Splitting this up to respond to the individual bits.
0.4
Lothario Ranch, if you go into the door it gets you stuck.
Lothario doesn't have a ranch, so I just checked all the doors on all his maps, and couldn't find any that don't transfer the player correctly. If you mean Viridius' ranch, I literally just finished reworking that section today (and double checked a few other things as I'm writing this just to be safe), so that should be fixed for the next release. If you didn't mean Viridius' ranch and something in Lothario's Estate is still broken, do you mind being more specific so I can find and fix that?
Shop keep shows up at the Uncle's mansion to talk but she isn't in the party, I thought she was always at the MC's mansion.
I couldn't find Emily anywhere in the uncle's mansion. Could you be more specific on where you saw her? It's possibly she got copy/pasted somewhere and I'm missing her.
Had a one off crash after playing the game for a while, heading to the Uncle's special room to rest and heal up, game crashed during a transition phase, fully closing.
That's not good. I haven't had that particular issue happen to me and I can't see any bugs or errors in the events, so I can't say what might've caused it, but I'll look further into it and see if I'm able to replicate the issue and figure out how to address it.
The maps are too large, mansions are the size of multiple villages combined and with things hidden and no map or way to cross out a visited room, it is just tedious moving around. Something that would be beneficial would be if all the stuff that was in the zone is done, like all mobs dead, all secrets found/visited/looted, then you can just skip past the zone.
This is also something I'm starting to implement, and some bits of it already exist. As the story progresses, different areas will present fast travel options so you don't have to move through the transition zones every time you want to go somewhere. I'm still working on another solution that'll allow for some direct teleportation.
5 minor game things, the antidote giving says they may be able to move after a large amount, but without knowing the amount how can the player do it? Also after the hold where phoebe says she wants to check on the special rock, the player may have cleared 3 holds by then, might want to tell the players that the previous holds didn't have it, rather than being new story/mechanic you might have missed out on. Exiting the tree changing hold, sometimes the large tree is half there and is missing 1/4 of the top of it. One of the grand throne like chairs had 2 small blue pixels below it, larder still has a rat hole yet the rest of the house is fixed.
For the bit about giving antidotes to the Ventire trader: Part of the issue with that is that I haven't decided exactly how many antidotes that is yet. That part of the game was a bit rushed to try to meet a Halloween weekend release, and I'm going back through and giving that section of the game more attention in the coming weeks. The other part is that it's an attempt to have gameplay support narrative. You have magic that can make poison go away, these people don't. You also have a way to get more when they don't. Who cares how many it takes if you're saving lives? Not to dismiss your feedback, it's a valid point, but to me it's equally arbitrary to not specify a number as it is to say "exactly 16 more <likes and prayers> before we <do the thing>!"
For the bit about the special rock: I recognize that I have a tendency to be verbose, and I've already gotten a lot of feedback about wanting a text skip. I didn't want to dump a load of exposition for something that's not immediately relevant. You're right that it could probably be revisited though. An explanation for that exists, but isn't presented well.
For the tree: I checked them all and couldn't find any bugs. That's something else I'll have to try to replicate to figure out what I can do about it.
For the throne: I checked all my tilesets and couldn't find any loose blue dots. Did you encounter this in only one place, or everywhere you saw that particular sprite? If only in one place, where specifically?
For the rat hole: That's on purpose. It was left open to funnel the rats there for the Extermination event, and at that point in the story there's no more scrap stone left to fill it. It'll get fixed when the rest of the walls get fixed.
As mentioned old software just is more problems for the players. Also windows hates and doesn't trust the extraction. I really suggest you acquiring MV or MZ, especially if you are trying to learn to code on these since the language changes over time. Don't get me wrong excellent games can be made on this software. This is in Japanese
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This dude made a side scroller beat em up and shmup on VX, and they play really good.
