VN RPGM Onhold Saria Reclaimed [v0.17] [Velminth]

2.40 star(s) 158 Votes
Sep 27, 2020
113
104
My guy, have you not considered that a healthy number of the people here do/did support him and are simply here for lack of reasonable alternatives? People who have withdrawn support obviously won't be posting on Patreon posts (and a good number of those comments are indeed negative), and from what I can see the dev is likely banning a shitload of people on Discord who simply disagree with him. So that leaves here, the platform formerly known as Twitter (weird place to be doing that though), the itchio page which I'm pretty sure he can delete comments from, and the Discord people are getting purged from for wrongthink.

That is, unless you're suggesting that all of the previous and current supporters with grievances are somewhere else, like maybe 4chan or something.
Thats wild. I didn't know this thing had so much lore behind it. I'm not on any discord server nor patreon for this guy. If I was in yall shoes i'd just stop supporting; I wouldn't berate the guy on a pirate website but I do understand the frustration if patreon supporters are being treated like this. From earlier posts the dev said the patreon community voted for the change to cards. anyways from a free stuff stand point im chillin.
 
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Exidel

Newbie
Nov 2, 2017
43
150
You are the guy that has been upset for more than half a year now about the game, and yet here you are in every other page, still here, still gurgling on my balls like a little dog ;)
Instead of getting on forums and arguing with people unhappy with your inability to stick to a single cohesive vision for your game and changing it every six months into something fewer and fewer people want to play, how about you stick to what you attest to be good at and make your goddamn game, because with the rate this is going, this entire game, and you as a result, REEK of the same stench that YandereDev puts off.

A complete and utter inability to deliver a product that people actually want to play, continuing to drip-feed content at an unsustainable rate while at the same time making major, sweeping changes to the game's mechanics that NOBODY but yourself asked for, all while continuing to make nearly $1,500 a month off of your almost 800 patreon backers who bafflingly PAY you to continue to jerk them around with your inability to focus on a single vision for a project.

I played every single build of this game up until you introduced the half-assed card system, at which point I simply stopped playing, and now you're changing the entirety of the game AGAIN to the extent that even your patreon backers are displeased. So do everyone here a favor for the holiday season, and either roll back the changes to either the original turn-based RPG mechanics, create a more fleshed out version of the card system that doesn't play like ass, or just do what you clearly want to do and abandon this project for something else and stop wasting everyone's time, and your backers money.

The minute you started taking money and donations for this project is the minute you opened yourself up to harsh criticism, so stop acting like a petulant child, pull the stick out of your ass, the pacifier from your mouth, and do your job.
 

JUDAEL

Member
Jul 8, 2017
182
386
Seriously peeps cooldown...
you're taking this as un update,....while it's clearly not..
This is a reboot,as you can see.
If this started with a new thread nothing would have happened.
I can't say i'm not disappointed of the choice, (since it will costs another 2-3 years of my life),but i still see a lot of potential in this anyway..
 

EyeoftheDark

New Member
Apr 25, 2018
12
36
Long time lurker, was just checking out to see if this thread updated with the new version of the game, and, uh...

Well, having actually personally tried to fiddle with RPGM's code for controlling complex mechanics and graphics both on map and in battle, I can understand wanting to throw everything out just because of how frustrating it is for it to just not work the way I want it to.

That being said, games like this, which start small, are really cool-looking and initially feel like they get a healthy amount of updates every month or so initially: often, if the project's updates grind down to a near-halt, I've seen it's because of one of the following things happened, usually:

1. Mismanagement of the workload: Essentially, at some point, major content updates just need so much new "stuff" that it takes a ridiculous amount of work (read: months) to add them properly. (Bonus points if the major content update replaces/removes existing content that isn't in dire need to be replaced/removed.)
"Stuff" being either lots of text, lots of new art, complex new mechanics, or something demanding like that...possibly all of the above at once.

Mechanics and most world assets in code really ought to be done well before the game is even revealed. If you're 4 years into your project and you suddenly need to create a bunch of new "stuff" that could probably be used to make an entirely new game instead, then you fucked up your development cycle.

How this relates here: We sort of saw this happening with the combat update a while back, which basically was taking a slightly modified system innate to RPGM, which also wasn't "that" broken, and replacing it with something more unique, but not all that much better. It felt like a very unnecessary change for me personally, that's for sure.
On a positive note, I was also there when this game was still using a top-down map instead of the "2d" map. That's a change that happened fast enough that it worked fine, because half the game's world hadn't been made in top-down by this point, so it didn't bog down the project for too long to have to replace them all with 2d maps.

