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 ...

Search

Filter

20180226_131446.gif

That looks really cool; neat idea. I'm not sure if you're looking for feedback on the HUD at all, but the black-outlined letters for 'state' are hard to read. Is that intentional?

Screenshot_menu.png

If you want a hand scripting it, let me know!

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.

Akiva__Leigh.png

Looking super sweet, as usual! I do love the way you do your grass; looks realistic while still being painterly.

One small suggestion for the armour: the right side (their left) of the chestplate looks slightly too dark at the top inside the swirl. Hopefully that makes sense.

Aaaand ... another demo update?

author=Liberty
I.. have an issue where for some reason I can't download from Dropbox reliably. Each time I try to download it just hangs and the download breaks, for lack of a better word. Mediafire is another good hosting site, and a lot more reliable too.

I made a mirror download; hopefully this one works for you.

All Quiet on the Western Blog

Sounds like a really interesting concoction of ideas; can't wait to see what it looks like!

Aaaand ... another demo update?

It sounded like such a great idea, and I was like, "yeah, I'll only make four areas to reduce the work" and now I'm kinda kicking myself, but hopefully it looks cool! Animated water is definitely quite a bit of work, but I think it's worth it ... if you have a few hours to spare, haha.

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.