UNITY'S PROFILE

author=Error

author=unity
Originally I was going to have you "buy" skills from a shop menu, but that lacked the flexibility I wanted.

I'm curious what the obstacle was. If I had to guess, it would be handling skill prerequisites.

(Context: RM's available customization hooks seem...not well documented. It's not clear to me what's easy, what's hard, and what's impossible.)

It's been 5 years so I don't remember exactly, but I assume it was something like that. I just remember it not feeling smooth or intuitive enough, for some reason.

author=Error
(epistemic status: talking out my ass) Such systems should either follow well-defined rules (e.g. opposites on an element wheel), or match everyday intuitions; otherwise, they come across as arbitrary. WaU's system looks like it's trying to take the latter approach, with mixed success. Examples: it makes intuitive sense that armored or spectral targets are resistant to physical skills, that nightmares are resistant to terror, or that machines are resistant to terror and sorrow. It's less clear why the Mystic type is weak to sorrow and resistant to the others (though I can sort-of-see it if I squint), and I can't see an underlying theory in the Oddity resistances at all.

Mileage probably varies a lot by play style. I care a lot about fair-play-insight mechanics because a lot of my enjoyment comes from learning the rules well enough to exploit them.

(on editing, I remembered that in the early game I had additional issues memorizing the icons themselves. A label or context-help button (a-la select in FFT) might have closed the gap)

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'll see if I can work something like that into my next MZ project, there's some plugins that look promising.

Again, still not sure what I'll do with future projects in the W&U setting, but I'll have some time to stew on that and see how I feel in the future. If you could see what weaknesses and resistances you're hitting just by selecting the skill (before you confirm anything) then that could probably help a lot.

author=Error
Thanks, Sooz! :-)

I always had the impression LA was close to a one-woman show. Is WaU different in that respect, or was I wrong to begin with? Makes me feel a little bad for not crediting more people in AD's author's notes.

When it comes to writing, originally I did all of it in Luxaren. But Sooz and I are roommates, so I'd often show her parts I was struggling with and get her input. Somewhere along the line she offered to just be a cowriter and we've been going like that from Luxaren to Weird and Unfortunate.

Basically, I write the script and then she re-writes it. She has a much better grasp of character voice and showing rather than telling. I'm often too straightforward and have a much weaker grasp on how people talk casually. She's been a life saver for me and has made these projects a ton better, IMO!

author=Error
I notice that Dottie's eldritch spell was limited in a different way, but worked out fine. The difference seems to be that there was an opportunity cost for *not* using Eldritch Eye. If there were a similar cost to not spending bullets and pieces (a capacity cap, maybe?), spending them might feel like a better option.

Yeah, a capacity cap could have worked well. At that point I could have sold them in stores too, if I wanted. Definitely something to consider.

author=Error
(hidden for spoilers, not just for WaU but also classic FF)

Show

author=unity

Show

As for the one mystery character you mentioned, I in fact did not allow you to save them through any means. In the future I think it *would* be fun to allow you to save a character like that through a very esoteric method, so I'll keep that in mind for future projects.

Show

I was only partly serious, for the record. I'm reminded of all the contemporary complaints about Leo in FFVI or Aeris in FFVII, and those stories wouldn't have been improved by a revival option.

But it's fun to think about, and I'm sure there's stories where one could get away with it. Probably those where the death isn't character-defining.

(fun fact: I don't know if you played FFVI when it was current, but at the time there were a lot of hoaxes claiming that Leo could be saved or revived. All lies. Then, something like twenty years later, someone actually found a way to do it. It was totally unintended by the developers, required massive bug abuse, and was 100% awesome.)

Haha yeah, I played those games when they were first out and I remember hearing rumors like that XD I guess it's just natural for people to want that sort of things in games, tho that makes the possibility even more fun.

author=Error
Oh, I don't know about that. It felt like genius bonus to me. Or at least it made me feel like a genius for spotting it.

