ERROR'S PROFILE

author=unity
Originally I was going to have you "buy" skills from a shop menu, but that lacked the flexibility I wanted.

I'm curious what the obstacle was. If I had to guess, it would be handling skill prerequisites.

(Context: RM's available customization hooks seem...not well documented. It's not clear to me what's easy, what's hard, and what's impossible.)

author=unity
Yeah, that's an issue with VX Ace, I'm hoping newer makers are better about it (I'm working with MZ now, and as the default settings for controllers work for me, I haven't looked into rebinding yet).

I have MZ (and also Ace, but I only ever used it to mine LA). I looked at MZ's input code a while back, and I *think* I saw a way to do interactive rebinding, but I haven't tried it.

author=unity
Yeah, I was really happy with {the enemy types} when I came up with it, and some people take to it like a duck to water, but others don't, and now I can see that maybe it wasn't as elegant of an idea as I thought it was initially. Not sure how I can modify it to be better for a possible future WU 2 or spin-off, but I'll keep my thinking cap on.

(epistemic status: talking out my ass) Such systems should either follow well-defined rules (e.g. opposites on an element wheel), or match everyday intuitions; otherwise, they come across as arbitrary. WaU's system looks like it's trying to take the latter approach, with mixed success. Examples: it makes intuitive sense that armored or spectral targets are resistant to physical skills, that nightmares are resistant to terror, or that machines are resistant to terror and sorrow. It's less clear why the Mystic type is weak to sorrow and resistant to the others (though I can sort-of-see it if I squint), and I can't see an underlying theory in the Oddity resistances at all.

Mileage probably varies a lot by play style. I care a lot about fair-play-insight mechanics because a lot of my enjoyment comes from learning the rules well enough to exploit them.

(on editing, I remembered that in the early game I had additional issues memorizing the icons themselves. A label or context-help button (a-la select in FFT) might have closed the gap)

author=unity

author=Error
Zlonyth's private rooms and commentary were awesome and I always looked forward to finding them.

I'm glad! :DDD Had a lot of fun with Zlonyth! Huge thanks to Sooz for how Zlonyth talks, I could never have pulled that off without her!

Thanks, Sooz! :-)

I always had the impression LA was close to a one-woman show. Is WaU different in that respect, or was I wrong to begin with? Makes me feel a little bad for not crediting more people in AD's author's notes.

author=unity
I agree with a lot of what you said in your Balance section. Tho I am curious as to why you decided not to use stat-boosters, as I had hoped they would allow players to tweak characters a bit, such as allowing certain characters to have expanded PSI point pools and adjust physical and psychic damage.

It was just a well-defined way to increase the difficulty without fundamentally changing the game. If I had run into something I couldn't beat without them, I would have relaxed the restriction.

(NB: that does not necessarily mean Hard is too easy. I'm probably not a good metric.)

If there's one thing I took from making and balancing battles in this game, it's that I don't think I want to tie skills to items like this in future games. It makes it way too hard to balance and like you said, Miriam's bullets are often just "battle shorteners."

I notice that Dottie's eldritch spell was limited in a different way, but worked out fine. The difference seems to be that there was an opportunity cost for *not* using Eldritch Eye. If there were a similar cost to not spending bullets and pieces (a capacity cap, maybe?), spending them might feel like a better option.

I did smile at the line about an unspent resource being equivalent to an unearned resource. On some level I knew I was failing to learn the lesson.

(hidden for spoilers, not just for WaU but also classic FF)

author=unity

Show

As for the one mystery character you mentioned, I in fact did not allow you to save them through any means. In the future I think it *would* be fun to allow you to save a character like that through a very esoteric method, so I'll keep that in mind for future projects.

author=unity
Also they are exactly who you think they are, tho I did poorly by giving them so little focus in the story before they joined the party. Again, something I hope I can improve on in future games.

Oh, I don't know about that. It felt like genius bonus to me. Or at least it made me feel like a genius for spotting it.

author=unity
If you want a hint...

Mrgh. You might want to move that under hide tags; I didn't want that much of a hint. -_- But I was already looking in more-or-less the right place, so not much harm done.

author=unity
If you ever decide to do a second playthrough, you can call up the password screen to input the code to auto-translate the languages by pressing Q as the screen scrolls up to Dottie's house.

You were a step ahead of you; one of the guys next to the machine says as much. :-P

author=unity
Thanks again for all of your thoughts, it was an enjoyable read! :DDDDD And I'm so glad you ended up playing the game!

