AMOONLESSNIGHT'S PROFILE

Hi all, I'm A-Moonless-Night, but you can call me Shannyn.

The name 'A Moonless Night' comes from the title of a story my cousin and I wrote together when we were about fifteen. It was about two cousins getting lost in the woods on the night of a full moon. Werewolf shenanigans ensued. No idea where an actual moonless night factored into the equation though. Well, the name stuck and it has been my username for every website I've frequented for the last five or six years.

About me? Well, I'm from little old Godzone in the southern hemisphere. I love reading and writing, with a particular love for Stephen King novels and poetry. I'm an avid proofreader - seriously, I love it. I foam at the mouth about it.

I don't like MMORPGs or first-person shooters. I particularly love platformers (especially Metroidvanias), RPGs, action games and point-and-click adventures. Some of my favourite games include Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap, the Tenchu series, Suikoden I and II, the Chzo Mythos (aka the John Defoe Quadrilogy), Minecraft, Age Of Empires, An Untitled Story and the Pokemon series.
Vermilion
One woman's quest to find her brother whilst an uprising is on the horizon ...

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Werewolf

I'm glad I inspired you! I ended up taking the game down because I really wanted to rework it, but just never got a chance to (because of working on my main game).

Villnoire

*blush* Thanks man! I'm always surprised when people have heard of Vermilion, haha. Totally get the whole labour of love, thing; that's where I'm coming from, too.

I've been secretly updating the demo every week or so

Ah, that'll be why! I think I downloaded it as soon as it came out and just hadn't gotten a chance to play it yet.

You can go back to Lukas' house and rest for free if you interact with his bed.

Doh. I don't know why I didn't try that. I usually interact with EVERYTHING. I honestly wouldn't worry about bumping up the treasure chests or anything—if players know about the bed, then I think that's enough.

Hey, I understand how labour-intensive those event/picture-based systems can be! I wouldn't even worry about it. Major props to you for those systems, btw. I said it before, but they're super tight. I can only imagine the nightmare of getting them set up.

Been a while since I made anything with RM2k3, but I never realised that. Huh.

Villnoire

Just wanted to say that I finished the demo this morning, and it was such a treat! The maps are all very well done, and the custom menus have the sort of polish that you don't usually see in an RM2K game (especially considering they're all picture-based). Of particular note was the chests mechanic: the little item popping up, the little strip of text at the bottom, plus the note saying how many chests you'd discovered in the area—all super neat.

I felt like I was playing an RPG from the glory days of yore. You can really tell that you've put a lot of love and care into this and I'm really looking forward to playing more.

My only gripes (well, not gripes exactly):

1. The Quizzer didn't give me the Druid Badge, although it said he did. :(

2. Lukas's cape pokes out over some tiles, mainly the corner pieces of the cave top and tree top. It's not a biggie, but it's a little immersion-breaking.

3. The fights in the forest were a little bit rough towards the end there. I'm all about that grinding life, but I felt like I couldn't grind in the forest because I ran out of healing potions. I mean, not everyone plays games the same way, and grinding obviously isn't integral to the game, but I thought I'd mention it. I wish there was some kind of 'tent' mechanic at the save points a la FFVI, although it wasn't a problem in the later dungeons.

4. The little menu that pops up when you step on the save point is choice, but I kept getting confused and thinking it was the menu and pressing X to get out of it ... which would then bring up the menu. Perhaps shift it to the right side of the screen?

5. Vivian's revive skills heal the target, even if they aren't knocked out. Not sure if that's intentional or not.

Vermilion

author=kumada
-A marigold potion 1 costs 7 obols to buy, 4 to sell, and 2 to craft. This means you can generate a lot of cash by melting your herbs into potions and your potions into obols. I'm at 105 obols in the first town without doing any grinding. Granted, I had to melt nearly all of my potions for it, but it let me get heavy cuirass 1 and sabre 3 basically out of the starting gate. Don't need heals if you can't take damage.

-It occurs to me that the above plus herbs constantly spawning could trivialize money if people just camp for herbs.

I think I increased the cost for the potions and then forgot to change the cost for making potions, oops. Thanks! I'll make the herbs spawn less often as well.

author=kumada
-Your town design is really top-notch. Even little things, like the house where everyone has been traumatized by a bandit attack, are really striking.

-Adorable little rabbits I will chase you!

I'm kind of sad there's no reward for catching up to these, since I do it every time I see one.

Naw, thanks! Yeah, I did consider doing something cute with the rabbits ...

author=kumada
-Enemies don't spawn in Koruna Pass/Koruna Pass Cave. Is this intentional?

-oh god walkspeed in dungeons is so slow

-Floating box puzzle, top right rock has a passability glitch on the right side.

-Top middle rock has a passability glitch to the north of it.

-Hey I found a battle! I'd been exploring the pass/caves for about ten minutes without encountering one. I think the encounter rate got screwed up here during the global encounter rate change.

-At a defense of 33, bats deal 1 damage to me on all attacks.

-Okay, encounter rate seems to pick up a bit once you're deep enough in, around Koruna Pass Cave 5.

