Re: Duality [In Progress]
Nitpick: King looks too young though.
Do you mean the sprite or his portrait? If the former, not much I can do about that, as not having the talent for sprite work, I can only use the mostly crappy sprite generator that comes with VX Ace. If the latter, the same thing mostly applies, though there are a few eye options that look older but they also look somewhat psychotic.
CG is above average. But this is pre-rendered stuff, so I expect anti-aliasing.
Using a pre-made poser that comes packaged with another game (
Yuusha Kara Wa Nigerarenai), so outside of the poses, I don't really have much control with it. I tried forcing AA onto the program via the nVidia control panel but at the ridiculously low resolution I'm forced to set the game to in order to make the pictures fit RPG Maker, it doesn't really do much.
Nitpick: "I'll go get supplies." Oh, I have control now, let's try going south, oh, I waited for my brother and I'm locked further into the plot. Huh. *reload* Let's try going back to the castle. Okay, can't do that. The lab? Can't go there either. Any hidden items around here? Doesn't look like it. Why did I get control so I could walk 20 tiles into another cutscene?
I've been planning on putting in a section here where you control Hiro and sneak around the castle but I haven't gotten around to looking for a good stealth script to use, let alone actually implementing it.
You're good at making maps. Take advantage of that. I actually want to explore them. Maybe you can even scatter bits of that backstory around as an exploration reward. Again, avoid info-dumps. Your game would probably be best served with skits between party members prompted by bits of the environment. It makes for a fun time getting the info, and gives an opportunity for character building, which you can actually pull off.
I agree about the info dumps. My fears of cutting it from the intro and scattering it in books across the game are:
1) Nobody will bother to read them. This is, first and foremost, a hentai game and people tend to rush to the next scene.
2) My writing style and ability doesn't really lend itself well to wanting to actually find and read them. Out of the hundreds of games I've played throughout my life, there's only been two games where I actually wanted to find and enjoyed reading in-game lore -- A
rcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and
Dishonored.
As for skits, they'd definitely be a better alternative but I can't really think of a reason why Nori and Hiro would be talking about Chaos, Order, and the history of the world.
Nitpick: Nori is a mage. 90% of the time I want her to cast magic, but I keep accidentally selecting the 'special' tab because it's easier to get to.
I plan on removing the 'special' option from Nori entirely.
I autoheal at the end of combat. Sort of nice, but without any sort of interesting mechanics, BF system, or need to manage resources throughout multiple encounters, combat right now is boring. Easiest fix would be to give the enemies more damage/reduce player health so that it feels riskier, add some telegraphed patterns, and get more synergistic abilities. See: MGQ, but easier because you don't have GOR.
Autoheal is kinda a relic from my first pass through of the enemies. Originally all I did was multiple their stats by three, making it so that your party barely survived each encounter. Combined with the originally very high encounter rate made for a lethal combination.
Upping enemy health / lowering party health is doable, but the other suggestions probably not so much. I'm not entirely sure if attack patterns are doable outside of some heavy scripting. Custom abilities are easily done but without scripting, they all only really heal HP and/or ailments or cause damage and/or ailments.
It feels like I have more MP than I will ever need.
You probably do. This is definitely something that needs further tweaking.
Nitpick: Really? You blocked my path with flowers?
Which kind of flowers? If they're the yellow ones, yeah, that was a mistake, and I recently fixed it.
If you got the values right, you could make every move just use TP. The value of a system like that is that it naturally paces combat well. You'd need to rebalance things to handle it and maybe add some skills that work with it, but you could get some actually good combat out of only stock skills.
What do you mean by 'every move'?
Nitpick: Why did I have to wait 5 seconds for Hiro to walk across the screen before regaining control?
Mostly because you'd see him vanish into thin air if you regained control and moved to the right any. I've upped his walking speed so that it doesn't take as long.
Nitpick: Doors are too big for their holes.
Fixed.
Talked to a white dog in the village. My game soft locked.
Fixed.
Some NPCs don't respond to me. At least give me a text box saying that they're ignoring me or have them tell me to fuck off.
Right now I have no idea how to make an NPC both move in a scripted way and be able to talk to you.
The village elder seemed overly eager to help out and gave off big creeper vibes, then he didn't do anything?
I plan on allowing you to come back later for optional scenes, where he'll bring up his generous hospitality.
Sex scenes seem to be generally too terse and not up to your usual writing standards. CG is still nice though.
The scenes are on the short side, I agree. The length of sex scenes in a lot of Japanese hentai games mostly comes from repetition (seriously, a lot of it is 'ohhh' and 'aaahhh' or some variation thereof constantly repeated). I'd like to lengthen them but in an organic way; I don't want them to feel artificially long.
Goblin sex scene. Once again Nori folds with only token resistance. Have her tied up if she isn't going to do shit to stop the goblins. Advanced route: give me the option to fight a battle with no equipment, some debuffs, and barely any health or mana. I do like the goblin dialogue.
Her being tied up wouldn't really work for the scene as it currently is but allowing her to enter an unwinnable battle with them could work.
I've done a lot of complaining, but I do think that what you have is good and that you're capable of making it better. Keep it up.
Thanks. Right now my only real forte is writing, so a lot of stuff with enemies and fighting in general will probably remain fairly shitty throughout, unfortunately.
I think it's in my signature, but- for the sake of your own sanity- use version control. It's a combination of the ability to roll back your project to before you broke things as well as an offsite backup. I personally use TortoiseHg for a client and Bitbucket as a server.
All of the past versions are still on my MEGA account, but thanks. I should probably download all the past versions, just in case something happens to my account.