I've been doing a lot of brainstorming for an eventual Luxaren Allure 2. No promises yet, but if I can figure out the plot and systems, that may be my next big project! Here's hoping.

You're welcome. It's nice to be appreciated. :-) And whenever LA2 is in the cards, I'll jump on it with both feet.

On another note, back when I wrote AD, you offered to give me feedback if I ever dove into RPGMaker. Is that offer still open? I have a project in mind for the near future (if I can solve a certain structural issue with my intended plot), so I might want to take you up on it soon.

.

So apparently I wrote "a day or two" when I meant "a week or two". That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

So! Weird and unfortunate things are happening, and lots of people are dead. Woo!

I loved it, but didn't know if I would going in. Urban horror isn't my usual genre, and I've never liked front-view Earthbound-style battles as much as side-view FF-style battles, and a save-the-child plot hook is...not an element for which the target audience includes me.

But I do love things that are dark as hell, and there were more than enough horrible things happening to keep my attention, and at some point I started to capital-C Care. Unfortunately I don't remember exactly when, which is a shame because that would probably be useful information.

I waited way too long to write up thoughts, so I'll just have to see what I can remember. Pardon the giant wall of text. I was too determined to write *something* to take the time to write a smaller one.

Mechanics:

The skill system was simplistic on its face, but presented interesting and meaningful choices, which is exactly what a skill system should do. It's a bit awkward to use, but I'm guessing "walk around an abstract map to pick out skills" was a workaround for RPGMaker limitations. It worked well enough and I hope you don't mind if I consider stealing it.

There are far too many quality-of-life details to list them all, but they were much appreciated. I'm thinking of things like indicating examinable objects (a feature I remembered from LA), providing maps, the boss warning (no fear of missing missables!), item descriptions that state what can be safely sold (ditto!), recording tutorial information as items for later perusal (a workaround for no in-engine help?), notes about how to rebind the controls, skill descriptions that are actually useful... I'm forgetting a whole host of things, but you've obviously thought hard about routine RPG annoyances and endeavoured to fix them.

(I do wish there was a way to *interactively* rebind the controls, so I don't have to experimentally figure out which button on my pad corresponds to RPGM's notion of "A" or the game's notion of selection/cancel. But that's a gripe with RPGM, not WaU)

Replacing the traditional "fight" command with a more interesting set of basic skills was a good move. So was making areas "empty out" so players who like to search thoroughly aren't constantly frustrated; the usual method (encounter-preventing equipment) has issues.

While there were a few spells I didn't get much use out of, there was no obsolescence. Spell selection was limited, but almost everything stayed useful. The spell design and differentiation feels more like Lunar than Final Fantasy (in a good way).

I'm not sold on the arrangement of enemy types and weaknesses. It's not *bad*, and it's certainly something new, but it usually wasn't obvious why type A had weakness B. Some of them made sense, others didn't, and I couldn't deduce them, only memorize them. Rather than memorize them or keep checking the in-battle help text, I mostly just used area spells to probe weaknesses on the fly.

I remember a number of puzzles having relatively subtle clues. I appreciated it but can't remember what they were now.

Zlonyth's private rooms and commentary were awesome and I always looked forward to finding them.

Balance:

I played on the highest difficulty with a couple of additional handicaps: No selling items and no permanent-stat-boosters. My perception of balance is colored accordingly.

Mooks remained dangerous-but-beatable throughout the game, which IMO is the most important balancing act. This section is full of nitpicks, but they're exactly that -- nitpicks.

Opportunities to heal felt few and far between, especially in the early game. I am not sure if this is a plus or minus; it was frustrating, but it also turned health and psi point management into an interesting optimization problem, at least until Lamar joined (and psi management stayed so until near the end of the game).

Lumin Flash seems too powerful relative to Alicia's other skills, its cost, and the stage of the game when you get it. She opened with it in nearly every battle, all through the game. I'm not exactly *complaining*, it preserved my ass excellently, but maybe it should have been more expensive or further down the skill tree.

Scourge Rot was the majority of my damage for a long time. Eventually monster HP outpaced it, though, to the point that I stopped bothering. So, oddly, it was too strong early on and too weak in the endgame.

Miriam's bullets seemed too rare relative to their worth, and (most of) her spells too expensive. For much of the game, I had trouble finding something for her to do after blinding (and later corroding) everything. Her other options often didn't seem worth the resource expenditure.