Cool, I'll up the encounter rate on some of those maps. The encounter rate is a random number between a and b, so I think I've just made those too far apart.

I'll look into those passability glitches as well. Are they both on the same map, the one with the floating puzzle?

Cool, good to know about the bats. I'll see what I can do. Balancing is hard, haha.

author=kumada
-In Mountain Beast's fight, I feel like there should be some signs that it's getting anxious/ready to run. Otherwise it's easy to feel like you just went in with the wrong shards equipped, load, and try again.

Not quite sure what you mean; did you reload and fight it again after it fled?

author=kumada
-Climbing a ladder after getting the warning that an encounter's about to happen seems to prevent that encounter from happening.

Yeah, ladders are an encounter-free zone. I think it gives you a couple of steps' respite and then the encounter should pop up again.

author=kumada
-Genbu are pretty frustrating. Only magic really hurts them, and even then it does hardly any damage. Maybe they have an elemental weakness, but not being able to switch shards mid-battle makes that challenging to find.

They don't have any elemental weakness. You can check by hovering over them during the selection screen and pressing Shift. Best to just run until you get someone with a heavy weapon.

author=kumada
-I wish there were more options for increasing your damage output. As is, even if I optimize for it, combat is still super slow.

I'm going to overhaul the skills for the next release (whenever that may be) and look into giving each character a few more skills from the get-go.

author=kumada
-Okay, I'm stuck outside the sealed door. I've turned on all four obelisks. No idea what to do from there.

There is a sign by the door that gives you a hint.
The sign lists four things that provide light (which correlate to the position of the pillars). One of those things does not generate its own light.

Vermilion

author=kumada
More feedback!

-Resource scarcity is really pronounced when you hit the first town, but that's good. It makes all the things you might want to buy seem that more appealing/worth working for.

Ooh yay, I was hoping you were still playing! Thanks for your feedback. Yeah, I was aiming for resource scarcity, think I've got a good balance this time.

author=kumada
-"Did you know that the princess in Maeden is transgender?" transgender as a word feels a little weird for the character to say. Transgender as an English word feels a bit academic-y and new, and in contrast Vermillion's society feels like it has been able to openly talk about transgender for a long time. I'm not sure what to suggest here, but I feel like either they'd have their own common word for transgender (trueform or something like that?) or they wouldn't really find it remarkable enough to gossip about (although the princess' wardrobe, or her hair, or her retainers would definitely still be gossip fodder). Take everything here with a huge grain of salt, since I'm making this suggestion based on world-feel, not actual lore, and transgender might be a new thing for the setting or I might have gotten something else totally wrong.

Yeah, I did consider having a different word for transgender, but one of my trans friends suggested that having the real word would be better. I was trying to find a balance between making it obvious that she is transgender and not dropping it as an aside every few sentences, you know? Hopefully more trans folks play the game and give me feedback about that particular aspect.

Vermilion

author=kumada
-Guarding in general seems to restore a bit too much HP. If the Wyvern spent its whole fight just guarding, I would never be able to bring it below 75% health.

-My saber seems to be the reason I'm not taking much damage. When I swapped to bow during the wyvern fight, I started taking almost reasonable amounts. Still not enough to put me in danger of having to use an item, since guarding is so strong, but the balance felt a lot better.

Cool, thanks. It's only 5% but I'll reduce it to 3% and see if that's a bit better.

The bow reduces your defense, so that could be why. I've increased the attack power of the forest monsters slightly.

author=kumada
-Shortly after entering town, while walking down the street past the weapon shop: Unable to find file Audio/BGS/tm2_river002

I'm pretty sure this is the crash liberty got, and I think I'm on version 1.3


Pretty sure it's in both 1.2 and 1.3, but I'll make a 1.4 shortly.

Thanks for your feedback!

Vermilion

author=Liberty
Got a crash when walking near the weapon shop in the second town. Music file apparently missing. :<

Do you have version 1.3? That should have the missing file.

Vermilion

Oh yeah, forgot about that. Yeah, the rock is something different, as Knightowl said.

I've updated the demo with a fix for the parallaxes not animating, so hopefully that's all good now.

Vermilion

author=kumada
You can move the pillar?! I kept trying to examine it and getting no result, but I guess I must've been walking to the left and breaking the grab every time. I thought it was supposed to display some sort of puzzle hint when you checked it.

As for the forest enemies, yes. I am running into loads of basiliks, but there's also flying enemies which I don't want to waste arrows on, so I use magic on them too.

The item I'm equipping for the percentage luck boost is the Copper Gauntlets. And I'm pretty sure the thing that's trivializing the enemies' attack damage is my Leather Cuirass.

Edit: wait, so is the pillar pushing puzzle unrelated to breaking the rock? I thought that was what the puzzle was supposed to be about, and that the black orbs would be bombs or something?

Yeah, you don't use up arrows in combat, they're just in the field. I'll make that a bit more obvious.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'breaking the rock'?

Vermilion

author=djbeardo
I've been pumped about this game - so happy about the update! :D

Thanks, hope you like it! :)
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