Lands of Ambustio

First of all, thank you for playing my game and thank you for the feedback you left! I really appreciate it.

A few thoughts that came to mind while reading your comment:

Well, i can see what you were trying to do with this game but i don’t 100% like it, so i’ll start, the random encounters are annoying and there’s no way to adjust encounter rate,i know you are trying to emulate old rpgs but that doesn’t mean you have to follow the rules to the book,and with that comes grinding,i wouldn’t mind it as much if the forest dungeon enemy didn’t hit so hard..i even encountered a world map encounter with a lot of enemies so i didn’t even bother with that..

Both exp and stats growth are balanced in a way that requires you to have fought at least a certain number of encounters before the boss, so leaving it up to the player to alter the encounter rate could be detrimental. The game itself was designed to minimize unwanted encounters. For instance, you can Escape any battle (except boss encounters of course) with 100% success and once you completed a dungeon you can use the teleport to instantly move between entrances avoiding any further waste of time. But, yeah, I agree that an option to adjust the encounter rate would have been nice to have.
Regarding the overall game difficulty: there are 6 tiers of equipment, you start with Tier 1 which is the weakest, and going through the Forest Dungeon with only Tier 1 equip should be doable but really hard. You can get Tier 2 equip (which is a vast improvement over Tier 1) from enemies you encounter on the World Map (which are so weak that they go down with a hit or two). You don’t need a full set of Tier 2 gear to clear the Forest Dungeon but drops rates from encounters are pretty generous so it’s relatively quick and easy so it’s easy to collect all pieces. The problem is, there’s nothing to help the player understand this system. Maybe some more explanation (like a short text tutorial) would have helped.

The game is pretty basic in terms in combat, no fancy mechanics,basic skills..it makes the game a little generic since there have been many that have done the same but maybe others won’t mind.

I agree. This is the first I made a game almost from scratch using RPG Maker so it ended up kinda basic. For my next game, I’ll try to strike a balance between classic and experimental.

The Graphics are pretty nice althought not 100% perfect and there are some weird enemies…like rocks..ants and floating stones that hit hard..

Yes, some of the enemy designs are a little lazy, especially the ones at the beginning of the game.

There’s also the imbalance in some skills being weaker than the basic attack itself..what? you throw a rock and it does like 7 DMG, you hit with the bow you do like 80 DMG.

I feel like that’s caused by my design not being able to properly communicate my design to the player. If a special attack is weak then it’s meant to be used mainly for its side effects. For instance, the skill “Stone” has a 50% probability of confusing the target. The small amount of damage it causes is just for show.

It’s also weird that the healer can do quite a lot of DMG vs not so armored enemies, almost as much as the blonde character.

Each party member starts with similar stats and begins to specialize when they reach level 12-15. The blond character is supposed to have a tank role and so his stats and equips are more balanced towards defense and HP than attack.

Overall it’s not a terrible game but could use a little more polish in terms of combat,art maybe but it’s not mandatory. I would have liked to see something unique in terms of combat, like how Bravely Default has it’s Brave that gives you extra hits(just an example). That’s all i had to say, good luck with the game dev and have fun!

Thank you again for leaving me such a detailed feedback. I will be sure to keep it in mind when I’ll work on my next game!