CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

I've now beaten it twice and used all character between the two play troughs.

Balance is, as I mentioned, much better than average. The MP/SP pool of the characters are well balanced with the length of the dungeons. You have enough to actually make a good use of the skills, but not enough to just spam the strongest move. The damage algorithm for standard attacks is also more sensible than the default (BTW, your project is unencrypted) and weapons and armor seems to have enough impact to matter, but not enough to break the game. Equipment may be a bit on the weak side actually.

Most classes are well balanced, but I noticed two which seemed considerable weaker than the others. I think I go trough what I observed about every class.

Knight: The second weakest class. His main strength is high defense. This is not so useful when the enemies target someone else. As of now, he can't really use his defense to protect allies. An offensive class can protect allies by simple killing enemies, but a defensive class cannot unless it can redirect attacks towards itself. The knight can also serve as a secondary healer, but secondary healers aren't very useful except for boss battles. You want one healer to conserve resources, but with two healers you cripple your damage output and end up needing more healing as a result on enemies getting more turns, so it doesn't pay. For boss battles, potions will allow just about anyone to be a secondary healer.

One important role the knight does have though is to increase the speed of your designated healer and secondary healer so they are guaranteed to have reactive healing. The battle Mage can do that as well however and I really don't like using characters who are only occasionally useful.

Warrior: Hits hard and can a few times hit even harder. What's not to like about him? I predict he will get better as the game progresses since he can use Combo Attack more often and said skill will never be outdated unlike spells.

Wizard: Glass cannon. Great if you want to grind and also good for dungeon crawling. There are also a few occasions when physical classes have a problem, so she's a great insurance. She does have survivability issues, but that seems to be solved near the end of the demo as Max HP increasers becomes available.

Cleric: Heals and heals well. Unfortunately, he lacks the Speed Up spell which you want to guarantee reactive healing. If you pick him you probably want the Knight or the Battle Mage as well, but having both the Cleric and one of them will harm your damage output to much. Basically, the Knight being below par holds the Cleric back as well.

Thief: The weakest character. None of his abilities are of much use and his damage output is decent, but considerable lower than average. If you pick neither the Knight or the Battle Mage he will have a use as guaranteed reactive healing, but that's it.

Monk: Hits really hard, but has no skills. Great for randoms and still good for bosses. For some reason he can obtain a weapon which robs him of the double attack in exchange of a pitiful bonus, but just stick with the default weapon.

Dark Knight: His standard attack is much weaker than that of the monk and he can only use Combo Attack a few times. However, he is likely to get better as the game progresses since Combo Attack scales well. Also, his Blindness spell is good at disarming a few dangerous situations. Still, during the demo he seems a little weaker than the Monk overall.

Battle Mage: Has healing and Speed Up in one package. He also has a Blindness and an offensive spell which has occasional uses. A great pick despite sub-par healing.

For the purpose of the demo, I think the best party would be Warrior, Monk, Battle Mage and Wizard. That team should make a short work of random encounters and perform well against bosses too. I'll maybe test it out later.

Edit: I tested it out and that party did indeed pick the game apart.

I start with a placeholder title and then see if something that sounds right turns up when I work with the project. My current project for example is for now just named "Mansion". Unless I abandon my project (a good chance) I expect to figure out a better title as I work with the story since it's the story which will determine what title fits.

post=135018
It depends on how stats affect performance - In normal algorithms the change from 60 -> 61 is less drastic than 30 -> 31. Iin order for it to work you'd probably have to base it on the difference between that stat and their other stats. It's a lot harder to go from 60 to 61 Strength if all of your other stats are 3's and 4's than if they're 30's and 40's.

Just dropping in my $0.02.

True, but in most games I've seen it doesn't work out that way. If your strength is 60 and your intelligence is 10, you're better of to continue raising strength because you simple aren't using intelligence dependent magic at all. For that reason the raise of strength is still more dramatic since even though the effect is minor, minor effect is higher than no effect at all which is what you get by raising intelligence. Lets also take agility as an example. In RMXP, leaving your agility at 3-4 while the enemies are packing 30-40 dexterity means you will eat a load of critical hits. In RMVX there's no such punishment, you never get worse than going after enemies.

Still, how the stats affect performance is very important and a lot of balancing can be done by just designing the stats in a sensible way.

post=134771
Players have to recover lost HP, but they have some choice about when. I've certainly played games where I prioritized an offensive action in-battle to kill an enemy right away and not have to worry about healing the damage they'll do, then healed later (maybe even after battle).
(Or maybe you're playing FFT and you don't have to worry about healing at all if you can just win!)

But it's not like I really disagree with you. Healing MP efficiency is something people have to watch out for.

I worded that poorly. What I meant was that there's little to no risk that the player decides healing isn't MP efficient and therefore just don't do it. The same cannot be said about offensive spells however. For that reason I think that if you can't make them equally MP efficient (hard to do since how MP efficient a skill is can change within the same game depending on circumstances) it's better to stick to the side of offensive spells rather than healing spells since doing so has a greater probability of making the player use both kind of spells.

You are perfectly right about the player having a choice about when to heal. I also think it's a good thing if the player has to think about it a little.