One important thing with quippy writing: generally don't make the creator the butt of the joke, because then it does two things you don't want: It signals insecurity in a way that can weird out the audience for your media, and it sort of puts people in the mindset of looking at the content pessimistically. "I guess our creator was a little lazy" could be replaced with, say, "At least my self-portrait is perfect". The premise of the joke is the same, but it keeps the framing of the joke in-universe, which is especially useful for a more surreal world like this. I also think that it's always a good idea that, if you give players consumables to start with, give them more than 1 type. Don't just give them healing apples, give them a consumable that gives a buff or does an attack that's impressive by "literally the first minutes of the game" standard. It helps them immediately get into the decisionmaking process if they care to, instead of Dr Joe's kind of "I'm just hitting attack, then". I am also a huge fan of action commands in strategy RPGs like this, but something rubs me the wrong way about the idea that they might appear inconsistently, and I'm not really sure why. Perhaps it's because it's a middle point between engaging me actively and engaging me passively? Like, if I "lean back" so to speak, I'll get punished by the occasional missed attack trigger, but if I "lean forward" I'll end up mentally prepping for a thing that didn't show up. Related to the writing, I think the descriptions on interactibles need work; if I walk up to a bucket of water and I can interact with it, I don't want the game to say "it's a bucket of water", I want at least something like "It's a bucket of water, probably important for blacksmithing" so it feels like there's someone being characterized or some world elements being explained. The only kinda-exception I have is when it's an item used for a quest you're not at yet, like if later in the game you'll have a moment of "the building is on fire" or the like, so remembering there is a bucket of water over there is important - although I'd definitely save that for when you're not going to go long between first introduction of the area and the scenario that asks you to recall where you can find water. Dr Joe talks about the connection between shapes and dreams not really being there, and I definitely see a path in the form of making it a world where things are more abstract, but that direction doesn't mesh too well with the very visually complete library dream we're shown; there's definitely something to be said here about finding the art direction to do it - making the real world more detailed would allow a more minimalist and abstract dream world to stand out, for example - but even without an overhaul like that, such a direction would be greatly emphasized with just careful consideration of "what makes this seem like less of a solid physical library and more of the idea of a library stripped down"
@endorb Thank you for your detailed comment and suggestions! I’ll definitely work hard to address the points that have received recurring criticism. I also like the idea of a stripped-down world during the dream state. Creating "low-poly" versions of the assets shouldn’t be too difficult or time consuming. I’ll give it a try and see if it adds something interesting to the game.
Missed this comment - these are all great ideas! Yeah, anything you can do to make the dream feel more dreamy rather than just a place you've been teleported to, would be great.
Vigorously tipping my hat to that ›They Live‹ edit and that list of beginner’s questions at the end. Both had me pause the video to grant my laughter proper space.
19:45 i believe it is a reference to an NPC in "Zelda II: The Adventure of Link" who says "I am Error". I love JRPGs and i played tons of them, and i played tons of indie and game maker or rpg maker ones too, and a few common issues keep coming from those: a lot of them have no focus on the story or the plot. They have a character at the start of the game where it break the 4th wall with a cring joke or even represent the maker himself. and a alot of crashes, usually games made by rpg maker get outdated fast and break often on newer machines but they aren't stable even at their time, i believe some of them have null pointers unhandled errors or something. when i play jrpg i really care about how the fight feel and what's my character\s are thinking and the story or plot, if the characters are not interesting neither the story nor what i am doing than even gameplay won't convince me to keep playing. i know some indie jrpg really tried to make an epic story or epic adventure just to fall flat cause the dialog is too long or not fun, or the crashes make you want to stop and never come back, or the characters are completly void of feeling and agency. i won't lie though, sometimes a light story and a clear plot is all what i need to keep playing, i played once a game that have less than a half page of story and plot and i enjoyed it somewhat and continue playing much longer than i expected: "ohh no my town on fire, who's that? a dragon? ohh no it need help their homeland is been attacked by demons! the hero and dragon became friend! let's go to this dungeon and get stopped by this boss!" etc etc, but again i might played it much longer than a game that have a long and boring story and it crashes here and there but i couldn't carry myself to finish it cause the story parked on the sideway in 15 mins and made the plot take the rest of the game with tideous fitch quests and dungeons with one boss at the end over and over till i shut it down for good. making an interesting RPG with turns and twists and interesting gameplay takes a lot of efforts indeed, and i am sure it required a lot of sacrifices too, what i mean if you wrote a novel for the game to make it interesting it will be a huge task how to represent it in the game and what to cut off to make it fit the scope and the screen, the art need a lot of work to make the game look unique, a lot use free generic assets which make them look cheap cause a lot of games uses same assets ( i use them as well) cause they are cheap, i am glad that this game look different just because it is different in this case. i didn't try this game by myself to judge it cause i can't tell how the fight feel, how the transition feels and if the start of the game is interesting enough for me to hope to see more or not. but from what i saw i don't think the story nor hte plot is going anywhere interesting anytime in the game, which is kinda sad, it is obvious there is some effort place in making this game with the puzzles and cutsences and fight mechanics.
