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Being the villain

Have you ever fought a boss in an rpg, and thought to yourself; “Man, I’d love to play as that thing!” Be it a powerful wizard, a giant monster, or an all around overpowered jerk, the villains always seem to get the best powers. What then, would it be like to be in control of that power? This game was built around that idea. No longer are you in control of a gang of plucky young heroes rising up against overwhelming odds to defeat the forces of darkness and save the world. No, now you are the villain. Now we all know that there are a decent number of games out there where you play as the baddie, but many of the ones I found were either comedic or parody games. Now don’t get me wrong, I love a good parody game, but I was a bit disappointed in the lack of villainous games with a slightly more serious tone. So, I decided to do what any good rpg maker would do and make one myself!

As a word of warning, this game is very cutsceney (which is clearly a real word). There’s a lot of backstory and character development I wanted to cram in there, but at the same time, I didn’t want to bog down the gameplay or the pacing. As a solution, I decided to include a cutscene gallery that unlocks additional stories about the various characters as the player goes along.Several of them are connected to sidequests, which will hopefully add a little extra motivation for the player to stray from the main story. Tired of grinding for a while? Just teleport to your castle, sit down with some popcorn and enjoy a cutscene.If you don’t like character driven stories...welp, that’s great! It takes all kinds to make the world go round, right? Who says we all have to like the same thing? Give the game a shot anyway, you might just have a good time regardless. Till the next update, stay cool everybody!

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Hey, I should be the one thanking you! Hearing the honest opinions of as many players as possible helps me tremendously. I am rapidly approaching the endgame of the main story in development, and just finished one of the major sidequests, so things are going quite well. I think you'll be pleased with the end result.
author=WheelmanZero
WARNING:The following response is hilariously spoileriffic.

Pfft, you call that critical? The angry video game nerd would scoff at such a thing! Thanks for the additional feedback Berry, I'll address everything as best I can.

Ragnarok is pretty much designed to be a very simple villain whose motivation comes from his general perception of the world. His "final boss" speech in the intro is meant to articulate the fact that through his eyes, the correct state of the world is to be covered in darkness, while light is an anomaly that needs to be destroyed. Not a very deep character, I know, but trust me, there are plenty of other villains in the game who have deeper motivations for their actions.


Lianna's reasons for living are not only the primal fear of death that generally grips human beings, but her anger over losing her family. As noted later in the story, Pandora considers giving up and killing herself a way of surrendering to the wishes of the world she hates. We all know villains tend to be sore losers, heh heh. Later on in the story, Pandora does show signs of mental trauma, but that's all I can say for now.

The scene where Lianna's mother explains the history of the world is meant to cement the fact that people generally fear dark mages because they know they have the potential to summon Ragnarok, hence the hatred. I felt that the angry mob attempting to kill Lianna was enough of a demonstration of the persecution of dark mages, and that another scene of a similar nature would've been redundant.

Both Draconus and Lanith have backstories rehashed in optional, unlockable cutscenes, showing how each of them first encountered Pandora and became her allies. Considering how many backstories I'm telling, I'm surprised I didn't give the shopkeepers their own.

The initial battle at the start of the game is designed to be the final boss battle of a typical rpg, hence the genericness. Neither Ragnarok nor the heroes are designed to be attached to at all. The heroes do their thing, then are never seen again due to the 200 year time jump. There are bits and pieces of their past unlocked through cutscenes later on in the game, but mostly the player is never meant to care about whether they live or die.

The battles are meant to be the meat of the game, designed to hold the player's interest through custom animations, moving battlebacks, sound effects, and the summon mechanic to add a little variation. I wanted the player to actually look forward to fighting, as it is what you generally spend the most time doing in an rpg. I personally prefer random battles to touch encounters, because the latter actually trains me to dodge enemies and avoid fighting, not to mention enemy sprites tend to clutter up a map. There's a script in the game that prevents encounters from popping up every 3 steps, so the encounter rate won't be all that abusive. To phrase it more briefly, the battles are tailored to my personal tastes.

I was actually worried that having so many trainable summons in the game would make it too grindy, so I designed a rare candy-like item that grants exp to the summon currently in the party. The item can be either purchased or won through a certain event, so it should help take the edge off of summon training while adding more value to gold. The exp curve should prevent players from making any one summon too OP, as the item grants 300xp a pop.

As for the roles of the summons in the demo, Draconus was meant to be the area of effect attacker, Lanith is a gimmicky psudo-white mage, and Chimera is the physical heavy-hitter. I tried to give each summon their own gimmick to keep things interesting, but from a technical standpoint, you don't have to recruit a single optional summon to beat this game. Recruiting summons and having them learn new attacks is meant to be fun, but not mandatory, and some of the summons do have similar functions.