Haha, then I guess I did some good! I'll consider that a victory, then!

author=Error

author=unity
If you want a hint...

Mrgh. You might want to move that under hide tags; I didn't want that much of a hint. -_- But I was already looking in more-or-less the right place, so not much harm done.

Terribly sorry about that, there's been a period where I'm constantly getting asked that over on the Itch.io page and I've gotten into the habit of just telling people. I've gone back and hidden it.

author=Error
You're welcome. It's nice to be appreciated. :-) And whenever LA2 is in the cards, I'll jump on it with both feet.

On another note, back when I wrote AD, you offered to give me feedback if I ever dove into RPGMaker. Is that offer still open? I have a project in mind for the near future (if I can solve a certain structural issue with my intended plot), so I might want to take you up on it soon.

Yeah sure, I don't see why not :DDD It'll depend on how much time and available brainpower I have at any given moment, but I'd still love to give feedback!

author=Error
So apparently I wrote "a day or two" when I meant "a week or two". That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Wow! This write-up is very detailed and insightful! Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts! :DDD

author=Error
I loved it, but didn't know if I would going in. Urban horror isn't my usual genre, and I've never liked front-view Earthbound-style battles as much as side-view FF-style battles, and a save-the-child plot hook is...not an element for which the target audience includes me.

But I do love things that are dark as hell, and there were more than enough horrible things happening to keep my attention, and at some point I started to capital-C Care. Unfortunately I don't remember exactly when, which is a shame because that would probably be useful information.

I'm very glad you were able to get into it, despite it not being your usual cup of tea ^_^

author=Error
The skill system was simplistic on its face, but presented interesting and meaningful choices, which is exactly what a skill system should do. It's a bit awkward to use, but I'm guessing "walk around an abstract map to pick out skills" was a workaround for RPGMaker limitations. It worked well enough and I hope you don't mind if I consider stealing it.

Yeah, that was it exactly, a way to work around limitations, and feel free to steal it for any future projects if you like :D Originally I was going to have you "buy" skills from a shop menu, but that lacked the flexibility I wanted. Tho I have an idea for buying skills from a menu that *might* work that I may try in Luxaren Allure 2 if things go well.

author=Error
There are far too many quality-of-life details to list them all, but they were much appreciated. I'm thinking of things like indicating examinable objects (a feature I remembered from LA), providing maps, the boss warning (no fear of missing missables!), item descriptions that state what can be safely sold (ditto!), recording tutorial information as items for later perusal (a workaround for no in-engine help?), notes about how to rebind the controls, skill descriptions that are actually useful... I'm forgetting a whole host of things, but you've obviously thought hard about routine RPG annoyances and endeavoured to fix them.

Thanks! I'm still trying to find new ways to further improve quality of life, and this game was a learning experience in that regard. For example the maps were added in response to feedback and watching people play. If at all possible, I think having a map function for every dungeon in future games would be really nice.

author=Error
(I do wish there was a way to *interactively* rebind the controls, so I don't have to experimentally figure out which button on my pad corresponds to RPGM's notion of "A" or the game's notion of selection/cancel. But that's a gripe with RPGM, not WaU)

Yeah, that's an issue with VX Ace, I'm hoping newer makers are better about it (I'm working with MZ now, and as the default settings for controllers work for me, I haven't looked into rebinding yet).

author=Error
I'm not sold on the arrangement of enemy types and weaknesses. It's not *bad*, and it's certainly something new, but it usually wasn't obvious why type A had weakness B. Some of them made sense, others didn't, and I couldn't deduce them, only memorize them. Rather than memorize them or keep checking the in-battle help text, I mostly just used area spells to probe weaknesses on the fly.

Yeah, I was really happy with the idea when I came up with it, and some people take to it like a duck to water, but others don't, and now I can see that maybe it wasn't as elegant of an idea as I thought it was initially. Not sure how I can modify it to be better for a possible future WU 2 or spin-off, but I'll keep my thinking cap on.

author=Error
Zlonyth's private rooms and commentary were awesome and I always looked forward to finding them.

