I'm glad to hear you're liking it so far. I'm happy for anyone who's dipped into it so far to let me know what they think. Especially since I'm working on this solo, any sort of feedback helps.

I can't guarantee a perfectly regular schedule for the updates from this point on, since it's going to depend on factors like how open-ended the events and gameplay are at various points, but I'm aiming for frequent content updates from this point forward, probably usually on about the time scale that this last update was made over. The plot of the game is loosely organized into three episodes, as stated in the game info, but I'm not planning to transition at any point to releasing the game in whole-episode chunks. I want to keep the latest state of the game available to players over time.

Edit: Okay, I responded before you edited your post, so I didn't see the issues you were facing the first time around. For any specific spelling or grammar mistakes, feel free to let me know here or by PM. For issues with the game crashing, I'm not sure what's causing that in your gameplay, because the game definitely works during my playtesting, but the first thing I'd want to check on is whether you have the RPMaker VX Ace RTP installed. I would actually expect the game not to run at all for someone who doesn't already have it, since it's not included with the game file, but the beginning maps are built around non-RTP-based tilesets. If you can let me know what sort of error message you're getting, it might help me resolve whatever sort of issue you're having.

Okay, I think I've worked out the problem with the guild building, which ought to be easy to fix. I'm not sure what could be causing the issue with the armory, so I'm going to have to try downloading and playtesting the game with a different computer to do some additional troubleshooting. I'd rather take care of all the issues at once rather than update it piecemeal while there are still major bugs in it.

I'm temporarily restricting the availability of the download until I've resolved this issue, since it also occurs on the other computer I tried testing it on. It's a bit more difficult to implement a fix when I can't force the error on my own computer to see where the source is, but I'll try to have a working replacement up soon.

A few. The imps will go down much faster if you use Ashe's wind magic. The wolves are vulnerable to fire magic; not super vulnerable, but they have an elevated chance of receiving the "panic" status if they're hit with it. The Forest Hulk is even more so, when you fight it. Especially when there are more enemies than party members, Long Thrust is useful when you have the TP for it, since it applies the Defend state (in addition to reducing damage, Defend also dramatically cuts your chances of being stunned, which the wolves can inflict, or disoriented.) Try not to spread your fire too thin attacking too many different enemies with different characters, since the longer you take to bring individual enemies down, the more damage your party members will take. When he's in the party, James' Poison spell is worth using, since it attacks three random enemies, so it'll dish out more damage than his other options. Don't worry too much about depleting his MP quickly. When you have Will in your party and you're facing a battle which is likely to last several turns, it's worth taking a turn to have him use his Fire Weapon skill, since it'll increase his damage output against the wolves or the Forest Hulk significantly.

Once you get to a gap in the battles, definitely take the chance to heal your party members. Better to use healing spells out of battle here, since the sequence isn't so long that running out of MP is a major danger, but in battle, be prepared to use healing items if you need them.

How much you've leveled up and to what extent you've upgraded your party members' equipment makes a substantial difference at this point. If your party is as strong as it's possible to be by this point, it's entirely practical to finish this sequence without using any healing items at all.

Although you can't grind for unlimited money, as long as you have access to the Guardian outpost, you still have the option to replenish your healing items. If you're out of Styptics, and can't afford to buy more, you can take five from the shelf at the Palk outpost. You can do this an unlimited number of times as long as you use them up first, but you can't stockpile them. This is also one reason your healing items don't have a sell price; if you could sell them back to the store, you'd be able to exploit the Guardian guild's supply for unlimited money.

I'm sure something is going to slip through eventually.

Technically, it's possible to exploit the free healing you can get at the Guardian outpost to get unlimited experience grinding on encounters on the world map around Palk. The healing isn't free until you can't afford the inn or healing items though, and the encounter rate and difficulty are low, so it would be very, very slow.

Honestly, if it weren't my own game and I weren't worried about getting an unrepresentative experience of the challenge players would be getting in combat, I'd probably be doing the same thing.

I tend to be the same way. But if I designed a game based around my own inclinations, I'd probably wreck the difficulty curve.

So, instead of letting the player feel powerful by letting them grind indefinitely and kick the asses of enemies that are supposed to be challenging, my approach is to give the player the chance to feel powerful by keeping the story grounded with a sense of how difficult and dangerous the protagonists' work is for ordinary people. If the player struggles against a Forest Hulk, they can still remember how dangerous imps are to ordinary civilians.

I also want to give players the opportunity to feel rich by making them poor!

Lots of video games let the player gradually accumulate huge amounts of money, so you might eventually get the sense that "at this point, realistically, my characters are probably pretty wealthy." But usually the narrative doesn't really do much if anything to establish this, and the gameplay doesn't highlight it because you've very likely spent the entire game always having as much money as you needed for all the stuff you wanted as it became available. Besides which, NPC shopkeepers can buy unlimited quantities of stuff from you and always have enough cash on hand to pay out, which takes away from the sense that that quantity of money means much of anything.

So, I think that if you want to give players a sense of their characters being wealthy, it helps to first establish a contrast where they get used to scarcity being the norm, so that later on, they can notice its absence.

I'm flattered if you think so. I'm trying to at least keep the mapping in the realms of the not-crappy (should get some more screenshots to add soon which aren't indoors.) It's one of the harder parts of the game making process for me, but some of my favorite games have mapping which most people would probably only rate as "decent." I'd hope that I can at least do a good enough job with the mapping that it doesn't become a disqualifying factor for potential players.

Deen is accessible from the world map in the vicinity of Palk. It's to the South of Brisylvania.