And now for the giant pink elephant in the room; the intro length. I honestly cannot think of a way around it that wouldn't involve me butchering Pandora's backstory and diminishing its emotional impact. The initial battle with Ragnarok is meant to provide some stimulating interactivity for the player, while the cutscenes are meant to lay the setting, draw them into the story and get them to understand Pandora's motivations. The intro is by far the longest string of cutscenes in the game, but isn't mandatory, so if the player wants to get to the nitty gritty, they can reboot the game and choose to skip it. F7 also skips through dialogue, so the player is never required to sit through any one cutscene.

Well, I hope I addressed everything adequately, and it only took me 70 paragraphs! Everyone's motivations and character will be flushed out throughout the course of the story. Except Ragnarok, that guy's just a jerk. Thanks again for both your time and feedback, and I hope to hear from you again once the completed version is up and running!


Hah. I mentioned that I wasn't being too critical. But I never said I intended to be super critic levels of critical. Me doing that would break the game and sour the experience, as I would complain on a lot of aspects of the game already as is. Especially since this is made by you alone, I presume, this is impressive as it already is.

I mentioned taking a neutral but ultimately subjective stance since I want both positives and negatives to be shown so you can justify and tell us your thoughts on the matter and use it as a framework for future development decisions. I enjoyed the game for what it is regardless and I do look forward to the completed version.

Though I will agree with your points for now and am expecting the full version soon. If Battles are formatted to the way you wish, as you say, then I hope it will be to the level of expectations that you would want. And hopefully, it won't be too annoying.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my really long feedback though. It was honestly pretty long.
WARNING: The following response is hilariously spoileriffic.

Pfft, you call that critical? The angry video game nerd would scoff at such a thing! Thanks for the additional feedback Berry, I'll address everything as best I can.

Ragnarok is pretty much designed to be a very simple villain whose motivation comes from his general perception of the world. His "final boss" speech in the intro is meant to articulate the fact that through his eyes, the correct state of the world is to be covered in darkness, while light is an anomaly that needs to be destroyed. Not a very deep character, I know, but trust me, there are plenty of other villains in the game who have deeper motivations for their actions.


Lianna's reasons for living are not only the primal fear of death that generally grips human beings, but her anger over losing her family. As noted later in the story, Pandora considers giving up and killing herself a way of surrendering to the wishes of the world she hates. We all know villains tend to be sore losers, heh heh. Later on in the story, Pandora does show signs of mental trauma, but that's all I can say for now.

The scene where Lianna's mother explains the history of the world is meant to cement the fact that people generally fear dark mages because they know they have the potential to summon Ragnarok, hence the hatred. I felt that the angry mob attempting to kill Lianna was enough of a demonstration of the persecution of dark mages, and that another scene of a similar nature would've been redundant.

Both Draconus and Lanith have backstories rehashed in optional, unlockable cutscenes, showing how each of them first encountered Pandora and became her allies. Considering how many backstories I'm telling, I'm surprised I didn't give the shopkeepers their own.

The initial battle at the start of the game is designed to be the final boss battle of a typical rpg, hence the genericness. Neither Ragnarok nor the heroes are designed to be attached to at all. The heroes do their thing, then are never seen again due to the 200 year time jump. There are bits and pieces of their past unlocked through cutscenes later on in the game, but mostly the player is never meant to care about whether they live or die.

The battles are meant to be the meat of the game, designed to hold the player's interest through custom animations, moving battlebacks, sound effects, and the summon mechanic to add a little variation. I wanted the player to actually look forward to fighting, as it is what you generally spend the most time doing in an rpg. I personally prefer random battles to touch encounters, because the latter actually trains me to dodge enemies and avoid fighting, not to mention enemy sprites tend to clutter up a map. There's a script in the game that prevents encounters from popping up every 3 steps, so the encounter rate won't be all that abusive. To phrase it more briefly, the battles are tailored to my personal tastes.

I was actually worried that having so many trainable summons in the game would make it too grindy, so I designed a rare candy-like item that grants exp to the summon currently in the party. The item can be either purchased or won through a certain event, so it should help take the edge off of summon training while adding more value to gold. The exp curve should prevent players from making any one summon too OP, as the item grants 300xp a pop.

As for the roles of the summons in the demo, Draconus was meant to be the area of effect attacker, Lanith is a gimmicky psudo-white mage, and Chimera is the physical heavy-hitter. I tried to give each summon their own gimmick to keep things interesting, but from a technical standpoint, you don't have to recruit a single optional summon to beat this game. Recruiting summons and having them learn new attacks is meant to be fun, but not mandatory, and some of the summons do have similar functions.

And now for the giant pink elephant in the room; the intro length. I honestly cannot think of a way around it that wouldn't involve me butchering Pandora's backstory and diminishing its emotional impact. The initial battle with Ragnarok is meant to provide some stimulating interactivity for the player, while the cutscenes are meant to lay the setting, draw them into the story and get them to understand Pandora's motivations. The intro is by far the longest string of cutscenes in the game, but isn't mandatory, so if the player wants to get to the nitty gritty, they can reboot the game and choose to skip it. F7 also skips through dialogue, so the player is never required to sit through any one cutscene.

