Congrats on publishing your first game! I know you were working on something before, but it's cool to see you put something up for the public.
Overall, this is a good first work! If I had one piece of advice, it would be to really focus in on what makes your game unique and try to make the player 'feel' that. Since you're using an engine that handles a lot of the art and programming for you, I'd recommend trying to nail the writing. Right now, I don't feel like I have a very good grasp on the characters or setting, it kind of just seems like 'generic fantasy'. The intro sequence feels lacking in this respect, you want to be sure to come up with a good hook that really grabs the player and forces them to care.
Because you're using a specialized engine, you can't just rely on the combat or graphics to draw people in (since many other games using SRPG Studio at a glance look and play 'the same'). Maybe look at the first episodes of your favorite series, think about what made you want to watch more of that show. It may seem like it's something minor, but the first few minutes of your game are probably some of the most important.
(Also just a couple of minor things. 1) At the beginning of the main combat session, there's a small typo: 'Remember your mother gave you some delicious (snacks?) that are sure to heal you', 2) Be sure that you actually submit your game to the Indie Game Making Contest jam page! Right now you don't appear on the page with the other entries)
Congrats again on getting it published! I look forward to seeing what you come up with owo
Thanks. Actually my other game is publicly available, just not here (and much worse because it is just a concept demo). I'm glad this isn't an awful game XD
Any way, I know I could beef up the writing, I just want to communicate the basic idea right now. To boot, this isn't even finished yet. The demo versions you can play right now are still missing things. I'm doing everything by myself with a lot of other things going on in my personal life so this is pretty much as good as it gets. It is true that SRPG Studio handles a lot of things for me, but a good chunk of this title is not stock. I put in a lot of effort to avoid the, "same-y" feel that this could easily fall victim to if you looked at other SRPG Studio games. It's also a relatively new engine with little support (outside of Japan, and even then), so a lot of this is me figuring stuff out as I go . This can lead to me being limited in what I can achieve.
I actually have some interesting combat ideas with unique locations, which I hope have some decent writing, for the rest of the game which is yet to be added but it kind of sounds like I already poisoned the well? I might just need to gut a bunch of stuff and soft restart? I really don't want to do that though.
I appreciate you pointing out the typos. Thought I caught them all yesterday when I did a sweep, I will fix that right now. Pretty sure when I was copy + pasting from my Word document back into the engine I just highlighted too far XD As for actually submitting on the contest page, I haven't forgotten because, like I said, I am not done yet. These demos are progress markers and people playing them help me spruce up the final product. You raise concerns about the writing quality, so that's something I should look at. Stuff like that.
Thanks for taking the time to comment and I'll do my best to improve things.
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Congrats on publishing your first game! I know you were working on something before, but it's cool to see you put something up for the public.
Overall, this is a good first work! If I had one piece of advice, it would be to really focus in on what makes your game unique and try to make the player 'feel' that. Since you're using an engine that handles a lot of the art and programming for you, I'd recommend trying to nail the writing. Right now, I don't feel like I have a very good grasp on the characters or setting, it kind of just seems like 'generic fantasy'. The intro sequence feels lacking in this respect, you want to be sure to come up with a good hook that really grabs the player and forces them to care.
Because you're using a specialized engine, you can't just rely on the combat or graphics to draw people in (since many other games using SRPG Studio at a glance look and play 'the same'). Maybe look at the first episodes of your favorite series, think about what made you want to watch more of that show. It may seem like it's something minor, but the first few minutes of your game are probably some of the most important.
(Also just a couple of minor things. 1) At the beginning of the main combat session, there's a small typo: 'Remember your mother gave you some delicious (snacks?) that are sure to heal you', 2) Be sure that you actually submit your game to the Indie Game Making Contest jam page! Right now you don't appear on the page with the other entries)
Congrats again on getting it published! I look forward to seeing what you come up with owo
Thanks. Actually my other game is publicly available, just not here (and much worse because it is just a concept demo). I'm glad this isn't an awful game XD
Any way, I know I could beef up the writing, I just want to communicate the basic idea right now. To boot, this isn't even finished yet. The demo versions you can play right now are still missing things. I'm doing everything by myself with a lot of other things going on in my personal life so this is pretty much as good as it gets. It is true that SRPG Studio handles a lot of things for me, but a good chunk of this title is not stock. I put in a lot of effort to avoid the, "same-y" feel that this could easily fall victim to if you looked at other SRPG Studio games. It's also a relatively new engine with little support (outside of Japan, and even then), so a lot of this is me figuring stuff out as I go . This can lead to me being limited in what I can achieve.
I actually have some interesting combat ideas with unique locations, which I hope have some decent writing, for the rest of the game which is yet to be added but it kind of sounds like I already poisoned the well? I might just need to gut a bunch of stuff and soft restart? I really don't want to do that though.
I appreciate you pointing out the typos. Thought I caught them all yesterday when I did a sweep, I will fix that right now. Pretty sure when I was copy + pasting from my Word document back into the engine I just highlighted too far XD As for actually submitting on the contest page, I haven't forgotten because, like I said, I am not done yet. These demos are progress markers and people playing them help me spruce up the final product. You raise concerns about the writing quality, so that's something I should look at. Stuff like that.
Thanks for taking the time to comment and I'll do my best to improve things.