Thank you for catching this Zelda II reference 😂 I want to have fun with the text, but I need to be careful that it doesn’t look out of place, as most people won’t see the reference.
I think being a game master for a lot of TTRPG campaigns in a lot of different TTRPG systems is a nice midpoint between being a player and being a designer It forces you to think about mechanics like a designer, and requires you to do actual level/encounter design, but you don't need to do everything from scratch and you don't have to muck about with anything technical, you can just focus on design.
As a developer, I would love to be part of the discord! Have an educational game that I just finished for an educational platform and some stuff on itch, still working on a bigger game's demo and would love to have you review it when the time is there. All the best with your channel! Great content as always!
Excellent! I think the Patreon links for Discord membership are on the vid description. When it comes to the reviews, I have quite a backlog at the moment so my strategy is to play them on streams and then work out which games go together for longer conceptual videos.
Thank you for the detailed review! It’s too bad you didn’t get to try out the gem system to gain new attacks but that’s on me to adjust the pacing. I’ll focus on improving those weaker areas and aim to have a better demo ready by the end of the year. And about that library sign, that was a bug 😅
Most interesting thingy in this game for me is the Daily Gift mechanic. Maybe it could be balanced around a calendar system with a time limit. If you take your time in the game you’ll get more gifts but you might be too late to finish quests?
I think the combat system has real potential as a mobile game, could be cool to even make combos with timed reactions. Perhaps shrinking the rpg scope so that it fits the combat better.
It definitely gets deeper later on, with more moves etc. but it was hard to get there for me. When I do play this kind of game, unless its a Diablo hack-and-slash, I'm playing it for the world and characters. And too much of the story side of things here felt very thin, like Runescape or something.
I liked the UI. Based on a screenshot from the steam page it does look like the combat expands a bit. They probably need to speed up progression by a lot.
@@BrannoDev yeah totally. There are screenshots of a combat scene where it looks like you have more things to do or manage. This is just way too slow to get to the fun.
I think a point that anyone making a game with combat, in any form, really needs to take away is this - if you are not giving the player choices to make during the combat, it is going to be very, very boring for the player. Whether that takes shape in thought-out, strategic options like in a deep turn based RPG, or faster-paced combat where the pmayer has to decide whether to make a quick, light attack, a slower, heavier attack, or to block or dodge. The point of a game is that it is interactive, and the player can make choices in that medium to reach the goal. If you're just clicking attack until the enemy or the player dies, that's really not a choice. It's just a dull button pressing exercise. Take the time to flesh out some mechanics that promote making decisions to create the outcome the player desires, it will be worth it in the end.
Reminds me of old browser flash games like Dragon Fable and Sonny, but what made those games fun is the progression and trying out different builds, not sure if this project will have that level of mechanical depth.
While you get better stats with better equipment. The main mechanic for builds are gems (represents your move set) that you attach to your equipments. So there's a bit of depth 🙂
One important thing with quippy writing: generally don't make the creator the butt of the joke, because then it does two things you don't want: It signals insecurity in a way that can weird out the audience for your media, and it sort of puts people in the mindset of looking at the content pessimistically. "I guess our creator was a little lazy" could be replaced with, say, "At least my self-portrait is perfect". The premise of the joke is the same, but it keeps the framing of the joke in-universe, which is especially useful for a more surreal world like this.
