Surreality, an rpgmaker VX game with a FFXIII battle system

[ZacTheImpailer]

SURREALITY


Download Link
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=C2YFJW8H

Some Background info on the project

Spoiler

I originally posted this game on RPG revolution a few months back, It was my first official project advertised within the community. The first couple of comments I got were rather positive(apart from an argument I had with some bitchy weaboo over me using some japanese characters on the title to elude to the anime satire in my game. I mean seriously, if you say something slightly incorrect about anything to do with the land of the rising sun they'll rip you a new one!), I even seemed to have a diehard fan! :biggrin: So I rushed to get out a demo and in few weeks I posted it on the site, I posted it on both my thread and the front page, but didn't get much feedback, only a few bad ratings and no comments at all. I decided to reach out a bit and post it on RPGmaker.net but before I could get some proper feedback, I got my friend to test the game and that's when I realised that I screwed up and my game had a HUGE bug due to a last minute, very small mapping change. I declared the project dead and went back into the woods never to be seen, but recently I decided to re release a fixed, more polished version of the game just for kicks, so here we are, enjoy!

PS: I wasn't sure whether this was to go into the casual project thread or here as this project is officially on hold(although if intrest peaks for it, I will start developing it again) but I felt that it didn't really fit the description

Story

Spoiler

This game is essentially based around my vision of an anime/JRPG version of my own life. The story is supposed to be satirical and show the impractibility of such surreal fantasies if they ever came into contrast with reality(hence the name). The Basic plot of the game is purposely cliche and revolves around me and my friends getting sucked into a conspiracy involving magical artifacts and some evil organisation who we have to defeat to save the world (think organisation XIII from KH2). I'm not going into too much detail but the game is also going to have a theme of surrealness itself injectected into it, and you will experience a bit of this first hand in the demo. Also, please note that the characters based on real people are not supposed to be the real people themselves, rather Anime/JRPG reprensations off the real people, the names of these characters have been changed to fake names because of this.

Gameplay

Spoiler

The game essetially uses the FFXIII battle system for VX, but slightly modified to take away the auto battle command and focuses on the player making quick decisions rather than changing the flow of battle by changing roles(although this is still a MAJOR gameplay mechanic).

Images

Spoiler

 

[Necrile]

Looks decent. But why is a 20-30 minute demo 100mb? Kill the mp3's if thats what's doing it (at least until your full game comes out :P)

 

[ZacTheImpailer]

That's another thing, how do I cut down filesize?

 

[Necrile]

Did you read my post? Delete your mp3's. I'm almost positive that's why it's so large.

 

[mawk]

as sound formats go, .ogg is your best bet for RMVX games. smaller and higher-quality than mp3, and capable of a few neat tricks. a free sound program like Audacity can convert mp3s to oggs quite easily. for a demo, it's also important to make sure it doesn't contain any music you're not using in the parts the players can get to; filesize economy is something a lot of people care about.

 

[ZacTheImpailer]

Thanks dude, I'll try that. I didn't want to delete any of the tracks because all of the music in the game to this point is custom non RTP. also I'm pretty sure there is no excess music but I'll check just in case.

 

[Petros]

The Final Fantasy XIII battle system is what's drawing most people here so I'll comment on that.

It's great, but a little frustrating, most battle systems will remove a combatant from the list of targets once you kill them for quick selection of the next target in button bashing mode. It's frustrating that this doesn't. Also it's a little annoying that it still says "Attack" when the option can't be used. Otherwise the battle system is pretty damn impressive, was it custom made for you or plug-n-play?

 

[ZacTheImpailer]

plug and play, but I changed the script slightly to get rid of the auto battle command. When I did take away the auto battle and the escape command (people could escape from any battle despite making them unescapable) though I had to change it slightly again because of small problem where the wrong commands were being highlighted during the wrong roles, so I changed it so all commands are highlighted during all roles, so that's the origin of that little design flaw. Anyway It's a brilliant script and if anybody wants it's on RPG Revolution, here's the link: http://www.rpgrevolution.com/forums/ind ... opic=38767

Thanks for for the criticism, I'll update the game and upload the new demo with a smaller filesize.