PANCAKE'S PROFILE

The scrolling background is subtle and atmospheric. Works very well. You even made the faceset blink – now that's a nice touch. On the other hand I'm not so sure about the "vital signs" animation which, drawn in such a fast and jagged pace, distracts attention.

I was ruminating on a concept of a castle siege game. The player would be in charge of organizing archers & knights around your castle, allocating them to different locations and fending off enemy attacks. At the beginning, you could dismiss some of your soldiers in order to make your supplies last longer. The gameplay would be less centered around single combat encounters but rather in strategizing so that you would endure the siege in the long run. Each soldier had his own strengths and weaknesses you had to consider in order to put up an optimal defense against the enemy. A crafting system would be simple and straight to the point – scavenge some scraps from your fallen enemies for your smith to fletch arrows, repair armor etc.




I had the layout of the castle fully mapped – composed of tight corners and small rooms contributing to that claustrophobic feeling of being under siege. I felt the (slightly drab) Aretha 2 castle tiles and sprites had a great look for the style I had in mind.

In the end I couldn't come up with a way to create the logic behind the system of shuffling npc's around different "spots" in the castle. With at most 20 people who could be shuffled around (and having for example 3 knights guard the west wall would lead to different gameplay results and approaches by the enemy as opposed to there having been 3 archers etc) would just take thousands of variables to manually implement. I could purge the max number of soldiers to only a handful, or I could make the position of my soldiers more static to make it manageable, but that would probably limit the player's agency too much.

Reincarnated native support for 16x16/32x32 tiles would make me reassess my faith in MV/MZ, but I guess dreams shall remain dreams...

Converting some of RM2003's RTP to use in Ace, whose default graphics I never liked. But Ace handles everything, from proper walk speed to coding systems, much better indeed. Always wanted to try making a setting centered around the monster's point of view, but as for the plot coming up with more interesting stuff to do than "you orc - go kill human" is hard.

I think we have to retain the contest entry download as it stands, though we can upload any updated downloads on the side, as long as the contest entry - which will be judged - isn't removed from the game page. My thing will have a boatload of stuff to be improved I don't have the heart not to make later updates for :)

GBA/DS:
Golden Sun 1 & 2
Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga
Summon Night 1 & 2
Radiant Historia

SNES:
Aretha 2
Breath of Fire 2
Lufia 2
Mystic Ark
Robotrek
Soul Blazer
Illusion of Gaia
Terranigma
Live a Live
Granhistoria
Chrono Trigger
Shiki Eiyuuden
Hi no Ouji
La Wares
Seiken Densetsu 3
Earthbound
Tales of Phantasia
Super Mario RPG
Treasure of Rudras

Final Fantasies:
1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Pokemons:
Blue, Yellow, Crystal, Ruby, Emerald, Pearl, Platinum

Others:
Paper Mario
KOTOR 1
Morrowind
Planescape Torment
Many Zeldas...

It was fun to reminiscence. Some obscure untranslated titles nobody will recognize :)