Super Battle Kiddo Experience!

So. Kiddos.

I started working on and almost finishing that stat redux right before the Game Jam, when I was invited into a team and decided "why not, it's just two weeks." It soon was three weeks during which I worked on our project, finished my share and nothing got released. Welp. Kind of put a damper on my gam mak drive.

I look at Kiddos, and I feel like the cast is still fun, the basic battle engine is fine, the skills (with some tweaking after testers played it) are useful enough, and the cutscenes are pretty fun and/or develop the kiddos nicely. However, there are few major flaws.

>The stats were fixed, but the equipment sucks. The funny descriptions are good, but the equipment is boring and the progression makes little sense. This partially has to do with the town pacing of the game, where three towns are opened up at almost exactly the same time.

>The towns I would want are really frustrating and time-consuming to make, with little gameplay benefit. I'm very happy with what I DO have, but the idea of making another 4-5 towns throughout the rest of the game makes me want to barf a little. I'm just not a fan of the traditional RPG town, and I don't know why I insisted on making them for this project.

>The HECSS (basically, the chained encounter system) adds almost no gameplay benefit and instead is a bit confusing and just adds near-pointless difficulty. I wanted something along the lines of Puzzle & Dragons or Tower of Saviors, where a "stage" features ~7 battles including mooks, minibosses, and a gimmicky boss at the end. The HECSS doesn't flow nearly as well, and the lore surrounding it is weak and (you'll notice that this is a theme) adds nothing to the game as a whole.

>It's too damn long. I wanted the game as a whole to be about five hours long -- the first third of the game is five hours long instead. I don't like slow games very much, neither making them nor playing them. I beat all 100 hours of FFXII and DQVIII each when I was in high school. I enjoyed them, but I don't really want that intense an experience anymore (Dragon Age: Inquisition notwithstanding (suck it, LockeZ)).

What am I gonna do with Kiddos, then? I don't really enjoy working on it anymore, at least not this iteration. I like the kiddos themselves, and I don't want to trash the general engine. The menus and shops and battle HUD are fine. I also don't want to NOT show off what currently exists, because I think plenty of people would enjoy it.

So: in the next day or so I'll finish touching up the balance, probably leaning on the (relatively) easier side of things because the original tester version was a kick in the genitals. That way everybody can play what's there, I won't feel like it's a total waste, and I can rework the bits I like into a better game. I refuse to keep working on something I don't enjoy.

Kiddos ain't dead, but it'll be resurrected in a new way. Same characters, same happy-go-lucky feel, same battle engine... new setting and gameplay flow.