DARKEN'S PROFILE

Commercial games are a pretty normal thing nowadays so I wouldn't think it's a big deal to have one award for it.

I should probably look at some potential misao noms though

Whoa! Thanks for the review! Did not expect to get one for this game since it's so tiny. It was my first Godot game so it was quite difficult to work on it past a certain point. Can't believe it's been 2 years.

@Lookatyou1: Your problem might be that you got the official rmweb RTP and not the unofficial one. The RTP link you posted should have all the files you need to run it, I'm assuming you only just grabbed the harmony.dll file but it helps to grab the rest of the files and just dump them in the RTP folder directly in C:\Program Files (x86)\ASCII\RPG2000\RTP or something.

A very small minority bother with custom battle systems from the ground up for completed games. A lot of them usually show up in the form of test demos or mostly unfinished. The fact of the matter is that the default battle will save you time. More time to make the actual content more time to balance/test etc. RPGs are already hard enough to make so I don't know why you'd be hesistant to take the most obvious shortcut RPG Maker offers.

Turn based games on principle are really about doing damage. Yeah you need to stay alive but the threat doesn't come up often at least not until bosses. Turns are so precious that any turn that isn't doing damage is probably a waste unless it's a boss. Thief and White Mage are both the same "uhhh I got to their turn but there's nothing crucial for them to do"

I personally love tense boss fights where half your party is wiped and the only way to keep up is to spam life full heal spells. It never quite gets old for me even though the flowchart is quite linear. Yet outside of bosses its a different story.

Recovery Items Only Work Outside of Battle Pretty self explanatory but basically prevents every character from being a glorified healer. In FF1 of all games its actually a waste to use restoratives in battle. Most of the healing is done in the menu, but it's one of those weird things where the chance to land a critical strike outweighs maybe living an extra turn.

Make Filler Battles Matter If you don't put on a defense buff, you die. If you take more than 2 hits, you die. This can be problematic if there exists a playstyle without a white mage, but in that case you just make it so doing the optimal damage is its own way of healing (if you don't kill this thing in 2 turns you die). This sounds like "HARDER" difficulty but just idk make it so the player can replay the last battle. Making things matter more is often why difficulty can be necessary (however subjective that may be). A lot of filler battles aren't meant to be grueling chess games though, and I think a lot of people inspired by SMT often forget this. So uh drawbacks for sure.

Provide Armor, not health It's time to play the game everybody loves: stealing a mechanic from Slay The Spire!!! Going into uh, inventing a brand new mechanic to solve a class territory. In this case another problem is when everyones at full health and its the first turn of the battle. Get rid of healing and have a spell that provides armor that can stack, but its flat damage. Meaning it becomes more about preventing future damage in a concise understandable way. A lot of defense buffs in RPGs are very vague, you see the resulting damage and I SUPPOSE they would have taken more damage, but I think taking a page out of slay the spire means communicating preemptive benefits better. (Theres a number with the shield icon behind it and it tells you how much damage is avoided) You could also keep heals and just factor this into overhealing.

Give them a healing tailored debuff smack

If a white mage uses a normal attack, just have them debuff an enemy. To make it more flavorful make it so some enemies heal and have the debuff cancel all healing. If there's no white mage in the party, make it so having more damage kinda cancels out the enemy healing but gee it really would be nice to have a healing specialist prevent heals. Hopefully there's a dilemma of weighing the risks of preventing the enemies heals vs preventing party damage! Biggest problem is that when enemies heal it SUCKS and I generally find it demotivating, but having that remedied by a healer I think can add to something.

Burst vs Consistency

But I'm also reminded of FF14. Different genre and not turn based but hear me out. The hardest healer in FF14 imo is the Scholar, the specialty is that they can prevent a lot of burst damage but it requires more knowledge of the raid in question. The default white mage has the chunkiest heals but is mostly reactive and this is better for going into a boss blind but worse if you use your big heals at the wrong moments.

This isn't so much of a solution than a way to think about what is the player skill being tested when using a healer. When damaging in turn based RPGs hopefully the game has some kind of target priority / optimal damage spread. But healing is usually very straight forward whack a mole. Enforcing and back and forth between preemptive healing and reactive healing might make white mages more interesting which probably involves using my above solution and factoring in heals more.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and making heals more interesting

Again, different genre, completely action based, multuplayer etc. But the best magic casting system and healing system is in FFCC bar none. Every spell in the game is an AOE circle that has to be manually placed by the player, including healing. This means that getting healed yourself requires positioning but also actually communicating with your healer. Healing effectiveness increases if multiple players get in the circle, but enemies also have big damage aoe circles so there's tons of dynamics going on. What's even more cool is when you die you can still move around as a ghost, so an essential life spell placement means whether or not the revived player is going to die AGAIN in an unfortunate boss AOE. Not only that but the healer also has an offensive role with the holy spell, Holy can only be cast if two players combine any elemental offensive spell fire/blizzard/whatever with the life spell, it's expensive but is really powerful and can hit a particular important ghost boss. Again the same positioning principle applies but the healer is working together with the offensive caster.

I don't know how you can incorporate action co-op mechanics into a pure singleplayer turn based affair but I guess the main takeaway is more synergy (tbh I just wanted to gush about FFCC and the most fun I had as a healer in any game). Fighter goes into a guard state? Well maybe that blocks heals hilariously but turns into armor instead. Black mage uses a fire spell? well maybe the normally undead only holy spell being used on the same enemy combines with it to do even more damage. Maybe there's some weird thing to do with back rows and positioning that makes heals more interesting. IDK! Something to wonder about.