2. Programming gets too frustrating: I've looked into the code of many RPGM games, mostly some abandoned ones like Despair Labyrinth or Succubus Covenant, and the reason they were abandoned becomes clear when you look at the game's design structure. They just...didn't do good game design/coding practices. It's just copy-paste walls of text for every different choice the player makes, or there needs to be 5000 Switches/Variables for all the little event differences they're trying to do. They also required buttloads of new art and dialogue for every new area, usually.
(I believe DLaby's last update infamously added a bit of story, new areas, and one new NPC with over a hundred images tied to his event...but you can only see them through specific circumstances. Oh, and no new actual enemies were added.)
(Similarly, Succubus Covenant had all this story, maps created for said story, lengthy ass cutscenes of said story, long prologue/tutorial and more...but then you start playing the game for real, and 70% of the maps you roam on are the template maps of RPGM. Wtf?)


Not that they're the only games that did that, and that it isn't possible to finish a game with those practices, but those games were often short, 1-2 hour gameplay experiences. The developer usually just wanted to make a small-time game, not letting ambition take over or something.
Thus, they never got bit in the fucking ass when, as a developer, you realize you need to update your old shit to make it work with your "new" ambitious stuff, and going through all those copy-pasted walls of code/text just becomes frustrating: either it's done properly that time (tedious, but the right thing to do) or the dev just keeps pulling the same shitty practice over and over, until there's so many things to keep track of that they just, usually, give up, because bug fixing, updating, and creating new stuff just becomes too frustrating to do.

(I might be speaking from personal experience here. I never revealed any of my failed projects though, so I at least never got anyone's hopes up for nothing...)

I should point out this game doesn't really have bad coding practices from what I've seen. They're probably a nightmare to update and keep track of, though.

3. Team conflict/Someone's being too much of an asshole: I think this one's self-explanatory. It's probably more common than the other 2, as it happens to projects of all levels, but it's not usually divulged to people outside the project. Usually.

Anyway, I'm kind of ranting at this point, and straying off topic, so I'm just gonna comment on what I think of the versions of this game I played.

TL;DR:
I like the look of the protagonist, she's very memorable.

I kind of get invested in the backstory choices, and thus the story, but they never seemed to matter as much as they should.

I like the implementation of voice in battle to some extent, problem is some clips don't make much sense with the situation, like Saria complaining about an injury when she's capable of one-shotting the targets easily.

I kind of wished the gameplay of this game had been focused strictly on RPGM combat, with physical attacks/skills being effective against some enemies and seduction/sex moves (some of which available from the start with proper backstory choices) being more effective against others.

The whole "if you lose all stamina, you get knocked down and can't do anything for several turns, and that's basically how 90% of the sex stuff is seen" thing never felt right with me, be it in the RPGM style or the card style. It just...doesn't work as a gameplay loop, and at some point you can get so strong the enemies cum before they can knock you down. I wish giving a blowjob to your enemy was just a thing you could do instead, without having to be forced into it.

The coyote enemies in the desert tempest area were always obnoxious, particularly in older versions.

Oh, and the fact the game feels much easier to naturally control with Keyboard only, yet one of the menus is locked (I think?) behind Mouse only controls always bothered me. The skill tree might've looked cool, but I never understood how the game could ever be long enough to ever need us to unlock so many moves, either.

Maybe most of my post involved stuff that was already answered previously or is no longer relevant, but I just wanted to get this off my chest. Ultimately, this game is carried hard by the artstyle and story setup for me, because the gameplay just never clicked with me like I hoped it would.
Merry Christmas.
 

Exidel

Newbie
Nov 2, 2017
43
150
Seriously peeps cooldown...
you're taking this as un update,....while it's clearly not..
This is a reboot,as you can see.
If this started with a new thread nothing would have happened.
I can't say i'm not disappointed of the choice, (since it will costs another 2-3 years of my life),but i still see a lot of potential in this anyway..

The dev is acting like a childish dickhead while he takes money for a project that he's clearly incapable of delivering.

He has this coming.
 

Xhianil

Member
Jun 23, 2017
122
158
Yea I'm going to have to be with most everyone else in this, if this update is meant as a improvement then it's done so by giving me more time in the day, as I'll not even play it anymore. This is a big time "What brain injury caused this?" update, and the devs reaction just has me thinking of other games/mods that end up abandoned because of similar stuff. Sad to see the game go down, but it happens.
 
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smegmaboyo

Member
Apr 16, 2019
130
233
Judging by Trello it looks like 0.16.5 is cancelled. So not even a compromise of what was there before, literally the only people who are left are the ones who just REALLY like Saria's design so much that even a jpg of her would make them happy.
 
2.40 star(s) 158 Votes