I'm glad! :DDD Had a lot of fun with Zlonyth! Huge thanks to Sooz for how Zlonyth talks, I could never have pulled that off without her!

author=Error
Balance:I played on the highest difficulty with a couple of additional handicaps: No selling items and no permanent-stat-boosters. My perception of balance is colored accordingly.

I agree with a lot of what you said in your Balance section. Tho I am curious as to why you decided not to use stat-boosters, as I had hoped they would allow players to tweak characters a bit, such as allowing certain characters to have expanded PSI point pools and adjust physical and psychic damage.

author=Error
Miriam's bullets seemed too rare relative to their worth, and (most of) her spells too expensive. For much of the game, I had trouble finding something for her to do after blinding (and later corroding) everything. Her other options often didn't seem worth the resource expenditure.

I'm not sure what the Right Thing would be here. Maybe expanded bullet effects. As-is, they only end fights faster, they don't help control the battle or otherwise get you out of trouble. Their rarity makes them impractical to combo with Overdrive, and maybe Overdrive itself should have been cheaper. Its opportunity cost is high at the beginning of a fight (where it competes with applying blind and acid one turn earlier), and it takes three turns to turn a "damage profit", and by then you've spent ~100 out of ~150 MP.

Dottie's chess pieces also seemed unusably rare until endgame, but in her case it's justifiable because their benefits are gamechangers.

If there's one thing I took from making and balancing battles in this game, it's that I don't think I want to tie skills to items like this in future games. It makes it way too hard to balance and like you said, Miriam's bullets are often just "battle shorteners."

It doesn't feel right for the kinds of games I make. A lot of things in this game were experimental for me and this is one case where I'm not super happy with the outcome. It doesn't break or ruin the game IMO (which is why they're still in there) but it does influence how I'll approach similar mechanics going forward.

author=Error
Story:

I'm not going to go too in-depth in responding to your story points, but I really enjoyed hearing your thoughts here. Thanks so much for that! :DDDD

As for the one mystery character you mentioned, I in fact did not allow you to save them through any means. In the future I think it *would* be fun to allow you to save a character like that through a very esoteric method, so I'll keep that in mind for future projects.

Also they are exactly who you think they are, tho I did poorly by giving them so little focus in the story before they joined the party. Again, something I hope I can improve on in future games.

author=Error
Margaret's late-game upgrade made me smile. A small nod towards sentimentality. Kind of like taking the Cael Hammer into the last level of Bastion. :-P

Haha, I love doing stuff like that XD

author=Error
Uiroq's presence makes me wonder if this is supposed to be in the same multiverse as LA, or if it's just fan bonus.

I needed a hell-merchant, realized I already had one from LA, and just ran with it. Who knows, maybe the games' netherworlds' are connected somehow. I'll probably use him again if I have another near-hell dungeon that needs a shop XD

author=Error
The school "dungeon" stuck out to me. It felt too long, but it was magnificently creepy. Grade schools creep me out to begin with, so I was primed for it.

Thanks! That dungeon was, in hindsight, waaaaay too big. And it was followed by a Vedim area. It just puts the breaks on the plot in a way that's not good for pacing. I love the place but yeah I went way overboard on its size.

author=Error
The Fool's Key areas (did they have a name?) also got progressively creepier throughout the game and it was great.

Thanks! Those were probably the most fun to make, and I felt like they were a good break from the usual cycle of battles. As for their name, I just call them "Fool's Spaces"

author=Error
I've yet to find the daughter's heart in the final dungeon. I found the clue regarding its hiding place, and I found the door that I think it's behind, but I lack the key and haven't been able to find it.

I've heard nothing about the key from any of the NPCs I can reach. It may be in Makyo, which I haven't explored much yet. I'm debating whether, before putting a lot of time into it, I should replay the game with the language decoding on. It might contain things that would be useful to know.

