how I missed it before, but I have to thank him.

FF1 is awesome.

Noted.

I have made unspeakable horrors before o_o.

-LS
Hey LorSquirrel! Glad to see you updating.

I just wanted to start off on a couple of nitpicks, and then continue with some overall issues, and then end it with the positive notes.

Nitpicks.

It would be an asset to your game if instead of the text boxes explaining the controls of the game. You would give a little background to your story. Imagine me walking in that swamp looking at these wisps, and I have no clue why that swamp is there, or why those wisps exist. Even if you leave it to be explained later. It's sorta leaving your players in the dark.

When the masked man runs off, and you're sent to go after them. It's a giant face-palm. You can't make me believe that they didn't send you to help the people while the guards pursued the villainous masked man. A player would feel more involved with your characters, if they witnessed the devastation. After helping the villagers. You could have the guards come back injured, and then Elena would rush to apprehend the fiend.

I'm not sure if its for demo purposes, but the boss fight should not give you a warning. It's my fault if I'm unprepared not yours. A warning like that should only exist during a side boss.

Issues-

The Forest itself is a royal pain in my #^%. I spent the 45 minutes to get my characters to level 7. (cause I know them spiders ain't level 5). The battle went something like this... Elena buffs the party. Lillian use vital shot. Lucas uses overhead smash. Ice spider uses freeze breath. Everyone's frozen. Musicals are happening, Olaf is dancing, and Elsa won't let it go. Here I am watching my characters die one by one. Eventually I do get lucky, and I beat them.

The slimes made me scratch my head a little. How is a slime's weakpoint a sword, but is resistant to axes? they're doing the same thing. They're cutting the slime. That shouldn't hurt it to begin with, but I'll drop that for now. You have to use weapon categories. Slash/Jab/Bash. Spells work on a different category. So axes, and swords belong in the same family.

Overhead smash is a bad idea. Have you ever played that carnival game with the Hammer? It's the same concept. Putting a weapon over your head in an arc actually cause you to LOSE strength. It takes more energy to bring the weapon up from that angle causing you to lose momentum, and power. Plus that's gonna give Lucas a herniated disk.

Positives.

The project is coming along nicely! The side view battle script is working quite well, and the sprites are rather decent. I'm glad you changed Ice lvl 1 into frozen whistle, but you gotta fix that during battles. (Elena uses Ice lvl 1)

The collect command in the forest gives you a good opportunity to get decent healing items without breaking your wallet.

FF1 town theme in Lucas's house makes him my bro.

The flow of combat seems a lot better. You just need to tweak a few things here, and there.

Mapping is fine. Could be better, but could also be worst. I HAVE SEEN UNSPEAKABLE HORRORS.

Final notes.

This is just for everyone whom aspires of making a great game. your Intro is the most Important part of your game! If the Story/Character/Combat is dull or boring. You will lose immediate attention.

With that said. Good luck LorSquirrle. I'll be keeping my eye on this.
Also, the pictures are out of date. I need to update them soon.
Sorry for the grammar mistakes. It's late.
-I've been trying to think of a way to put it in the game, but every time I try putting it in after the first dialogue with Elena's father is felt awkward.
-If you could point out where the spelling error are I would be grateful.
-The font is called Monotype Corsiva. And just to it actually doesn't overflow very much, or at all that I'm aware of. This is one thing I really felt I would have to deal with at some point, but I'm not sure how to deal with it, or how to fix it.
-I'm sorry about that guy. I didn't notice that I had his event setup wrong until about an hour ago.
-Again. Sorry. I forgot to activate an event there.
-I haven't had that problem and I just entered the shop eighteen times in a row without trouble. Not sure what's causing that.
-I'm planning on working on that tomorrow, but thank you for reminding me.
-I'm not really focusing on the combat, but I do want to make it as enjoyable as I can.

I think I addressed everything you said up there. Awaiting a reply.
-LS
Another bullet-point nit-pick bonanza, comin' right up!

- I appreciate that you put in a controls tutorial, but I think it'd be better served as being integrated into the gameplay instead of being just put in text boxes at the start.
- I'm seeing at least three spelling/grammar errors and one dialogue that gets slightly cut-off due to length in just the first conversation.
* Actually, now that I think about it, the font I'm seeing and the font in your screenshots doesn't match, even after installing the fonts in the Fonts folder. Not sure if this is on your end or mine.
+ The butterflies flying around the first map are a nice touch.
- Nearly every other person I talk to has waaaaay too much text that overflows the dialogue box, by a fairly significant margin so that I'm fairly sure it'd be doing it even if the font were displaying correctly. Be mindful of this sort of thing.
+ The "Talk" text above people you can talk to is a nice touch, but...
- ... it shouldn't appear unless the NPC has something to say. There's a guard standing by the Inn that has no dialogue but the sprite still attempts to turn and face Elena for a brief moment.
- Trying to go south from the Smithy, which looks like it should be possible, results in absolutely no feedback.
- Trying to enter the item shop results in you being placed on the wall of the shop and unable to get into the actual shop. You are then unable to leave and have to reload from last save.
- The map transition between the last screen of the town and Malory's Marsh is a bit jarring in that you're going right and then all of the sudden you're facing down with a solid rock wall to your right.
* The battles are fairly bog-standard from the few I did. I'll finish the demo at a later point with a bit more of an eye on the battle mechanics for more feedback here.

I'm going to stop here for now since I have to go take care of a few real-life things, but here's a few takeaways from my brief playsession:
* Consider having somebody proofread your dialogue. There's a lot of spelling and grammar errors in here.
* What font is the game supposed to be using? If it's not the VL-Gothic/VL-PGothic files included in the extract, then what?
* There is a LOT of dialogue too long for the boxes and I'm almost positive this would still be an issue even if the font were displaying correctly.
* I actually kind of like what I'm seeing so far once the game gets a little TLC to fix the issues I've pointed out here. I'll make another pass later with some more general advice.
I will also exclude the inclusive RTP thing next update. It has been making the file take so stinking long to upload.
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