I'm not sure what the Right Thing would be here. Maybe expanded bullet effects. As-is, they only end fights faster, they don't help control the battle or otherwise get you out of trouble. Their rarity makes them impractical to combo with Overdrive, and maybe Overdrive itself should have been cheaper. Its opportunity cost is high at the beginning of a fight (where it competes with applying blind and acid one turn earlier), and it takes three turns to turn a "damage profit", and by then you've spent ~100 out of ~150 MP.

Dottie's chess pieces also seemed unusably rare until endgame, but in her case it's justifiable because their benefits are gamechangers.

The Princess area of the final dungeon was *exactly* as hard as it should be. Those damn Fiendish Minds stopped me dead just as I started to think things were getting too easy. :-P

Story:

Hidden for spoilers:


Misc:

As with LA, I got that last-dungeon feeling well before the actual last dungeon (specifically at the temple, IIRC). I didn't get the same sense of gruelling-ness, though, possibly because WaU mostly doesn't have "towns" in the traditional sense to break up segments, so I didn't feel their absence as much. I don't know if that decision was inspired by anything in particular, but I mentally mapped it to SMT3, which was the same way.

"A resource never used is the same as a resource never earned." Spoken like someone who's saved way more elixirs over the years than they should have. :-P

The school "dungeon" stuck out to me. It felt too long, but it was magnificently creepy. Grade schools creep me out to begin with, so I was primed for it. The Fool's Key areas (did they have a name?) also got progressively creepier throughout the game and it was great.

I've yet to find the daughter's heart in the final dungeon. I found the clue regarding its hiding place, and I found the door that I think it's behind, but I lack the key and haven't been able to find it.

I've heard nothing about the key from any of the NPCs I can reach. It may be in Makyo, which I haven't explored much yet. I'm debating whether, before putting a lot of time into it, I should replay the game with the language decoding on. It might contain things that would be useful to know.

Speaking of which, the decodable expanse languages. I *love* the concept (which is unlikely to surprise you, after AD), but never actually tried to decode them. The trouble was that I had no good way to transcribe them for later analysis. I can't copy-paste out of the game; and the letters don't resemble English ones so I can't type them into another window; and I have arthritis, so physically writing them down would be slow and painful. Nevertheless, I wanted to know what they said (I kept expecting them to contain warnings that the evocations were about to betray me, or something), and I'll play again to find out now that I can decode them. I'm not sure what to expect on the scale between "interesting but nonessential material" and "complete reinterpretation of events," but I look forward to finding out.

In retrospect, I should have taken screenshots whenever Expanse text came up; that would have worked just fine for transcription, and I'm pretty sure the language itself is normal English text with a custom font. I puzzled out a few lines along the way just eyeballing it. Oh well, too late now.

{edit: and now that I've reminded myself of custom fonts, I remember noticing that the designs on some of the walls in Daybreak look suspiciously like someone speaking in hands...}

---

And, wow. I wasn't expecting to write a thousand words when I started typing, but I'm guessing you won't mind. I'm sure I had more to say, but at least for the moment it's lost in the last two months of memory. This will do for now.

Enjoyment is a thing that happened. I also just did a double take watching the credits. :-P

I have a cold and don't feel up for analysis, so for now I'll just say that I finished it and loved it. More later.

(edit: my magic number was 74. I don't know out of how many, but I know I'm missing a few things.)

Hey, I know this is a month late, but: Thank you for the shoutout.

I usually wait for stuff to be finished before playing it, but I might make an exception for Date Knights if it's going to be a while otherwise.

...people who primarily wanted yuri content had to power through all the exploring and battling just to get to content they wanted. Some even cheated to get there

My first, somewhat-uncharitable thought is that people who don't enjoy exploring and battling aren't the target audience for an RPG. But if you want to support them anyway, maybe add a "story only" difficulty setting, that removes all the battles except bosses. I certainly appreciated that the setting was there, and it seems as good a solution as any.

(I'll admit to some self-interest here. I *like* the combat, it was one of the high points of LA, I'd be disappointed if it were de-emphasized next time around. :-P)

author=Unity
Actually, I started making a game about just that, a love triangle that would culminate with the three characters forming a relationship, set in a Dragon Quest-like world where the three of them are servants of that world's goddess. It's on hold for right now, as I'm struggling to write the start of a polyamorous relationship in a way that I find satisfactory

I just thought of a way you could cheat this, depending on what else is going on in your plot. If it's specifically the start of the relationship that you're having trouble writing, then...skip it. Make them already together when the story starts.

(granted, if the mutually-falling-in-love thing *is* the plot, obviously that doesn't work. :-P)