I'm confused, I got the quest Make Connections! where I have to find 3 girls, but where do I start? because the quest log says Location: VIP Lounge, but I don't get the option to start the quest there.
Are they outside Dark Delight? because I can't find them there either
Also, there is some invisible force right here to the "Docks"
View attachment 2213610
Edit: So, they are out in town, there is an exit to the left that is available and now everything is going forward.
+1 to this - I immediately ran into this issue as well. The guard's text directly suggests this is the way to a transit station, but no dice - no entrance or transition screen, and worse, it looks like there should be.
Issues:
1) Major issue with the palette choices - it is
very hard to discern what is background and what isn't, and the janky positioning of tiles doesn't help this. You've chosen some interesting weather effects (which is great), less great is that telling a wall tile from a pavement tile is difficult. e.g. take a look at the 1st Western area, the pavement tile is exactly the same color as wall. This is bad.
2) You need to either color code exits better, increase tile size (the window is extremely small scale for some reason) or add "the infamous glowing sparkles of RPGM". My 1st quest states: "
Find the 'anomaly' in the Maze behind Dark Delight": after 10 minutes of just trying to brute force all tiles north of the Dark Delight, I am still at a loss at where this Maze entrance is supposed to be. This is not helped by
every single window in the first map being interactable with: you've managed to show the player that
any random tile might be interacted with, with no way of telling which they are, which is terrible game design.
3) NPCs block single tile pathways
constantly. This is bad. Really bad. Either double the size of all your roads or make NPCs transitional: I don't have the patience to wait 1-3 mins for RNG to allow me to pass a background NPC who is just flavor who happens to be blocking the only exit out of a map.
Add these three immediate issues together and you've immediately alienated your potiential player: I'd suggest doubling the path width on all the maps and adding sparkles until you can at least add neon graphics or *something* to aid the player.
Other than that: the art style is good, the "read the conversations to get +points" is novel & raises the bar for RPGM dialogue by several notches as the text isn't painful to read (and the world building, if a little cliched, is good); the scene art is
fantastic and the NPCs (although, ofc being monster-girl tropes) well characterized. The background management looks at least interesting but I've not play tested it. Moreover, you've managed to provide a decent reason for the management and made it a core goal, which is mature game design (and something sadly most AAA titles are forgetting in the "Ubisoftization" of world building). So major +1 for that.
Having read other feedback, it looks like battle balancing is off and you've fallen into a grind-trap: I'll provide feedback on these once I've encountered them (and it won't be positive if the grind is horrific).
~
Other than that, looks a very distinct and interesting game: if you can iron out the niggles that immediately assault the player that is.
Edit:
Holy crap... I found the maze entrance, selected a short / easiest mission and my 1st battle (2nd node) was with 7+ creatures who wiped my party of two in a single round.
Uffffff. That's really rough & bad. Having >3 enemies in a RPGM game is good. Not doing the whole "your 1st dungeon is going to be slimes who don't fight back" is fne. Insta-ganking a level 2 team in the 1st round is
not. Rough as fuck.
On a reload to check, I managed to RNG the new Party Member on my 2nd node which was lucky: but the 1st battle is still this:
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That's 8 mobs (some of whom appear to be 100% resistant to melee, at least two of which who have AoEs)
in my first battle, and who can easily wipe the party in a single round. That needs a
lot of work, sorry to say. [Note: the last RPGM game I played was "Monster girl 1000" which has extremely tough battle mechanics wise and has suffered heavily from 'over-development of battles vrs content' so I'm not unused to these JPRG mechanics (MG1000 is practically built on "trick fights" and extremely specific requirements for interrupts etc in the later content). But right out of the gate, your mob DPS is massively larger than it should be by a factor of about 4 and you've not even introduced any tank / blocking / mitigating tutorial battles - not helped
at all by disallowing saves mid-mission either].
TL;DR Holy crud: don't do that to your new players, esp. without any equipment / mitigation mechanics.
Minor bug: Pepper is referred to as a "cat girl" in the 1st conversation (herb shop), everywhere else she's a frog girl (?!). +100 points immediately if she has a long prehensile tongue in any of the scenes for future reference.