I fully understand and recognize the benefits and advantages that come with newer software. I think "use newer software" is the most common feedback I've gotten (hotly contested by "needs text skip"), and it's all valid feedback. If I could afford to, I would, but as I have no current income, it's not an expense I can justify. I'll likely make the purchase as soon as I
can justify the expense, but unless this project suddenly starts making a lot of money, I can't say when or if that will happen. In the mean time, I'm working with the tools I have (I got VX Ace as part of a humble bundle years ago, so it was basically free), and I don't mind the extra challenge the older software presents. Thinking on it, I should probably include that in the README, since I'm adding a bit of Q&A to it anyway.
As far as Windows goes, I've gotten those alerts since long before F95Zone was around. I know what it is and I trust it. If anyone else doesn't know what it is or doesn't trust it (in reference to any .exe, not just mine), I encourage them to either learn what the .exe is and if it's trustworthy, or ask a trustworthy source for more information. I am more than happy to answer those questions. I realize that isn't helpful to anyone at the moment they're clicking on it, but there's nothing I can do about how RPG Maker packages games outside of making the offered product less secure.
I'm also at least a little familiar with excellent games being made in VX Ace. My hope is that this game will eventually be counted among them.
There is so much the game being a walking simulator and a maze everywhere, also puzzles you can't actually see to solve. Take Lothario's attic chest, it is purely trial and error to solve it, there are no paths you can see, items you can use to mark paths, differences in the look of the crates, you have 3 or 4 holes and sometimes the camera scrolls. Similarly with the Tree vanish hold, being you can't see what changes and that some of the trees are now able to be walked through it makes the thing frustrating. With the Uncle's key, there are clues but the player doesn't have a way to sort them via time frame and the one that says "nearby" it is nowhere nearby her, also one person mentions to check behind things so that makes the player think they now have to click on every desk in every room which includes door opening animations you have to wait for. There are a lot of hidden things which is cool, I have yet to find the talking plant, but when maps are gargantuan then no one is going to search every nook and corner.
I've gotten that feedback before as well. As far as maps being too large, some of that is deliberate, some of it is losing track of the sense of scale. Hopefully the newer maps are better about that, but if they're not, feel free to call out specific examples so I can make improvements.
As far as the wilds being constantly maze-like, that's mostly deliberate, though after re-playing some earlier sections as I revisit older content to rework, I noticed that some of the "magic" I accidentally captured is missing from newer maps. It's very high on my to-do list to revisit some map structure and either change or add things to make maps more interesting and meaningful to explore, instead of having all these no-reason labyrinth maps that just sort of exist. I've already got one map that I want to be smaller and didn't get to it for v0.4 due to time constraints, and more that I want to revisit for various reasons.
Some of the puzzles I'm not particularly happy with, others are deliberately obtuse. It's difficult to find a balance when you know the solution for the puzzle you're trying to test. The example you gave for the one in Lothario's attic is supposed to be a blind maze, with the few gaps that are present being there because the map stops moving and it's impossible to tell if you're moving at all, otherwise the whole thing would be completely blind. The one with the vanishing trees is an example of one I'm not especially happy with. There should be trees that you can always see so that you can see that
something is happening, but there aren't really enough of them to make that super obvious. I have plans to rework that in the coming weeks as well, so hopefully it'll be better. Same with the uncle's key, I've been meaning to add more/better hints to that for a while, and it's near the top of my to-do list.
The enemies might be slightly over tuned, I fight everything and thus have whatever the max the characters can be as of now and can still easily lose maids to the new creatures. I can only imagine people who only fight what they have to being destroyed and getting frustrated.
That's something else that I have a little trouble testing. I've tested against every encounter with both gear and levels being as low as possible, and while it was certainly rough, I was able to clear all of the mandatory encounters, typically without needing to backtrack to rest. Trouble being, I've playtested everything so much that I've likely fallen into an "optimum playstyle" that makes things easier on me than someone who doesn't know the mechanics inside and out. For example, I was a level or two shy of the maximum for v0.4, and had no deaths and never needed to rest to reset.
The good news is that I did a massive equipment rebalance over the weekend, which will make the game a bit easier. Even if a player doesn't pick up/earn/buy any new equipment, things have higher defense values and better secondary stats. Equipment upgrades should also be more tangible and meaningful, and I intend to hide more equipment upgrades in the maps I want to revisit. I'll have to do more playtesting with some different party configurations just to double check some things, but this is the first bit of feedback I've gotten about the difficulty of the game, so I hope the changes I have in mind address any difficulty hikes. As a general message to anyone reading this, I'm a big fan of feedback, and you won't say anything worse than what I've already said to myself, so feel free to field even the most minor of grievances.
