This game was such a pleasant surprise! I wasn’t sure what to expect when I saw it was a canceled project, but this ended up being a really involved, creative, entertaining and well-thought out experience that I had a lot of fun with! I love how each new city brought a new spin/twist to the game’s worldbuilding, I especially had fun with Salisbury Town and Pardean Town. The AP system took some getting used to but that never really hampered the gameplay, and despite the default RPG Maker graphics I still really enjoyed the characters and exploring the world. The writing was always sharp and funny too, I enjoyed how it flipped between absurd and serious, and how it often lampooned RPG tropes.
It’s a shame the game won’t be completed but I’m glad we got the rest of the story outline in the dev notes. And the epilogue sounds like it would’ve been a really nice way to wrap up the story.
Thank you so, so much for the kind words! I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you, but it's genuinely really wonderful to hear somebody say they enjoyed this little project that I made on-and-off over the course of a year or two.
I might've already mentioned it in the dev room at the end of the game, but I feel like a big part of the game's vibe being the way it was probably had to do with the fact that that I'm a big fan of comedy which comes from inherently absurd situations being portrayed entirely straight, and while I was fairly limited for the most part by my decision to work as much within the default RPG Maker MV assets as possible I think that philosophy was actually really helpful when it came to giving locations their own unique feel despite that restriction (as well helping to maintain the same balance you mentioned).
For a game that I only made as a way to try out the MV engine for the first time after a friend gifted it to me and was pretty much just making up as I went along for the most part (something that's probably especially noticable during the early parts of the game, with even the name itself being something I just pulled in reference to the acronym used for the Runtime Package that you had to download to play games made in older versions of RPG Maker) I have to admit that even I came to get attached to the strange little world I'd created and the cast I'd written for it.
I'm also really glad to hear the AP System was a success for you; by the time I'd come to grasp how to properly use plugins to make the RPG Maker battle system feel enjoyable to play it was far too late for me to implement much of it into RTP, so the AP system & having level-ups be connected with items gained through sidequests rather than XP was something of a compromise in that regard. I wanted to try and make battles feel more involved than just "attack enemy til dead without dying" and I like to think that, in combination with a couple plugins I was able to squeeze in during development, the AP system helped me pull that off and make players feel like fights required proper management of party members & resources to beat.
(also as a P.S. - by "Pardean Town" did you mean Praegen, the final town? that's the only one I can think of beginning with the letter P but I could be wrong... glad to hear you liked those two either way, Salisbury Town was honestly really fun to implement so I'm glad to hear you liked it! :D if I had to pick a favourite of my own it'd probably be Solford, but that's mainly because it felt like the most visually accomplished to me personally, and I was especially happy with how the maps I made for it came out even compared to the other areas in the game because of that)
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This game was such a pleasant surprise! I wasn’t sure what to expect when I saw it was a canceled project, but this ended up being a really involved, creative, entertaining and well-thought out experience that I had a lot of fun with! I love how each new city brought a new spin/twist to the game’s worldbuilding, I especially had fun with Salisbury Town and Pardean Town. The AP system took some getting used to but that never really hampered the gameplay, and despite the default RPG Maker graphics I still really enjoyed the characters and exploring the world. The writing was always sharp and funny too, I enjoyed how it flipped between absurd and serious, and how it often lampooned RPG tropes.
It’s a shame the game won’t be completed but I’m glad we got the rest of the story outline in the dev notes. And the epilogue sounds like it would’ve been a really nice way to wrap up the story.
Thank you so, so much for the kind words! I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you, but it's genuinely really wonderful to hear somebody say they enjoyed this little project that I made on-and-off over the course of a year or two.
I might've already mentioned it in the dev room at the end of the game, but I feel like a big part of the game's vibe being the way it was probably had to do with the fact that that I'm a big fan of comedy which comes from inherently absurd situations being portrayed entirely straight, and while I was fairly limited for the most part by my decision to work as much within the default RPG Maker MV assets as possible I think that philosophy was actually really helpful when it came to giving locations their own unique feel despite that restriction (as well helping to maintain the same balance you mentioned).
For a game that I only made as a way to try out the MV engine for the first time after a friend gifted it to me and was pretty much just making up as I went along for the most part (something that's probably especially noticable during the early parts of the game, with even the name itself being something I just pulled in reference to the acronym used for the Runtime Package that you had to download to play games made in older versions of RPG Maker) I have to admit that even I came to get attached to the strange little world I'd created and the cast I'd written for it.
I'm also really glad to hear the AP System was a success for you; by the time I'd come to grasp how to properly use plugins to make the RPG Maker battle system feel enjoyable to play it was far too late for me to implement much of it into RTP, so the AP system & having level-ups be connected with items gained through sidequests rather than XP was something of a compromise in that regard. I wanted to try and make battles feel more involved than just "attack enemy til dead without dying" and I like to think that, in combination with a couple plugins I was able to squeeze in during development, the AP system helped me pull that off and make players feel like fights required proper management of party members & resources to beat.
(also as a P.S. - by "Pardean Town" did you mean Praegen, the final town? that's the only one I can think of beginning with the letter P but I could be wrong... glad to hear you liked those two either way, Salisbury Town was honestly really fun to implement so I'm glad to hear you liked it! :D
if I had to pick a favourite of my own it'd probably be Solford, but that's mainly because it felt like the most visually accomplished to me personally, and I was especially happy with how the maps I made for it came out even compared to the other areas in the game because of that)