TRASHCANENTHUSIAST'S PROFILE

Cool stuff. A lot more in depth than I thought it would be. That said, some sections feel a bit badly paced, but I suspect that was due to smaller events that were left out?

I also liked that you seeded in other countries and built in their influence on events relating to Felgarin. Makes the world feel very lived in, if that makes any sense. There was less visualization than I thought there would be, but at the same time I get it. Trying to break something massive down into postable and readable chunks is always hard.

My main take-aways:
Pacing could be better in some sections, normally when dealing with time jumps.

The writing lacks a bit of specificity when it comes to the characters and areas they are in. I would have like some kind of description for Sandil for example; the most I know about her is that she was one of the leaders of the Wargmat, who are a mercenary army. She seems to be old at this point in the lore based on the comparison between her and Klaius. More detail could help a lot there.

I like the world-building this is showing and how it is introducing other nations and lore within this stuff for Felgarin; I really want to know more about what happened with Galardia, for example. I also found it interesting that Elvish magic is different from Human magic. That was an interesting and focused point you were making so I guess that detail is important to the story in some way.

All of this just makes me want to play this game more! Good job, looking forward to the next part.

YO, I missed this one or something. Those changes to the escape system are wild but make so much more sense than the broke ass standard RPG Maker escape.

I like that you are looking at stuff that is just dog crap in RPG Maker, generally, and are fixing them with cool as hell ideas. Most RPG Maker devs just throw band aids over the gangrenous parts of the RPG Maker and call it a day.

Worlds systems are the first mechanic I think might be bloaty. Are these really needed? Or are you just adding these in the pad the play time?

What are your plans for how these are going to be used, in real terms. There is so much in the game already, I don't think this stuff outside of material gathering for crafting is needed.

Like fishing and farming? Farming maybe for crafting mats, but I don't see why fishing is here. That said, I usually detest minigames in games so take my cringe with a grain of salt.

Request Office

So each region or province will have a Request Office? Is this only in the starting country or does this apply in other nations as well?

Will there always be quests available or does each request office have a limited number? Will there be repeatable quests? If so, when do they become active again?

Will Request Offices get new quests as the game progresses or once you are done with the quests at an office, do you no longer go back to those offices?


Rope Climbing
I like what I see of this so far but I have questions. How integral will these be in exploration? Given the amount you put into the Usgol Mines, it seems like very?

I know this is an evented system, but do you see this being moved to a plugin for tracking? Given the number of these you might use, it seems like that would be too many switches to have to keep track of and present a lot of bug potential (which you already have apparently lol).

Wait, are you going back through and updating these? The formatting looks different and I noticed some of the typos and yeesh typos/wording has been corrected.

Secondly, it looks like you updated some of the info too. If you are going back and updating the blogs, sweet! The later ones are way easier to read than these first ones.

Reading back through these to see if I have anything else I want to add since you asked for it.


Lantern

How often is this going to be utilized? I'm just thinking about the extensiveness of the design you have laid out compared to how much it's used. Does it make sense to have all of these different fuel types that can be crafted if we're only using it like maybe 5 times in the whole game?

Also the times seems a bit long. How long would you realistically be in an area? I know that the Usgol Mines are freaking huge and that what you have right now is based on testing in there. But not all of the maps are going to be that massive.

Would it make sense to have the time scaled a bit? Like 1 minute in real-time = 5 minutes in-game as far as the lantern timers go? That way in smaller maps, there is a real possibility of not having enough oil.


Bridges

I like this mechanic when you showed it off the first time. As with the Lantern, how often is this going to be used? I would assume more since it's a exploration gate. Is it possible to add in more than one type of bridge material?

Like should the same materials be used to work on wood and stone bridges? Also should there be additional quality levels of bridge materials? Some that can be used to repair more than one section? I don't know how you would track that though, that might need something in the plugin just for that.


Secret Finder

Nothing much to add here, this is a kick ass feature and I wish more games with hidden areas used something like it. Will there be any visual components? How will we be told how much the amulet is vibrating?

Man this is dense. I like a lot of what I have read, but I do want to make some comments about everything so I'll go in order from the blog.

Quest Markers

I like that you are considering multiple ways of obtaining quests. A lot of games pick a single system and then stick with that system. That's fine, but in a real scenario you would be able to find things that would lead you to a quest or overhear discussions ala Skyrim.

I think that using two styles of marker is enough. The fact that the color can chance depending on the type and status of the quests the NPC has means that can work fine.

I also like the consideration you are putting into how marker priority will work; I feel that is something even AAA devs are shit at.

I would suggest getting some kind of stylized icons tough instead of using a generic ?/! type icon. Something with a bit of flash can go along way here.


Field Journal

This is my first time hearing about some of the stuff you have planned here. I like it. Making menus a bit more complex to segment information, but in a reasonable way that makes sense within the game world too. A lot of games have shit menus, like Starfield. It can be hard to navigate the menus in that game.