The Princess Heart, the Blue Face, and the two Triangles were put in as a "I wonder if anyone will find these" sort of thing (and yes, of course people found them, no matter how mysteriously I hid them).

If you want a hint...


Give that to the princess to get that key you are missing. If you want more exact instructions, let me know.

author=Error
Speaking of which, the decodable expanse languages. I *love* the concept (which is unlikely to surprise you, after AD), but never actually tried to decode them. The trouble was that I had no good way to transcribe them for later analysis. I can't copy-paste out of the game; and the letters don't resemble English ones so I can't type them into another window; and I have arthritis, so physically writing them down would be slow and painful. Nevertheless, I wanted to know what they said (I kept expecting them to contain warnings that the evocations were about to betray me, or something), and I'll play again to find out now that I can decode them. I'm not sure what to expect on the scale between "interesting but nonessential material" and "complete reinterpretation of events," but I look forward to finding out.

In retrospect, I should have taken screenshots whenever Expanse text came up; that would have worked just fine for transcription, and I'm pretty sure the language itself is normal English text with a custom font. I puzzled out a few lines along the way just eyeballing it. Oh well, too late now.

Yeah I think screenshots are the ideal way to go. I only found this out recently, but if you're on a window's machine and press the windows button plus Print Screen, it'll save a screenshot of the printed screen directly to a folder in your Pictures folder. Super useful!

If you ever decide to do a second playthrough, you can call up the password screen to input the code to auto-translate the languages by pressing Q as the screen scrolls up to Dottie's house.

author=Error
And, wow. I wasn't expecting to write a thousand words when I started typing, but I'm guessing you won't mind. I'm sure I had more to say, but at least for the moment it's lost in the last two months of memory. This will do for now.

Thanks again for all of your thoughts, it was an enjoyable read! :DDDDD And I'm so glad you ended up playing the game!

I've been doing a lot of brainstorming for an eventual Luxaren Allure 2. No promises yet, but if I can figure out the plot and systems, that may be my next big project! Here's hoping.

Thanks very much, so glad you loved the game! :DDD

Hope your cold gets better soon!

author=Error
I also just did a double take watching the credits. :-P

Haha, didn't expect that, did you? XD

author=Error
Terrain made from dismembered body parts, drinking celestial saliva to heal...this should be fun. And disturbing. But I had no need to say it twice.

Also, hi. :-P

Hello Error :DDD Nice to hear from you again! Hope you enjoy ^_^

That's very good to hear! That really makes me feel better! Thank you, Housekeeping! And Cash and Merlandese too, I've been on the fence about this and you all lit a fire under me :DDD

Okay! I've decided, I'll put it on Steam! :DDD I'll go ahead and keep it free, otherwise there's too much to replace. I'll look into getting help with setting up the game for Steam and getting achievements put in. This is exciting! :DDDD

author=Merlandese
How many music tracks would you need to replace?

It'd unfortunately be a lot, like even if I reused tracks it'd have to be at least like twenty. And there's a lot of creative commons sound effects too >.<;; I just never dreamed I'd sell this game back when I was making it!

author=Malandy

author=unity
Tho I dunno if free games can have achievements.

They surely can!

Yeah, I dunno why I thought otherwise XD

author=Sgt M
It can be easy to feel pressured to "go big" nowadays in the social media age, where a lot of people are focused on advancement, but I think it's still perfectly okay to make a thing for the sake of making a thing.

But I think the key thing about WAUTAH is that it's been very successful on its current platforms through word of mouth and serendipity. You haven't had to aggressively push the game on social media or artificially boost its popularity to get people to play it: it speaks volumes about the quality of a game when it can find its audience and spread itself passively like that. WAUTAH has already had a proven ability to manage itself and I think that would still hold true on other platforms, too.

Sorry, I missed your post as it came while I was tying mine, but this is a great point! :DDD I think I've been overworrying about stuff, as usual for me XD;;;