RACHEAL'S PROFILE

I hadn't even realised how pink the final palette ended up being. (It doesn't help that my laptop screen has a slightly purple-ish tint to it, or so Maki tells me.) It was originally more of a blue-violet, but an accident happened with a lowered opacity fill tool when I was changing some old sprites, and I kind of liked the result.

We never intend for our games to be taken super seriously. :) Never have, and likely never will. We are largely influenced by quirky, humourous games that we enjoy (i.e., Phoenix Wright, Disgaea, the Atelier series).

The battles being easy was largely a product of time. Poor time management on my part meant I did not have the time needed to properly balance battles, so I made the conscious decision to lean them on the side of easy because I'd rather the player be breezing past them than meet a stone wall of an unfairly hard fight.

I think sound will forever be a thorn in my side. It's kind of like another language that I just don't understand. That said, we did pick some rather unsuiting battle themes just so they would match the parody of the fight (the aforementioned Yellow Brick Road as well as the All for Love song for the Musketeers).

I think it also shows that we're a big fan of designing characters. If we could just sit and make characters all day, I think we would. XD

But enough babbling from me. I'm really glad you enjoyed the game (and even made a comment on the menus! I love making menus!) I greatly enjoyed reading your review, and it was much more favourable than I was ever expecting the contest version of the game to get. Thank you!

I managed to get through all the basic "AI" stuff and tested about a third of the battles at work today. I don't think we'll have it finished up for today like I was hoping, but I think I'll have the large majority of tomorrow to work on it.

It's amazing what a difference the lack of stress can do. I was stressing pretty hard about getting this done, and it was really turning it into this monster that I hated. I couldn't even look or think about it on Friday. Now that I'm casually picking away at the aspects that bug me most, I don't hate it anymore. There is still a lot of balancing to be done and enemy "AI"s to be played with, but I'm starting to feel like it might turn out "okay" in the end.

Things that are being added that I'm happy about:
-A combat log so you can see what happened.
-The skills you have not learnt yet will now appear greyed out in the menu so you can have a better idea of who you would want to learn a skill first.
-Stat upgrades as a reward for exploring the environment!
-Enemies that actually pick skills "sensibly" (aka conditional branches + force action, same as the first game).

It's a good thing daylight savings starts tonight because I'm going to need the extra sleep from staying up and working on this.

I actually originally missed your review because of the flood of notices from the last day of the event and the rush to (sort of) finish this on time. We really didn't want to fail the same contest two years in a row. :x

It's probably too late to incorporate some of your suggestions from the HF review, but I am going to at least add a battle log so you can catch what you miss. It has always bugged me how fast the messages disappear, but at the same time, I don't want to waste the player's time too much.

If tomorrow is as slow at work as I'm predicting, I should be able to get a good chunk of the work done tomorrow. Expect the new version tomorrow night or some time Monday. Gotta love snowstorms for keeping the customers away.