I've finally uploaded a demo for my RPG Amethyst. :)

Although there are quite a few areas where this game can and will be polished, I'm kind of running out of enough free time to work on it at the moment, so I thought I would release what I have completed. Be sure to read the readme.html included for known issues, an introduction, etc. :)

A big, big, thanks to Gannon who played through this demo before anyone else and gave some excellent feedback on ways to improve it.

Enjoy!

Amethyst Demo(Now hosted using v-rpg love :D)

That's Toen's bootup, btw.

Yes, Toen is a sexy man, who made a sexy splashscreen.

It's Syn :

Wow, I dunno what is up with your work Rysen but it always gets me all happy. I just went through the intro so my feedback is based on the little I saw. But I will probably post some more after.

1- First thing I noticed is what Omni pointed out, the polished feel of the game. It seems you didn't rush through any part and even if you did, it doesn't show which is a real feat.

2- The sprite I saw up until now are beautiful, their look and feel are simply wow. I mean, they each have a unique and original look that fits many personalities. Often amateur RPG makers make a bunch of uninterested bunch of general looking people that all have the same feel (Cool, funny, badass, heroic, interesting, cute... etc)

4- The horse art was like super. I think there is a lack of any horse art in rpg games(they seem present but never much in a majestic way), must have been some work getting the anatomy just right.

5- The minigame off the bat was cool. And kept me trying hitting the enter key like crazy, lol.

6- The slight differences in NPCs made the castle academy thingie feel real and rich with characters.

7- Although I quickly breezed through part of the demo, from the snipets i got, the dialogue seems pretty good. Something a lot more deep then random 'Eat my blade! RAW!' crap.

8- The music, now i hope you didn't think i would forget that. Obviously the tracks helped ambiance and feel of the scenes. The music seriously hits the mark everytime up until now and I hoping to hear more. I gets shiver just listening to the music in the bg as i'm writing this. This is professional work people.

9- Did I mention the sprites rock?

Now I do have suggestion and things to point out. Lol, I hope I don't say anything that will annoy you.

1. The main thing are the tiles, some are to square like and some feel out of place with others. I dunno if they were done by the same person but for example in Sean's room, the barrel over the treasure chest clashed with each other.

2. I noticed the chest on the right bed in Sean's room is over the entities, dunno if it's only in the flammed up part of the plot, since I noticed it there.

3. I'm thinking the game might have some avatars, maybe just for the menus. It would really add to the feel you are trying to get. But i'm not a 100% sure about that, since it depends on the artists style, i mean it has to fit with the game feel and character' personalities. I would offer my assistance if wanted, although I dunno if my skills are enough lol.

4. In the runaway wagon mini scene I would have the brunette move around and have more expressions while the thing is happening and have a loop of animation when Sean is trying to catch up to her. It would add much more effect to the arrival of Sean if she is kinda freaking out graphically before he makes his entrance.

5. The flashback death of the girl Ami seemed to be gratuitous. I would have loved it to be better exploited and also keep some part more mysterious. It just seemed like boom, you dead. I was surprised since other scenes were taking their time. Btw, the people fighting in the main hall look like Jedi knights with lightsabers, lol.

I'm currently in the prison and am writting this at that moment, so I still have to pass through that and replay while looking at the text boxes instead of the art, lol. I will add other comments later, but all in all this is a quality work and i hope, and i mean HOPE you continue this. Or i will haunt you for the last of your days.

Wow. Thanks Syn. I'm going to respond to all your points , point by point.

The Good:
1 - I didn't really rush anything no...and I spent a long time on all the scenes, fixing dialogue, adding tidbits here and there, etc. With my music, for example, I have this habit of listening to one part over and over again fixing the tiniest things until I'm content, and then once I complete a song I listen to it over and over again...just to make sure I'm still happy with it. I think I took that attitude towards creating the different aspects of this game.

2 - The sprites are what took the longest for the most part. I worked hard on the main characters, but didn't spend as much time on the other sprites. I used CT characters for animations, so I cannot take credit for those, just the overall look of each character, and truly Jessica (My old artist), who helped design the characters was a great source of inspiration.

4 (What happened to 3? :P) - I cannot take any credit for the horse except placing Sean on top of it. That horse is a straight rip from Romancing SaGa 3. So thank you but, a professional did that.

5 - hehe, I loved the mini-game. I had just finished FFIX before I started thinking about how I could make the game start off with a bang, and it hit me: A mini-game! I loved the mini-games in FFIX, and I always wanted to have a horse in the beginning of Amethyst, so I put the two together. :)

6 - I felt I cheated a bit with the NPC's by using the old 'change the hair colour' trick. ;P But thank you.

7 - I spent a lot of time on dialogue...as I said the story and characters are what draw me to RPG's so I tried my best to make sure mine was good. :)

8 - Thank you for the compliments on the music. That's my favourite part of game creation and what I aspire to do as a career. Again, if the music is what stands out the most then I'm extremely happy. :)

9 - Thank you. :P

The Bad:
1 - Tiles are really not my strong suit. If at all possible I grab them from other resources (Such as RPG Maker, other games, etc.) so it really isn't surprising that that would be a point of criticism. Now if someone were to say, oh I don't know, offer to redo my maps using more original tiles, hey, I wouldn't complain. ;)

2 - I'll look into that one.