Wasn't sure on the Emily thing when it popped up asking in/out/first time, so I guess I missed a scene because I chose first time? I didn't get to see the text because of a glitch when it looked like it was staying black so I kept pressing the forward text button. Unsure what any of it was about.
You shouldn't have missed anything unless you saved the game after moving forward and continuing through the next conversation, where Melissa sends the others inside. Unless you mean something glitched and you didn't get the full "end of version" message, in which case it should repeat every time you try to approach the gate from within the Estate walls. I'll have to see if I can rework the event for that a bit, it wasn't behaving particularly well the first few times I made it, so it might be in a "barely working" state instead of a "working as intended" state.
I'm curious why you're referring to it as "the Emily thing" though. Emily shouldn't be involved in that event at all, unless I'm misunderstanding which part you're referring to. Just to do my due diligence, does Emily appear after the "end of v0.4" message for you (outside of her shop), or are you meaning to refer to someone else, like Jenny or Willow?
Ella feels like she got thrown to the wayside, Alice is the new healer who does the job better. Sure they are different with Ella having special spells, but both of them hit like paper and you only really need to keep your HP up in most fights, Alice healing costs something that you don't need rest or special items to refill.
Yeah, I can see that. To be fair, she's intended to be the sort of party member you want on hand, but not necessarily on the front lines, so I guess the ludonarrative intention landed exactly where it was supposed to? Things will also change with her as the story advances, and I've got systems in mind that will compensate for low stats, provided I can make them work the way I want. If they do work, you should be able to use whatever characters you like the best instead of whoever functions the best. It's hard to test late game things when the late game doesn't exist yet.
Though this did bring my attention to something that I
could test, and brought something to light that I had missed until now, so thanks for saying something. I've now got a handful of potential solutions written down to start testing.
I would suggest looking at some YouTube for good game making practices.
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I've done and am still doing a lot of studying on game design (though most of that has been focused on narrative instead of development; I never expected myself to be the sole developer on a project, but here we are), but I'm always down to learn more. I watched a bit of the channel in between hunting for the bugs you mentioned and writing this, and I'll definitely be watching more later.
Now with all of that said, I like the story you are trying to create, even if the name of the MC is not great and he seems dumb for having been purposely raised and tutored at his Uncle's.
I fully recognize that the MC is a bit of a moron. It's mostly on purpose. As much as there are reasons for it, I realize that those reasons aren't always made particularly apparent (aside from sometimes calling out that he's a terrible student and hates studying). Without getting too deep into it, the one throw-away line that addresses it is that Masters are "educated differently," meaning there's a very wide swathe of "real world knowledge" that they never learn because they're expected to have Servants for those things. Being a bad student on top of that results in the presented idiocy. As for his name, it started as a bad in-joke I have with myself, but I also wanted something exceptionally generic so that it'd be easier for the player to self-insert. Naming him after his title seemed appropriate at the time, and now I'm in too deep to change it.
Though this also brings up a narrative issue that I don't like hand-waving that I don't think I've talked about before. Specifically, your past and the character's past are not the same, and I can only present information starting at the beginning of the story. Making the character not especially book-smart was an easy way to excuse presenting information about the world that would be relevant to the player under the guise of educating the character (and also makes for some cheap jokes at his expense). At some point, I intend to write out a good deal more in-game books about these subjects and fill out the MC's library with them. And more issues of the nudie magazine with a dark secret, but I don't want to give away everything just yet.
Lastly, thanks! And sorry if this is a giant wall of text. (If you aren't somebodynobody and you read this whole thing, you're my kind of lurker. Keep being you.) I'm really glad you like the story, and extremely appreciative that you took the time to write all this out. This is my first (and currently only) public-facing project, and it means a lot to me that enough of it is resonating with anyone enough to inspire constructive criticism.