I also think that it's always a good idea that, if you give players consumables to start with, give them more than 1 type. Don't just give them healing apples, give them a consumable that gives a buff or does an attack that's impressive by "literally the first minutes of the game" standard. It helps them immediately get into the decisionmaking process if they care to, instead of Dr Joe's kind of "I'm just hitting attack, then".
I am also a huge fan of action commands in strategy RPGs like this, but something rubs me the wrong way about the idea that they might appear inconsistently, and I'm not really sure why. Perhaps it's because it's a middle point between engaging me actively and engaging me passively? Like, if I "lean back" so to speak, I'll get punished by the occasional missed attack trigger, but if I "lean forward" I'll end up mentally prepping for a thing that didn't show up.
Related to the writing, I think the descriptions on interactibles need work; if I walk up to a bucket of water and I can interact with it, I don't want the game to say "it's a bucket of water", I want at least something like "It's a bucket of water, probably important for blacksmithing" so it feels like there's someone being characterized or some world elements being explained. The only kinda-exception I have is when it's an item used for a quest you're not at yet, like if later in the game you'll have a moment of "the building is on fire" or the like, so remembering there is a bucket of water over there is important - although I'd definitely save that for when you're not going to go long between first introduction of the area and the scenario that asks you to recall where you can find water.
Dr Joe talks about the connection between shapes and dreams not really being there, and I definitely see a path in the form of making it a world where things are more abstract, but that direction doesn't mesh too well with the very visually complete library dream we're shown; there's definitely something to be said here about finding the art direction to do it - making the real world more detailed would allow a more minimalist and abstract dream world to stand out, for example - but even without an overhaul like that, such a direction would be greatly emphasized with just careful consideration of "what makes this seem like less of a solid physical library and more of the idea of a library stripped down"
@endorb Thank you for your detailed comment and suggestions! I’ll definitely work hard to address the points that have received recurring criticism.
I also like the idea of a stripped-down world during the dream state. Creating "low-poly" versions of the assets shouldn’t be too difficult or time consuming. I’ll give it a try and see if it adds something interesting to the game.
Missed this comment - these are all great ideas! Yeah, anything you can do to make the dream feel more dreamy rather than just a place you've been teleported to, would be great.
Vigorously tipping my hat to that ›They Live‹ edit and that list of beginner’s questions at the end. Both had me pause the video to grant my laughter proper space.
19:45 i believe it is a reference to an NPC in "Zelda II: The Adventure of Link" who says "I am Error".
I love JRPGs and i played tons of them, and i played tons of indie and game maker or rpg maker ones too, and a few common issues keep coming from those: a lot of them have no focus on the story or the plot. They have a character at the start of the game where it break the 4th wall with a cring joke or even represent the maker himself. and a alot of crashes, usually games made by rpg maker get outdated fast and break often on newer machines but they aren't stable even at their time, i believe some of them have null pointers unhandled errors or something.
when i play jrpg i really care about how the fight feel and what's my character\s are thinking and the story or plot, if the characters are not interesting neither the story nor what i am doing than even gameplay won't convince me to keep playing. i know some indie jrpg really tried to make an epic story or epic adventure just to fall flat cause the dialog is too long or not fun, or the crashes make you want to stop and never come back, or the characters are completly void of feeling and agency.
i won't lie though, sometimes a light story and a clear plot is all what i need to keep playing, i played once a game that have less than a half page of story and plot and i enjoyed it somewhat and continue playing much longer than i expected: "ohh no my town on fire, who's that? a dragon? ohh no it need help their homeland is been attacked by demons! the hero and dragon became friend! let's go to this dungeon and get stopped by this boss!" etc etc, but again i might played it much longer than a game that have a long and boring story and it crashes here and there but i couldn't carry myself to finish it cause the story parked on the sideway in 15 mins and made the plot take the rest of the game with tideous fitch quests and dungeons with one boss at the end over and over till i shut it down for good.
