SAM'S PROFILE

Mine's up and ready for people to download and try out! Can I post a link to its page here?

I'm sadly going to have to pull out.

I admittedly didn't do myself any favours signing up a week in while already doing Inktober, but I'm also getting married this Saturday and my word was there a LOT more prep left than I thought. My Mmind was foolishly thinking "All the invoices are due 6 weeks before, so at that point, we can't have any jobs left." WRONG! There are so many jobs left!

So here's what I had planned that sadly won't come to fruition. Based on Cinderella, you're a detective invited to the Prince's Ball. The Prince is found floating dead in the pool and the only clue is a single glass slipper. Then the clock strikes midnight and horses and footmen start turning into rats and lizards while more bodies pile up. It was going to turn out one of the jealous step sisters murdered the Prince and tried to frame Cinderella, at which point Cinderella absolutely flipped out.

Gameplay was aiming for a classic Resident Evil / SNES Clock Tower vibe.

Super WIP screenshot:

Oh well, always next time.

author=mjshi
Kill the King by Sam, Theme: Royal

Your game was a lot more futuristic than I expected! Normally it'd be a lot more magic and swords than guns and clones.

A lot of the combat was up to luck. I barely avoided dying thanks to the King deciding to use "knife slash" instead of his HP-demolishing "full clip" >.< Attacks miss left and right. The King missed a reinforce once ._. Well, I wouldn't've had died or anything but still, it was kind of funny. Story-wise, I got both endings. Pretty straight-forward, kill the king, things are good. Let 'im live, he wrecks the world. Standard stuff. Also, the chasing is a bit clunky, I avoided the entire corridor of enemies leading to the King simply by dashing. Nice going on the original art though! Your game was visually very put-together.

Thanks for giving it a playthrough and giving your thoughts, Mjshi. I'm glad the setting surprised you. When things like this get announced I always think "Yay! A chance to get away from typical fantasy RPGs!" and then I got handed Royal as a theme and thought "F**k!"

I admittedly spent too much time on an initial prototype that was a lot more like Resident Evil in nature. It used top down shooting mechanics similar to my 2k3 game, Fenrir. I originally used Galv's Map Projectiles plugin with Yanfly's Self Variables and Button Common Events but ran into issues with that setup. I then tried QABS which is... way more involved than I could initially wrap my head around! Finally, I tried an event based system based on how I built Fenrir but for some reason the bullet collision wouldn't work.

At that point, I had used a good week of the already limited time so I fell back to MV's default battle system. The missing attacks issue was frustrating. Most skills were initially set to a success rate of 95% but kept missing so I cranked it up to 99% and yet they still kept missing left, right, and center! I don't suppose anyone more familiar with MV can tell me what's up with that?

The end boss, admittedly, is kind of broken and that's my fault entirely. I balanced him for the player being at Level 3 but there were guards in the final corridor that would chase you into the "throne room" and mess up the cutscene so I removed them. Doing that meant most players would only be Level 2 unless they fought every single enemy on the way to the King.

What really broke that boss though, is a late addition where I didn't think the consequences through. I felt he didn't interact much with the supporting soldiers so I added Rallying Cry. It meant he would do something other than attack relentlessly and it suited his character as a leader. I forgot some key things though:
1 - All Allies buffs also buff the caster
2 - Buffs stack
3 - He already had a low HP desperation attack

That meant Full Clip went from doing 60% damage to 90% after 1 buff and well over 100% after two buffs! You sort of have to hope the RNG doesn't pull a Rallying Cry, Rallying Cry, Full Clip combo.

Balancing also suffered from only having one playable character. One character was a hold over from when I was initially making a top down shooter. Ideally, when I gave up on the shooting system, I should have added at least one more character - preferably a medic with heals, buffs, and debuffs. Maybe that should have been my priority at the time?

I'm glad you liked the artwork! While the tilesets are MV RTP, the on-map sprites for the characters are made from scratch by me, as are the in-battle graphics for the enemies, FPS POV pistol, shotgun, etc. Admittedly, I had to fall back on MV RTP for a lot of the battle animations though. I ended up with a lot of unused assets from the shooter prototype - such as on map bullets, the protagonist carrying a shotgun, firing animations for the pistol, etc. and in hindsight I wish I could have used that time for a wider variety of enemies, for example adding some soldiers with AK-47s instead of everyone having pistols.

If I were to ever expand upon and re-release it, I think those are all things I'd love to fix, in addition to adding more levels and bosses. I'm glad I entered though, I learned a lot about scoping, time management, and the difficult decisions behind cutting / changing content.

I've just got a final boss fight to finish up and then I can upload mine! Kind of worried about time as I have to head out and pick up my wedding rings today, then we have to go shopping for our daughter's bridesmaid dress and a little suit for our son.

I've already had to change the gameplay style to something more traditional and scope the project down due to work commitments, sorting some stuff at the doctors, and some drama with my dad but I'm determined to submit my entry today!

I'm making some progress with my game. Frustratingly, I couldn;t get the top down shooting working the way I wanted it. I tried Galv's projectiles and encountered problem after problem, was baffled by QABS, and even tried replicating the evented system I used in Fenrir: First Operation, a 2k3 game I made years ago, but again hit road blocks.

I figured instead of butting my head against a wall fighting to craft this system, I'd fall back on the standard battle systems and such to make sure I have a game ready for the deadline.