RED_NOVA'S PROFILE

Nice! I didn't know this game was completed. I'll give it a shot when I get a chance.

Congratulations on the Kickstarter funding! Good luck with the rest of development!

Ayo it's finally here on RMN let's gooooooo!

author=Strak
Level Requirements: So, there was a reason that equipping weapons was locked behind a level requirement. It has to do with the locker in the Keep. The one that allows you to move items between save files and playthroughs. Essentially, with that locker, you could put a level 99 weapon onto a level 1 character without the requirement. That said, I will admit it can be very frustrating to find an obviously better weapon only to find you can't use it yet.

I have a few questions about this:
1) If there is a level requirement for equipment, then isn't the idea of transferring equipment between save files already negated since anything I put in that chest will have to wait until my next party is already leveled up enough to use it? By the time I level up enough to use that gear, I likely would have found something just as good (or even better) for my party in my next playthrough since I can get lucky and get a high rarity item early on.

2) What exactly is the harm in letting players transfer high level gear in a subsequent playthrough? The chest can only store ONE piece of gear, after all, so it's not like you can completely deck out your party in OP gear in your second playthrough. Even if you could, I feel like anyone who would make use of this mechanic is to see the routes that that didn't take the first playthrough, and letting them use high level gear just makes it easier for them. If they wanted a subsequent playthrough to be fair and challenging, they would not make use of this item transfer mechanic at all.

I had a similar issue in Prayer of the Faithless where I added EXP decay once your party started to outlevel the enemies. I did this to discourage tedious grinding and to learn the actual battle mechanics. And yet I still got reports that some players would just grind anyway, EXP decay and all. Eventually, I just threw up my hands and said "fine. Make it easier for yourself. At least you've earned it."

Boss Fight: Ironically, I was trying to add additional gimmicks that fix the "damage sponge" boss that most RPG's seem to fall in to. Changing elements was the gimmick I went for with this boss. The HP bar changes color based on the bosses elemental weakness. Unfortunately, the only way to do that was to essentially spawn in a new enemy, which heals it. I can work on an alternative solution that maybe spawns it in at the HP of the enemy that was despawned. Shouldn't be too tough to figure out.

I feel like the underlined statement goes against your stated intention of accommodating colorblindness. I haven't checked, but what changes about the HP bar if you enable colorblind mode?

As for the slimes, those were included because of one specific feature: Kill skills.

That's a dangerous reason considering each character has 3 different skill trees and so the possibility of a party with no kill skills is fairly high. I stand by what I said during stream that the additional enemies need to make the boss fight itself interesting and not exist purely as trash mobs to annoy the player. Kill skills should be a reward for diversifying your party's skill set, not a requirement for beating boss fights.

Narrative: I agree that you don't really get to spend enough time with any of the characters to develop any sort of emotional attachment to them, but I'm not entirely sure how to fix that, to be honest. Something tells me that making the prologue an hour long isn't the solution. I'm open to feedback, and I'll do some thinking about that myself, but I don't exactly have a solution right away.

You're right in that making a longer prologue isn't the answer. Depending on what you want to emphasize to the player, there are a few ways to address this:

1) Punch up the dialogue that is already there. You can use tutorial messages and other flavor text to help expand on the character's personalities more. Mel, for example, has absolutely no personality to work with at all. You can do pretty much anything with her dialogue and it would be an improvement. Brutus is alright, but pretty one note with his anger issues. I get that he's a Berserker (though not angry enough to actually Rage in the middle of battle, I guess), but the current dialogue leans so hard into it that it's his only character trait. Lionel is the group leader, but all he does is give orders and boss people around. He's done nothing (from my perspective) to earn the loyalty and trust of the rest of the team. All he did is bark orders and shut down any dissent. Why did he split the team up the way he did? What does he know about each one to know that they would work well together? Damian is... alright, actually.

2) Give the characters their Action Skill right away. As I mentioned on stream, most of the fights in the tutorial area were just "press space to win" fights. It wasn't nearly enough to give me an idea of how each character played (which is what I thought the point of splitting the party up in the first place was). Since you can guarantee that certain party members will be in certain places, it's the perfect opportunity to design enemies in such a way to make use of your character's Action skills. Making physical resistant enemies to encourage uses of Mel's Bursts, or poison/burning inflicting enemies to make use of Lionel's Aura skill.


Anyway, glad to help and glad to see the stream helped you! I'll give the next release a playthrough too with a different party setup and see what I missed.

This game has a lot of heart and soul poured into the world and it's people! I tried Leafko on stream and had a good time all around. Initially, I thought the game was in Spanish only since that was the default language, but it's impressive that you have two different language supports that you can toggle in game.

The English is a bit wonky, but that wasn't enough to stifle the personalities of the characters (and even the NPCs). I liked Leafko, and wanted to see where events would take her. It really helps that this game's art style is very cute and endearing. The expressive faces sets and creative setting really come together to give this world a distinct feeling to it. There are some oddities, like how a fountain in the market square doesn't animate or how some of the RTP music tracks don't quite fit in well with the game's more relaxed tone (the victory theme in particular is a bit too bombastic and feels really out of place), but they aren't dealbreakers for me.

Battles are where this game takes a few missteps, though. Granted, I've only gotten so far as to beat the first cult member causing a scene in the town square, so I haven't done too much fighting, but the biggest issue I have is that the party's attacks tend to miss. A lot. And there is no way that I can tell to increase the party's accuracy or reduce the enemy's evasion. Battles are difficult and don't require too much strategy to win, so the frequent misses don't do anything but elongate an already simplistic fight. Also, while some semblance of similarities in skills are to be expected between Leafko and Fertile since Fertile is Leafko's teacher, but the game advertises itself as needing to utilize each partner's unique skillset to win battles. Not only are 90% of Fertile's skills identical to Leafko's but you can get through battles just by holding Spacebar and doing basic attacks. Fertile claims to be able to use fire magic if she could get her hands on a staff, so why doesn't she have a staff equipped at the very start? At least that would make battles a little more interesting if Fertile had a more distinct moveset at the very start.

Overall, though, I'm really enjoying my time with Leafko! I'm gonna keep at it and let you know more as I go along. Subbed!