• Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS

Not alot here at the moment.

  • pianotm
  • 03/03/2016 05:58 AM
  • 1503 views
Name: Nakaishi Wars

Developer: Darigaaz! It's Marrend!

Story: Yeah, there isn't one yet. This is barely a tech demo.


Is it just me, or does this not look like giant robots fighting? No robots? So it's not just me. Thanks.


Gameplay: Those who have used it should immediately recognize the GubiD Tactical Battle System, herein referred to as the GTBS. Now, Marrend has stated in another thread that he was making a game using the simple, minimum mechanics of the GTBS. Ordinarily, I'd say that was fine. Then I played the demo. Okay, you have two combat training options available: land battles and space battles. And there's a little difference between the two. I'm going to talk about space battles first. GubiD's script does something I really, really, really, really, but I mean REALLY hate. If you are stronger than your enemies, they will run like little bitches and make you chase them all over the damned map. Okay, first of all, to stop them from doing this, you need to reduce your enemy move ranges. It's alright to leave enemies at the default, but bosses like Lenneth...yeah, it really looks lame when you're chasing her all over the place. I understand the strategic concept, but GTBS does not balance this well at all, and don't bother asking GubiD to fix this, because he has literally already said "derp!!!" to that idea. If you want to do a bit of a workaround to make this mechanic less annoying, then you can do the following; in the enemies tab, go get Lenneth, and in your Note window, put in move=x (x being the number of spaces you want her to be able to move per turn; no <> brackets are necessary). I would put in move=4, but that would be my personal preference. Basically, put a leash on her. Seriously. Also, she's a little weak. She's got a lot of HP, but she's basically a one-trick pony. It makes the fight really boring. Give her multiple abilities. Give her a self-repair ability to make her more difficult. Make her a little stronger to make her a significant threat. You could also give her drones she can spawn to give you hell. Do not use the GTBS method to do this. It's borked. Instead use the standard VX Ace enemy spawning script calls (Thanks go to LockeZ).

SceneManager.scene.set_character("enemy", X, 6, 1, 0)


X is the enemy's number in the database. 6 and 1 are your X and Y coordinates: change these as you see fit. 0, you can ignore and leave it as is. Use this script call in your battle event manager to spawn enemies. Make sure you set your condition. I like to do it once every couple of turns. Setting it based on HP levels is another good way to do it. This is another issue with the GTBS. It's supposed to do this, but it doesn't. You have to use the SceneManager script calls to make this work (thank goodness there's a workaround). This, of course, is only a suggestion, but you need to do something to make this game flow a little better, and this is the best thing I've got.


Tactics is about strategy, and there is very little strategy going on here, other than killing the little enemies and then chasing the boss all over the place. Also, seriously, I mean, really, turn off that stupid mini-battle. It's in the GTBS Interface Settings settings scripts at line 48. Simply change Mini-Battle's value to false. Don't confuse it with the Mini-War. That's something different. If you want to use the mini-battle then at least change the backdrop to something appropriate. I don't think robots battling in space will do their individual attacks against a lush, green mountain background.

That mini-battle background does seem to go well with your ground battles, but the problem is, GTBS only allows one backdrop, and your mini-battle's are either on or off. Your ground battles are much better. Trees and cliffs provide some obstacles for you and enemies to have to work around. If you're interested, the LAYY Meta engine can also handle obstacles very nicely. I understand in space that you find many obstacles, and that's probably what you were going for. Just make sure you keep your battles interesting. Your ground battle has the same issues as your space battle, except the obstacles kind of mix things up a bit. As a result, the battle is a bit more engaging. You have a bit of a better interest in the fight as instead of just doing move-action-chase, you're now working how you're going to efficiently get to enemies who are out of reach behind a stand of trees. While the battle still suffers from being drawn out and repetitive, the obstacles at least provide a bit of engagement.

Finally, in GTBS General Settings at line 115, I would recommend setting REMOVE_DEAD to 1. This will make the enemy sprites disappear upon death, but allow your allies to remain so that, if available, you may be able to revive them. Again, just a suggestion. You may be of the mind that once a robot is down, it's not getting up until repaired at the shop, and that's fine, also.

Graphics: Custom graphics that mesh very well with RTP. Marrend has a way of making sci-fi, beat-em up/shoot-em-up robots look cute. But in battle, they still look like guys wearing armor. A suggestion for the space battles...they wouldn't be walking. You may want to animate their sprites so that it looks like they're gliding. You could also do this for the ground battles so that it looks like they're hovering over the land. That would give them more of a robot appearance. You may also want to consider using 70px sprites with the $ prefix in the file name so that you can add more details to make them look more like robots.

Conclusion: There's the promise of a good story here, and a very interesting game, but gameplay has a long way to go. It's uninteresting and fails to capitalize on the benefits of a tactics system. If I were scoring, I'd give this, as it stands, a 2.5.

Posts

Pages: 1
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
I've got no qualms disabling the mini-battle, now that you mention it. It was mostly disabled because it looked awkward when characters jumped to their targets on the map when they were doing ranged attacks. Now that I set it up that character's don't move when performing actions (note: targeting oneself still causes a bit of a "jump"), yeah, okay.

REMOVE_DEAD is set to 2, which removes all dead battlers from the map. That's fine for enemies, but, if players do get a "raise dead" effect, the restored unit would appear within the range of the skill, rather than require players to hoof it to where the battler fell.

Scouts, Engineers, and Lenneth all have Nano Repair (which absolutely has a minimum range of 0), but, I've never seen them use the skill on themselves. On other allies, certainly, but never themselves! Is... there something I'm missing in regards to that?

Thanks for the tip on spawning enemies! I was looking for something like that! My original thought was a resurrection skill that enemies use, but, I never saw them use that skill at all!

Another thing that I'll probably want to do is remove the all-recover-full on level-up. The reason I did that is because I recall looking at Naora's stats after a fight both with and without equipment, and something didn't seem right. It seemed to correct itself when I included the all-recover-full after leveling. Then again, I probably forgot that the bonuses that equipment grants are percentage-based!

*Edit: Wait, am I reading this right? Did I really forget to set a backdrop for the space-battle in this demo? Uuuuuggggghhhh.
Pages: 1