Hi Dullstar, thanks for having a look at the game. I will disagree with some of what you say, but I hope you understand that your feedback is welcome (although at points I wish you would adopt a less patronising tone).
I'll use italics for any point where I agree that something needs to be changed -- that will make it easier for me when I look back at this post while working on the project
The tutorial isn't clear about item conservation. The starting equipment for the main game appears to be intended to be entirely identical regardless of what you do in the tutorial - for instance, the consumables I used during the tutorial were replenished. The text stating that you still get items and experience from the tutorial if you skip it almost suggests that it's detrimental to use consumable items during the tutorial.
I agree, the tutorial needs to point out the importance of healing in between battles.
I will have Ken (the instructor) explicitly state this after the Roach + WG fight. You don't actually get items replenished as such -- I wanted to make sure the player wasn't penalised for playing rather than skipping the tutorial, so I assumed you would emerge with 5 Garnets and 1 Amethyst remaining, and set the post-tutorial inventory to double this (since you team up with Stephanie). I accept this may be confusing, and I'll think about how I can explain this more clearly.
The Niblick is missing from the equipment granted to you if you skip the tutorial. It looks like you are given an extra shield for the second character as well - so make sure skipping the tutorial gives a shield for each character. I didn't check if it did.
I'm not sure where the extra shield is coming from -- must be a bug in the eventing. I've had another look while writing this post, and I don't see anything wrong with the event, but I'll try to find and fix the bug.
You are correct about the Niblick.Why is a status recovery item worth more than a revive?
Uh... why not?
Too much money management early on before the player really knows what equipment/items are useful and necessary. I'd say either fewer choices or more starting money would be a good idea. Consolidating some of the item categories into a smaller number of shops might also help (e.g. one shop for weapons, rather than a bow shop and a sword shop).
Very good point! This would actually kill a few birds with one stone: I need to find a natural way to get across the information "Erika is an archer, her unique equipment type is bows" without pushing the player too hard towards buying a bow (which is actually a bad idea because the Branch, stealable from the Wood Golem, is better in the first dungeon). Having a single weapon shop, and the shop owner ask which type of weapon each girl uses, would solve this.
Also, because I had split shops, I felt I needed to include second-tier equipment (Flatbow etc), so that vendors weren't selling just one thing each. This meant I had to set the price of second-tier stuff at 100 mon to make it a possible choice, but in the long term this may feel like it's too cheap. Much simpler to leave second-tier stuff out completely at this stage -- and then, as you say, there's less choice to overwhelm the player.
Finally, I was having trouble with the shop after the first dungeon, where two more equipment types (wands and earrings) are available.
Combining the weapon shops into one, and the clothing shops into one, would solve all of this.The regular encounters are incredibly overpowered. Several enemy types in the first dungeon are capable of defeating player characters within two rounds, and often occur in large groups. I found it necessary to heal after EVERY battle just to survive, even in the tutorial. This is bad when your heals are finite!
Okay, seems like this is your biggest criticism, and also the one I disagree with the most
Did you notice that Stephanie has a healing spell?
I will add dialogue to make sure the player knows this.The only troops with more than two enemies are (3, 4, 5) x Roach, which should
not be a problem (they deal about 7 damage to Level 2 characters) and Roach Queen + 2 Roaches, which is specially highlighted as a dangerous encounter.
It is absolutely intended that the game will focus on acute difficulty (individual encounters are dangerous) rather than chronic difficulty (encounters gradually wear down player health / resources over time). I might slightly tweak some enemies, but after playing through the dungeon and watching namida play through it, I think the balance is close to what I'm aiming for.
One thing I will definitely do:
there will be four colours of slime icon to indicate varying threat levels, so the player knows which troops to take seriously (fully heal before challenging). In the tutorial dungeon, 3 x Slime Cube will be green, and I'll put the information about what the colours mean at that point as well as its current location. In the first dungeon, Roach Queen, Spider and 2 x Slime Baby will all be green; Roach Queen + 2 Roaches will be yellow. None of the troops so far will be red, but later dungeons may have red wandering monsters as a signal that the player should try to avoid them (or particularly challenge-minded players may attempt fighting them, like the Midgar Zolom in FF7).
If you run out of healing items in the first dungeon, you can't leave to go get more of them. I'm not sure if that's still a problem later because I gave up.
Stephanie's healing magic, together with 4 Amethysts (2 initial, 2 in a chest) and two full-healing crystals, are definitely enough resources to get through the dungeon. However, I agree that the first dungeon should have more leeway because even if the player is unlikely to run out of resources, they should
feel comfortable even when they don't know how long the dungeon will be or what else will come up. I've given this some thought, and I think the best solution is to
allow using the healing crystal three times (with the crystal changing colour to show how many times it's been used). In effect, that gives the player another 20 uses of Stephanie's healing spell (as well as fixing the problem namida had, where he wasted the crystal before understanding what it does).
Continue practicing your mapping. Your current maps are fairly boxy. This can be okay for manmade maps, but, for example, the first dungeon looks like it's a mix of natural and man-made structures. If you want it to be that boxy, consider replacing the tiles with something that looks more man-made.
Assuming you mean the real dungeon (after the shop), the walls are all brick, so I thought it was pretty clear it's man-made (by digging out a space in the rock below the school, hence the rocky floor).
An easy way to make your game look a little less like a generic RPG Maker game is to change the font.
I don't see the point in trying to hide that it's an RPG Maker game -- you can always tell. I'm not trying to make something I will market, just a game for myself and to share with friends.
It does appear that some effort has gone into making the database items customized from the default. This is good - it makes the project less generic!
"Some" effort, right.
All the skills, equipment and enemies that appear in the game are customised. Sure, there are still default ones in the database, because the database comes with over 100 of each category and I haven't bothered to clear out more space than I need.
Anyway, now that I've finally finished playing through namida's game -- at least, I've got to the end of the main video series, although I still have the LLG and a couple of bonus videos to finish -- I'll get back to working on this, and try to have the next update some time before Christmas