making an interesting RPG with turns and twists and interesting gameplay takes a lot of efforts indeed, and i am sure it required a lot of sacrifices too, what i mean if you wrote a novel for the game to make it interesting it will be a huge task how to represent it in the game and what to cut off to make it fit the scope and the screen, the art need a lot of work to make the game look unique, a lot use free generic assets which make them look cheap cause a lot of games uses same assets ( i use them as well) cause they are cheap, i am glad that this game look different just because it is different in this case.
i didn't try this game by myself to judge it cause i can't tell how the fight feel, how the transition feels and if the start of the game is interesting enough for me to hope to see more or not. but from what i saw i don't think the story nor hte plot is going anywhere interesting anytime in the game, which is kinda sad, it is obvious there is some effort place in making this game with the puzzles and cutsences and fight mechanics.
Thank you for catching this Zelda II reference 😂
I want to have fun with the text, but I need to be careful that it doesn’t look out of place, as most people won’t see the reference.
Yeah it's maybe a bit early in the game to "spend" that sign on making that kind of reference which 5% of people will get.
I think being a game master for a lot of TTRPG campaigns in a lot of different TTRPG systems is a nice midpoint between being a player and being a designer
It forces you to think about mechanics like a designer, and requires you to do actual level/encounter design, but you don't need to do everything from scratch and you don't have to muck about with anything technical, you can just focus on design.
As a developer, I would love to be part of the discord! Have an educational game that I just finished for an educational platform and some stuff on itch, still working on a bigger game's demo and would love to have you review it when the time is there. All the best with your channel! Great content as always!
Excellent! I think the Patreon links for Discord membership are on the vid description.
When it comes to the reviews, I have quite a backlog at the moment so my strategy is to play them on streams and then work out which games go together for longer conceptual videos.
Thank you for the detailed review! It’s too bad you didn’t get to try out the gem system to gain new attacks but that’s on me to adjust the pacing.
I’ll focus on improving those weaker areas and aim to have a better demo ready by the end of the year.
And about that library sign, that was a bug 😅
@@TheUnsupported I hope it gets a bunch more players. I think we just need a quicker on-ramp to more of the combat features.
Most interesting thingy in this game for me is the Daily Gift mechanic. Maybe it could be balanced around a calendar system with a time limit. If you take your time in the game you’ll get more gifts but you might be too late to finish quests?
@@kuku7732 repeatedly drugging myself and sleeping in chibi Jeff Goldblum’s pixel-bed to get my daily prize with increased regularity
@@IndieGameClinic I’m on that sleep grind 😴
@@kuku7732 dreamsmaxxxing
Hello Kate
@@diredier I hope you waved at the screen
I think the combat system has real potential as a mobile game, could be cool to even make combos with timed reactions. Perhaps shrinking the rpg scope so that it fits the combat better.
It definitely gets deeper later on, with more moves etc. but it was hard to get there for me. When I do play this kind of game, unless its a Diablo hack-and-slash, I'm playing it for the world and characters. And too much of the story side of things here felt very thin, like Runescape or something.
I liked the UI. Based on a screenshot from the steam page it does look like the combat expands a bit. They probably need to speed up progression by a lot.
@@BrannoDev yeah totally. There are screenshots of a combat scene where it looks like you have more things to do or manage. This is just way too slow to get to the fun.
I think a point that anyone making a game with combat, in any form, really needs to take away is this - if you are not giving the player choices to make during the combat, it is going to be very, very boring for the player. Whether that takes shape in thought-out, strategic options like in a deep turn based RPG, or faster-paced combat where the pmayer has to decide whether to make a quick, light attack, a slower, heavier attack, or to block or dodge. The point of a game is that it is interactive, and the player can make choices in that medium to reach the goal. If you're just clicking attack until the enemy or the player dies, that's really not a choice. It's just a dull button pressing exercise. Take the time to flesh out some mechanics that promote making decisions to create the outcome the player desires, it will be worth it in the end.
Reminds me of old browser flash games like Dragon Fable and Sonny, but what made those games fun is the progression and trying out different builds, not sure if this project will have that level of mechanical depth.
While you get better stats with better equipment. The main mechanic for builds are gems (represents your move set) that you attach to your equipments. So there's a bit of depth 🙂
dont you know flatland ?