ANARYU'S PROFILE

Actually it's already gotten 2 full reviews, one by Max McGee and one by Asalieri. :)

@Asalieri (after this post): Yikes. :O

I finished this tonight as well, but I'm not a reviewer so I'll just give my thoughts. I am keeping in mind that this was more of a demo for a greater project. :)

First, things to consider that could really make the next version stand out as something new and unique in this theme:

1. What was processing the whole time? My FPS kept going up and down between ~60 and ~28. Anti-lag script or having a scripter take a look at constant processes to see if it could be simplified or such would be a good idea.

2. Fatigue message could mess up other things, a picture in the corner to track your status and food/water available (all eventable easily) would be much nicer.

3. Less random battles; in both senses! To be precise I mean how you can find yourself in a total win/lose situation just based on what you're fighting, AND that they're random encounters. On-map enemies that would immediately chase after you if they could see you (would make stealth so much cooler) wouldn't have been that much more effort, and you could have created spawn points or something for the rats/wasps, with the tougher monsters being more sparsely placed.

4. Make alternate party members more useful in combat OR support in combat, etc. For example Ai could have been a skill your character uses instead of a person in combat that can die in one hit. :)

5. Skills instead of Stats. Even in Fallout 3 there are many times where I feel the stats themselves were tacked on; they only give your starting skills some boosts and unlock some Perks. I'd change the in-game stats to instead reflect skills and maybe look for a way to add additional ones and concentrate on those.

6. More loot and more uses for it! Lots of weapons that you can repair other weapons with, spare parts to fix/upgrade weapons, etc, would all be great additions.


Okay, enough about that!

This was indeed pretty short, but I enjoyed it all the way through. As a matter of fact the length you have for this little dungeon is what I think you should aim for as a middle ground for your next project; shorter for small areas of exploration and just a tad bit longer for bigger ones (not too much bigger though!)

The loot was cool, but I'd have loved to get more; when you're dungeon crawling loot is great.

The atmosphere was well done, the characterization was way too short to tell if it was good or bad, but that comes with the territory on a game like this.

The mapping was good, it's VX so there's not exactly a LOT you can do (what WAS with the dragon corpse?) but I certainly wouldn't complain about any of it.

It got across the feeling of dungeon crawling fun by cutting lengthy cut-scenes and concentrating on gameplay. The puzzles were well done in the sense that even without much guidance on some I always had a pretty good idea of what to do, so you built in the flow without the obvious flashing signs many revert to.

Overall considering the insanely short amount of time you put into this it's a great start and has a ton of potential to be turned into something much larger!

I heartily recommend anyone to give this a go; it's fun, it's short, it's interesting, there's really no reason NOT to try it!

author=Asalieri link=topic=2587.msg48291#msg48291 date=1228165463
Well, it's Dec 1st, so it would be a good idea if we all decided on a day pretty soon here!

Dunno about everyone else, but a Saturday or Sunday seems ideal, I can't do the 7th.

Just woke up and a new review is here! Being a feature game sure brings the reviews in.

This is great feedback too, and I appreciate the time you put into this.

I would certainly NEVER argue about story being my strong-point, though I like to think I've improved over my earlier attempts, and SkyE's story was a lot of experiments.

One thing I tried was introducing a lot of (what I thought was) original ideas and structure without hammering background into people's faces since I usually have that stuff covered more, but it's usually really dull, boring, and most people don't care anyway. You and Max both seem to agree that there's concepts there that are really empty and need covering, covering history concepts without long speeches is now an item on my "Research how the heck writers do that." list (which is getting bloody long...)

I think perhaps adding vocals to the music was a poor idea, though I really thought it added a lot, but then again I tune out vocals and I treat them like an instrument in my own mind unless it's something where the vocals are what I'm there for (think Weird Al or Aquabats, etc).

The controls are an interesting point I'd like more feedback on, while I did test with a controller 1/3 of the time, I played mostly on my keyboard, especially I'm wondering about the "shift" key bit, did you try to hold it in? I'm wondering if it was too vague and if you were trying to hold the shift key in all the time? Also, Z and X should also be held instead of tapped repeatedly, unless you're mixing a lot of specials in between your stream of main attacks, or am I interpreting your statement there incorrectly?

Regarding writing the more I practice it the more I really feel the actual plot and ideas are more pointless and the more the presentation and characterization are ALL that makes a game great; I worked with a really good writer on the premise for this game, but I do feel that my implementation of the story and dialog was terribly weak.

You probably liked the music that was made by actual musicians and not the stuff we managed to make, this is another thing we'll work more towards as we form some better alliances with musicians. :)

Again, thanks for the review, these really do help me out a lot!

author=Max McGee link=topic=2480.msg47498#msg47498 date=1227833216

What would be awesome is if I had two specific types of close friends who lived in my town... a professional programmer/scripter, and a top notch sprite artist.

Anaryu is basically the former and his god damn wife yaoumei is the latter.

Lucky bastards. (I saw what she charges for commissions, too, marrying her was probably a smart financial move in terms of free art. :P )

Nail on the head, 'cept it's for art and not sprites, but you can make do either way. :)

And it's less rare for a spouse to just 'disappear' and be unresponsive for years than someone you just know online!