PAD'S PROFILE

Hello, I am the creator of Hell Gates 1 and 2. I am also known under the nickname "Valadurs Erbe". "Valadurs Erbe" is the German subtitle of the game Hell Gates 2. It can be translated with the words "Valadur´s Legacy" or "Valadur´s Heir". This also gives the subtle hint that I am living in Germany.

I also enjoy immensely playing all kinds of games. I prefer games with complex mechanics and relatively fast pace (but my reflexes are not as good as they were, damn age). I tend towards games with medieval or fantasy settings. I also like a good challenge and imaginative worlds to explore.
Hell Gates
ActionRPG inspired by Secret of Mana and Zelda

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The Sequel to Hell Gates is getting an English Translation

Hello everybody,

thank you for your kind words. I will give my best to deliver a great English translation.

I was able to fix the format of the blog post. It all collapses and it forgets all the formatting when I try to embed the trailer in the blog post. When I only put in the link to YouTube, it works. Strange...

@NeverSilent: I will upload the English translation to rpgmaker.net when chapter 1 is fully playable. I am still chewing on the system messages and menus. Hell Gates 2 just has sooo many of them.

By the way, does anyone know where and how to promote a game like Hell Gates 2? People keep telling me that I am silly for not doing more promotion. But I am really not good at this kind of stuff.

The Sequel to Hell Gates is getting an English Translation

Hello you two,

yeah the format doesn´t look right on my browser, either. I checked with my other blog posts to see if I did something wrong here, but all looks well in the "edit mode". I then tried to make a new blog post and rewrite the article, but it still looks like that. I am not sure what is wrong here. I will have to fix it somehow.

Hell Gates Review

After so many years, it was still no problem to remember how to operate the RPG Maker software. I guess it is permanently burned into memory.

Sadly, after so many weeks I was not able to find any person willing to test my game which made me feel disappointed. And suddenly I remembered why I stopped with Hell Gates in the first place: the lack of any kind of response (not even negative).

Anyways, enough of these dark thoughts. I officially released Hell Gates Version 1.14 :) The new special attack is probably the biggest change to the combat in a decade, so my judgement may be clouded whether it is actually a good one. Let´s see how it works out.

Hell Gates Review

So I did a few changes according on your feedback. Changing the special attack was certainly the most experimental as it changes gameplay a lot. I am still doing a bit of testing before releasing it but here is the link: Test Version V1.13

Changelog:

Gameplay
- The special attack was redesigned. You can now move freely during the execution but you as well as the enemies can´t start attacks in that time. Receiving fatal damage in that time span will leave you at 1 health point.
- The first boss encounter was redesigned. It should be a bit easier now as the unavoidable damage part was removed.
- The ice boss no longer moves while invisible, making it easier to hit and avoid.
- The minions of the true final boss attack less frequently and you can walk through a few of them in their recovery phase.
- You can now attack slightly faster as the readiness bar fills at 0,4 sec intervals instead of 0,5 sec.

Quality of Life
- When obtaining the helmet key item, a vision will show you where to go next. It will also be marked on your map.
- The save book before the final boss was repositioned slightly.
- The monster book in the first shop disappeared and is automatically added to your collection. This was done to avoid confusing new players with seemingly useless items. Note: if you use a save game from the previos version you still need to buy that book.
- A few icons were added to the spell learn menu in the futile hope to make it clearer to new players.

Bugfixes
- A bug was corrected in the Wind Palace when entering and leaving the upper level.
- A few walls were not solid in the area where you learn magic spells, this was corrected.
- It is no longer possible to open the save menu during the true final boss fight.

Hell Gates Review

Just to avoid any confusion, when you talk about the final boss you mean the Secret Final Boss, do you? The battle area for the Standard Final Boss was rather huge.

Hell Gates Review

Hello NeverSilent,

to start it off, let me thank you for all the time and effort you put into this elaborate review. Feedback like this is always helpful and is very rare. The lack of different perspectives apart from my own is what made Hell Gates as it is, for good or for worse.

- "the supposedly helpful companion gets you killed, because you weren't able to hit an enemy at the right moment and get trapped" almost all enemies run as fast as you so when you hold down the direction button after the special attack you can always move away. That being said, the special attack gets a lot of criticism. I can remove the wait time from it so you can freely move around while the partner is attacking. Don´t know if this is technically possible but at least I will try.
- "a number of instances where I just had no idea how a certain enemy or boss worked mechanically": All fights except for a very few can be won without getting hit. Which enemies caused you trouble? From the screenshots i suppose the boss from the ice mountain is one of them.
- "problematic or even potentially game-breaking bugs": did you really encounter any of them? I thought that they were eliminated but it is possible that after the International Release new ones popped up since it added lots of stuff.
- "there are situations where the road to progression is just so unclear that it becomes frustrating": do you remember when this happened? Probably after the fire island as this makes the biggest leap in logic when you let it rain and a raft appears in the river that brings you to the water temple.

PS: Did you also try out the sequel? Since it is entirely in German, I did not upload it on rpgmaker.net. You can find it on the Hell Gates Wiki http://de.hell-gates-2.wikia.com/wiki/Hell_Gates_2_Wiki

Hell Gates

Hi Freank,

nice to see you again.I updated the download links on your page to the latest versions.

Have a nice weekend.

What do you think about games/communities from other languages?

The language barrier is indeed a huge problem, especially in such heavily text-based games like rpgs. Concerning this topic…

Around 10 years ago there was a contest between German and French RPG Maker communities. In order to understand the games, the rule was to create a game completely without text within roughly 3 months. If you want to try out German or French games, this could be a start. But you will need a good understanding of general RPG mechanics to have a chance in games without any text.

My entry for this contest was “Hell Gates”, an Action-RPG (around 10 hours long). While Itaju (who posted in the beginning of this thread) created “3 Monkeys” which is a horror-survival-game.

By the way: Someone in Germany had the bright idea that including MIDIs from commercial games is illegal and took legal actions against a few RPG Maker sites. They had to shut down or remove the MIDIs from all downloadable games. So it can be kind of tricky to get a German, non-silent version of a game.

Here is the link to Hell Gates:
Download Hell Gates

Here you can find a few videos about Hell Gates 2. It is 100% complete but in contrast to the first part has a lot of text and its in German:
YouTube-Channel of Valadur
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