3 - There are actually avatars, I just couldn't put them anywhere. If you look in the Pics/Char folder you'll see a few portraits made by Jessica. She made them back when I was still using v2 (so they were limited to 256 colours), and were fairly big. I tried to resize them, but they didn't look very good, but then again I'm no artist.

4 - Again, I'm no artist. I would have loved to have Charity doing more in the way of animated terror but...everything I tried looked bad. But if someone were to, Oh I don't know....;P

5 - Yes, the death scene wasn't executed at all like I had wanted....again, my artistic handicap made it difficult to make it the way I really wanted to...but it was an important event that had to be shown to understand Sean's character a bit. It'll come back into play later on in the story a few more times.

As for the Jedi thing, my brother said the same thing. haha


Again thank you for the wonderful comments and feedback. It's stuff like this that not only helps me to improve my games, but also gives me inspiration to work on them more.
cheers!

Edit:
And thank you RPGking, I'm glad you enjoyed it. :) Making the game more GamePad friendly is on my Things to Do list, but I'll make it more of a priority. :)

Cool!

Gayo:
I agree completley that the learn system is flawed in many ways, and I am currently thinking about ways that I can improve it and make it more meaningful. My reasons, initially, for the four spell limit was because I didn't want people learning more powerfull spells right away, but it hadn't occured to me that the high MP cost for the more powerfull spells would defer players from actually using them early on. I think I'll take the magic level idea out.

Omni:
1. No worries there. I've used HookKey for so long that I hadn't even considered to see what 'HookButton' does, but if my assumptions are correct then that'll probably solve the menu opening woes.

2. I never actually put that anywhere in the readme or the tutorial...heh :P That text function is actually really old, aside from the slight modifications to make it more V3 friendly, so it completely slipped my mind that I should make mention that it can do that. It's just always been there. :P But I remember it was one of the first things I did in VERGE that I thought was really cool. :P

3. That's not dumb at all and a very good suggestion that I eventually would like to have in place. Thanks for reminding me. :)

That's pretty cool about playing it on TV though...hehe, I'll have to try that some time. ^_^

1. Yeah, I've all ready mentioned how flawed I feel the learn system truly is. It was just something different than the 'reach a certain level learn x spell'. I am working on ways in which to improve it, but that subtype idea sounds interesting....

2. As I said in the news post I hate my damage algorthms. They don't work well at all, but aside from using D&D rules it was difficult for me to find any useful articles on them...but those are going to be refined for sure.

3. I am aware of most of the layer issues now, but the picture thing is there on purpose. That is actually a *real* picture of *me*. ;) One of those little jokes game devers seem to like to put in from time to time.

4. Thank you. Yeah, there are a lot of cliché's, and probably will be in the rest of the plot as well, but the world is much bigger than just those two Kingdoms and the beginning is somewhat insignificant in the grand scheme of things....:)

I certainly appreciate the offer for contributions in any form to this game and understand your position as a devoted artist. To be honest I can't really dedicate a whole lot of time to this game right now (whence the somewhat quick release), so it really wouldn't be fair to anyone that decided to join my team anyway. This feedback alone will help tremendously however, so a big thanks to everyone for all the help and enthusiasm.

Hey, some thoughts on the learn system. Someday if VERGE gets finished and the libs are done and all I'll write an article just about ability systems, but for now:

Your current system is built around the seed of a good idea. However, you have to realize that there are middlegrounds between 'make everything available right away' and 'force near-complete linearity.' First of all, the least complicated method: you could force a person to learn at least two of the spells in each level before moving on to the next. This allows him to pick and choose to some extent while not forcing a completely linear growth pattern.

Now, you might want to add more chances for customization, which I think is a very good idea. Here's another alternative that allows for that: this is looking pretty FF-ish, so most of the good spells are probably higher forms of the simpler spells. You could make it so the chance to learn Firaga (or whatever) only appears when you learn Fire, and so on. This is sort of how FFX-2 handles things, if you played that. A more formal method of doing the same thing is to have trees or paths. Like, take traditional FF-style white magic. There are three broad categories: restorative spells, buffs, and indirect-offensive stuff like Scan, Slow, and Holy. These could be grouped into three paths where you need to move up the path gradually, so you could put all your focus on improving at restorative and be only OK (or even terrible) at the other two, or you could sacrifice power for versatility and boost all paths at the same rate, and so on. Thus, progression is more or less linear, but there are several 'tracks' to follow. The most advanced option in this vein is a tree system like Geas uses, with multiple prerequisites for some abilities and multiple child abilities for others.

In short: Complete linearity is bad, because there's no hope of customization. Complete non-linearity also bad, because it fucks with your game's power balance. Middleground is good!

That's pretty similar to my suggestions, except with the added complication of 'blocking' paths that aren't initially taken. I dunno how I feel about that. There's only going to be one person with each skillset from the looks of it, and I like to have the option to sacrifice power for versatility.