Well, I hope I addressed everything adequately, and it only took me 70 paragraphs! Everyone's motivations and character will be flushed out throughout the course of the story. Except Ragnarok, that guy's just a jerk. Thanks again for both your time and feedback, and I hope to hear from you again once the completed version is up and running!
Yo jstomp, thanks for your honest opinion, every little bit helps! Yeah, the biggest struggle I've been having with this game is balancing the gameplay with the sheer amount of story there is. The initial woods area could afford to be a few maps longer in order to spread some more gameplay between cutscenes. Dungeon mapping is my biggest weakness and the bane of my existence, and as a result, the dungeon length is pretty abyssmal (see what I did there?). Maybe I'll jump back in there and stretch out Palnea woods a bit more.

I wanted to cement the characters' personalities from the get-go, so unfortunately I can't think of any scenes I could trim without hurting their characterization. Maybe that snippit about saving can be removed. I mean everyone knows to save regularly in an rpg, right? Right. Spacing out the cutscenes a bit more should help as well. Time to conquer my dungeon mapophobia!

Honestly I am taken aback by the positive feedback concerning the visuals and battles. I never expected to receive such high praise. I'm glad you're enjoying the battles, as I consider them the cornerstone of what makes an rpg fun. As you may have noticed, I like flashy attacks and battles with a lot of razzle-dazzle, so there's sure to be plenty of that. Rest assured, there are many more epic bosses to come.

Thanks again for your input, I'll be using it to help sharpen this game into the best it can be!
author=WheelmanZero
Hey, I'm all about feedback bro! Thanks for your time and have fun.


No problem, man! I'm back with some feedback after spending some time with your game last night.

First and foremost, I want to say the writing is great. You do a really good job with story direction and character development. The scenes were incredibly well done and scripted. There were a few typos, but I'm sure you'll have those ironed out by the final release, so no biggie.

Plus, playing as a boss during the prologue was really unique and the opening battle scene was very engaging. Great use of graphics, music, and special effects. The combination was pro. One of the best I've seen in an RPG Maker game to be quite honest and it immediately hooked me. A+ on a job well done there.

But, now what I didn't like.

The biggest drawback was the sheer, crazy amount of story and text. It felt really overwhelming. You should probably cut a lot of it to make the game more of a game, and less of an interactive story. In the first 30 minutes I played, it was like 25 minutes of story and reading text and about 5 minutes of interactivity. Way overkill.

You have a lot of great ideas going here and the battles are amazingly well done with some interesting and fun abilities, but the sheer amount of needless story and having to read ALL that text really started to turn me off.

I understood what Pandora and Raganrok are all about, so I didn't like reading their constant back-and-forth banter. Let us fight in those amazing battles you've crafted and explore more of that great world you created without so much needless repetitive text.

I know you said it's story and cutscene heavy, but it is really overkill if you want my honest opinion as a player. I played about an hour and 45 min of that was scrolling through dialogue.

I'd like to play it more, and read it less. You got some unique ideas going here so definitely a game I'll be keeping an eye on.













Hey, I'm all about feedback bro! Thanks for your time and have fun.
author=WheelmanZero
Thanks for your input buddy!


Hey, WheelmanZero, no problem. :)

Going to give your game demo a try right now! The premise looks fun, I'll let you know any feedback I have if you're interested.


Heh heh, I hear ya jstomp, I hear ya. I knew there'd be a demographic that just wanted to get down to the nitty gritty, so I made the prologue optional.Just one button press, a short conversation to set up your first goal, a battle tutorial and BOOM! You're off to the races. There's also a script in there that skips all the dialogue when F7 is pressed,so you can get right to the point.

The mandatory cutscenes aren't too terribly long (we aren't talking xenogear levels here), and I attempted to make them interesting enough to hold the player's attention, though I suppose that's more a matter of taste. The gallery cutscenes are optional and aren't necessary to understand the storyline at all, so you can just gloss right over them with no problem. Thanks for your input buddy!

EDIT: Hey there BerryRMN, thanks for giving the game a shot! Yeah, I wish I could have peppered Pandora's past into the story in bite sized chunks, but sadly there was no room for it. Many of the major story segments focus on a single character, so I didn't give myself much wiggle room to slip anything else in there. Bah, hindsight!

Blast, now I'm curious as to what you think the ending will be! Oh well, that's just a bit more motivation to get this game done! Hopefully you'll find the journey to the grand finale an enjoyable one. Thanks so much for the feedback guys.
Played it for a bit. Have to say that this game has potential. It definitely looks pretty.