Making sure menus are concise in the information that they hold and that everything is easily reachable are key things here and that seems to be where you are headed. So good job on the design here.

I like that the menus are reactive to the story too; you will still have access to the information early on, just in different locations and a more limited amount of information. That is a cool little idea.

I like that you are calling out something too many games ignore; a synopsis of the story. So often I leave a game for a while and when I come back it can be months, even years. I don't remember a damn thing that happened and there is no way to find out.

Adding in that feature will be a godsend as well as the fact that you are taking it a step further and including the choices we have made as well. Amazing foresight there that, that will be a problem. Then again, considering you play a shit ton of RPGs I am not surprised to see this, to be honest.


Saving

I kind of like this idea of preventing auto-saves at certain points. Overall, I think auto-saving can be good but also can be bad. It depends on how it is implemented.

That said I like the second change. It isn't often that a game uses an item for saving, I actually don't know of any RPGs that do this. The only series I can think of that do, is Resident Evil.

Auto-saves limit the bad potential of this where you can't save if you wanted to and it also sets up situations where if you don't think ahead and prepare, you can't save manually at a point where you might want to. I can see some having problems with that, but at the same time I think games are too hand-holdy these days. They should have some amount of punish to them if you aren't thinking ahead and preparing before a large quest or something.


Battle Weather

That's fair. As long as players know it will be coming at some point I think most will overlook the disjointed feeling of area weather not being reflected in battle.


Status Effect Damage

I was there when you came up with the system. I will say now what I said then; you have some crazy ideas that I would never think of. Watching this system unfold was awesome. The amount of time you spend thinking about mechanics and how that can be used is nuts. If only many AAA devs put that level of investment into their games.


AWP

Some new stuff here and I like it. I know you were struggling to figure out how the system should be applied. It seems like you finally found a way to get it to work with all weapons again, but in a way that doesn't unbalance the game.

Right on. I also like that you are considering instances of regular weapons that have special properties. Was that because of how you are going to change the AWP to use YanFly's instance system?

Nice to see that "Level Up" now has a proper name lmap. I also love the idea that weapons can unlock new skills as they are improved or even during this new Improvement Cycle thing. That is an obvious, but amazing, extension of what you were already doing.

That is going to make weapons so much more valuable to level up and give you a a reason to do so other than numbers go up. It also gives you incentives to refine too.

I like that durability is an optional system that we can turn on or off in the options, but I also like that at higher difficulties it is forced on. Making game system mechanics be tied to difficulty is a cool idea and allows for playthroughs on higher difficulties to present us with unique gameplay moments.

I also like that you fully embraced the weapon break idea, even if it is an option we can turn off. I like that it has positive benefits too, so we have a reason why we would use it as opposed to just increasing the difficulty. That is premium game design.

The Enhancing system is entirely new to me, but makes sense because it branches off the item crafting and magic upgrade systems quite nicely, so it makes sense for it to exist.

I also like that there is a hard limit for the system though too. It means your choices with it matter a lot. No take backs.


Mental Fatigue System

I knew some of this, but it seems you are thinking about changes too. For what it is worth, I am 10000% behind "implementation 2"; that sounds like an amazing game system that will make battles feel more unique even against enemies you have fought a lot of times because how that specific battle can unfold can be drastically different.

I love this system though, it is so cool to see something like this which is heavily influenced by the story and lore for the game show up as a game mechanic. I know you have said in the past that there are specific reasons why the system works this way; looking forward to learning why because this is easily the most interesting mechanic to me.


Magic Focus

You have mentioned these on stream before. I like the idea, gives more customization and choice for how your characters are equipped and I like that you called out the fallacies about how equipment is used in RPGs. I don't think people think enough about that kind of stuff, so cool to see here in an RPG Maker game.


V-Weapons

This was also a cool idea. More options are always a good thing, as long as they are implemented correctly and the whole game doesn't collapse into a buggy mess. I got some faith though.


Ammo System

Another one I was there to see the creation of; I thought you were a bit cracked for putting an ammo system into an RPG Maker game, but the details here and stuff you have said since you created the initial version are bringing me around to it. I want to see more though, before I pass my final judgement on if I like this or not.


Skill Bundles

YES. I LOVE THIS. This is one of my biggest problems with RPGs, messy skill systems. RPG Maker games, especially large ones, have some of the most atrocious skill management. This tries to deal with that instead of saying "Oh well, it's an RPG. What do you want me to do about it?".

I will need to see it in action to give proper feedback about allowing additional grouping within groups though. Like, how many skills will actually fall under the Class Skill category for Compound classes? I think those are going to be the biggest offenders here.


Overall though man, this has been cool to read through. All of these blogs have given me a lot of hype for the game because you are making some great decisions and the thought and consideration those decisions imply means that other parts of your game are being given that same level of thought.

I can't wait to start learning more about the lore for the game and see how you've built all of that. It will give us an idea of what to expect of your writing style and how thorough you are in terms of world-building.