Edit: After replaying the demo once more, I realised that I wasn't being too critical. (As I read and skimped past the early scenes without a second thought.) I won't be too negative, there are good parts in the game. But there are parts where I suddenly realised to face palm at certain situations because of how corny and uhh..(for the lack of a better word) lacking it is.

Spoilers though.

Kind of sad and tragic how the antihero/our main character is developed early on. Though it is really heavy reading through the scenes following up to that build up and set up plot, as jstomp had put it. Since the intro has you read text after text of exposition and the spiel of good vs evil stuff we all know and love(or hate, in some cases) in classic ol' RPG's. Kind of wish we could learn the main character's backstory piece by piece as you beat the "bosses" or something, but I won't complain. And also kinda wish the end part is a little less... Corny. Corny is fine, it's subjective and I personally don't mind corny dialogue at times. But too much of it and you get sick of it. Simple as that.

Addendum: Yeeaaaaahhhhh... After giving the plot a second time readthrough, I realised Ragnarok was generic and cheesy. This is probably intentional or something, but I suppose it might turn off some people. Also, too much exposition dump or banter can easily turn some people off.

I want Draconus to play a more prominent role than the succubus is to be honest. Also, heroes of light are fine and all with their dialogue, but we don't know either side of the story, so it's hard to relate to them early on if you just, in a metaphorical sense, "put the cheese in before the meat and the bun" (and the veggies). In the end, both sides are so cheesy that they lack substance of character in them to make me invested in how they will fail or succeed, because it remains the same either way.

Also, maybe instead of chatting about how pointless the characters are, maybe shed a little bit of insight into Ragnarok's origins and history. We ARE playing as the bad guy here. All we know is that he hates Lumierre. And that's it. It makes him hard for us to kind of root for him or play as him. Unless it gets explained later on how, I feel a little off putting about it.


And it took at least 50 minutes just to get to the meat of the gameplay. If people watched through this the first time, they'd be turned off after 10-15 minutes.


Regardless, you kind of succeeded in hooking me in through Lianna's suffering at least, since her build up and execution is presented pretty well in my eyes, with light comedy peppered down a little bit in the aftermath of the "event" that shaped the main character to what she is now.

However, some sections of her dialogue is a little bit weird. What's her motivation for keeping herself alive when she lost everything she had? Also, what's the village's motivation for hating her? We don't know enough to exactly feel really mad at them for it other than she's a part of the bad ones, we must kill them. The heart is there, it just lack context to make make us feel hatred over them. Showing dark practices being punished as a context would really give some meaning to the villager's actions.

Also, for a girl with very little knowledge and wisdom, you'd think she'd have scarring suicidal thoughts running through her mind since her parents and later her only caring ally died. But that's my two cents on the whole thing. Take it with a grain of salt.

I'll admit that I felt sympathy for "Pandora", especially after what happened to actually build her hatred towards humanity like that. But it lacks the "spice" make me feel past that emotional spectrum.

Also, I didn't talk about the gameplay much more so than the story, but I will admit that the random encounters are annoying. While the mechanics are interesting, I don't like to grind too much. I haven't lost once though, but still. Random encounters are going to be really cumbersome and annoying once you go through step after step trying to just get on with it. Thankfully, a certain
tool helped me make this less annoying, but other people may not be so lucky.

The "train your summon" mechanic is interesting, but some characters (especially the Chimera) feel redundant. They all have different levelling curves, I think, which makes it really hard to train everyone. And in addition, when I know there's going to be more party members, you'd think to add a little more usability than what you have right now. My biggest gripe and worry will be that one character will be redundant like the other and the main characters have more power over the other main summons. Though it being in its early stages, I won't complain all that much. After all, it is only a taste of what's to come.

I will admit your use of sound design is impressive. There are some mapping gripes in Lianna's home. But you said mapping wasn't your strongest suit. So I won't complain on that part at least.

Though from your direction, I feel like the ending is going to be pretty honestly "predictable" with minor twists (at least that's how I feel). I want to hazard a guess as to what the ending is, but I don't want to until I play the full version and see it for myself.

Also, I hope the ending isn't going to be cheesy pompous speech, but in reverse. At least, I hope it's not.


All in all, relatively good mapping (with some gripes) and good early build up so far (at least during Lianna's section) and I look forward to the full version. Also, my apologies if I was a little more critical this time. I realized that I want to remain neutral to this as much as I can, so you can learn from the good and the bad.
Let the player play the story rather than watching or reading it too much. There's nothing worse than a heavy-handed cutscene or immersing someone in lore before they can even play the game.

Games that tend to overdo cutscenes or try to do too much "name dropping" before I can even do anything on my own tend to turn me off.

Long introductions for a story I'm not even involved in yet is a huge factor in me quitting the game before it ever truly begins. A short intro is fine, and often needed to set the story, just don't go overboard with it.

We play games to play games.
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