Hah, Cesque, that's what Obel did too. But his words were FAG, WHORE, DICKHOLE, BITCH, and ASSFACE, or something like that.

The trees are ripped. They're actually the only thing in this game that are. Well, besides the house exterior construction set.

Should should spend a few hours making your best tree. Its not easy making trees for some reason. Unless you have a reference or picture to copy from.

Oh and I'm going to play the game.

I liked it, nicely done. But that gas thing was just out of place so early in a game.

There was really only one reason for the poison cloud.

The second boss fight–which probably none of you have seen yet due to the game's difficulty, doesn't let your sister fight with you. I wanted to have at least one fight that did, so I threw in some random (stationary) monster. I was unsure of ideas, so finally I decided on a phase-based fight–the poison cloud.

But if I need to remove it, I can. Or at least lower the damage effect. If I do remove it, I'll just save it for later.

You should've seen the dummy boss. It was a superfly.

I think I've had a dream today. I was playing your game, and I told you you should add shadows in the forest to add more contrast to the background, and you said something like "I like the forest as it is", and I thought you were stupid. But that was just a dream.

I think my choice was (coincidentally) perfect. I cracked up when I came to "Twat: Well, Dick, you know the way out of here better than I do…"

I called the kids Twat, Dick and Cock. I also called the parents Father and Mother. Heh.

Now - for some actual comments! I'll try and alternate between praise with whining.

1. The intro is too long. Not by much, and you can make it hilarious with your name choice, but it just feels slightly too long (especially when replaying the game, I imagine).

2. The game totally succeeded in continuing the traditions of its spiritual ancestors. Earthbound, Terranigma, Secret of Mana…

3. The trees need shadows. I'm not a big fan of shadows, i.e. I wouldn't really add shadows to the characters, but it would be great to add shadows to trees, if only, just to increase the contrast on the ground rather than having just one colour background. And you could make the shadows only visible before it gets dark. That'd be cool. :)

4. The characters look pretty awesome. Their animation looks completely different vertically and horizontally, but who cares. They all did in those old games. Okay, maybe they could wave their legs slightly less when seen from the side, but it's not really a big deal.

5. The transitions (at the start) and between the "overworld" and the battlefield need to be shorter. It's always annoying to wait before action sequences. Remember Pokemon Red, where everytime you heard "durududurududurududurum DAM DAM dee dee DAM DAM" you wanted to bang your head on the wall?

6. It's great to have a supporting characters during battles, and even though her AI may not be absolutely brilliant, it actually feels you've got a side character to rely on. Some future customisation ("pimp your sister") would be cool :)

7. I got kind of confused story-wise at the escape from the forest. La, la, la. Oh, there's a blue light which prevents us from going there for some reason (doesn't even look like a "barrier"). Let's go there. Oh hey, we meet a magical being, who explains the nature of ether, and then TEACHES US COMBAT AND THEN DISAPPEARS. Wait, what? I see what you've been trying to do there, but there's little to none transition between "you've stumbled upon me, here's a secret" and "battle tutorial time!" Maybe the ethereal should actually give some rationale for suddenly explaining how to fight? Something along the lines of "here's a secret how to unlock your inner powers" or "you seem lost, you'll need to know how to survive here". Just random ideas.

"You're learning fast" is so cliche I won't even bother copy-pasting an acute accent over that 'e' to mark my point :P

Oh, and when writing dialogue (this applies to points 1 and 7), you can always use my rule of thumb:

1. Does it contribute anything to the game's story or character development?

2. Is it funny?

If it's neither, cut it out. This in particular applies to characters saying something just to acknowledge they heard it. If it's not in a snarky manner and if it wouldn't feel very unnatural if they didn't - it's unnecessary.

I think I ran out of praise, so it'll be just criticism from now on ;)

8. What everybody else said about contrast. I'd also say add some rocks or something of that sort to the forest to make it feel less dull but still more repetetive (sic - you're getting lost there, right?).

9. The log that the father is cutting presumably comes from a tree, so why is its width not only larger than that of a tree trunk, but also of a completely different colour? :P

10. The first time I ran into the boss, I considered the battle absolute shit. At level 1, the first phase of the battle - correction, both phases of the battle - are a button-mashing contest, and that's never a good thing.

11. It's always annoying when you discover there's an invisible barrier preventing you from going back to the previous area with absolutely no logical reason for its existence.

12. Aren't the ravens a little… big?

13. The .midi music is utterly horrible. Not bad music-wise, bad quality-wise. At some parts, it made me want to just turn the volume off, and playing on high volume is virtually impossible. If you or someone you know made it, remove those noisy crackling parts :|

That being said, I didn't get past the first boss yet, but I will :)

Oh, right. I forgot: Ether Wave is horribly hard to aim, and it only deals as much damage as your melee attack… I'd say increase its hitbox and/or projectile speed.

I'm copying Cesque's whole comment into a notepad file. That's the best feedback I've ever gotten, and it'll take me an eternity to reply.

INTRO

I wanted to play out the story a bit, but I couldn't figure out how to make it a little more interactive. Originally I was going to have you walk there, but I wanted the battle tutorial to come before the battles.

SHADOWS

I actually thought about adding shadows. I didn't know how many games of this mediocre quality had them, but I think it'll be a pretty good improvement.

ANIMATION

Character animations look really bad, I'll admit. I'm not a graphics artist, and animating is even worse. Look at the attack and casting animations. They look God-awful.

TRANSITIONS

I actually thought the battle transitions were pretty decent, because for future battles, I didn't want to have an instant "PLOP! IN BATTLE! HEY WHAT'S THAT! OOPS DEAD!" Most of the other transitions are too slow, especially the title-newgame transition. When you've got stuff going on in the background, that transition is hell.

PARTY MEMBERS

I'll give you one hint now. Your sister only fights with you for that first part of the story. Later, you get a couple more party members, so you can have up to three or four. Usually it'll be an attack/support/tactical setup.

BARRIER AND TUTORIAL

The "barrier" was thrown in, and draw_set_blend_mode didn't turn out the way I'd hoped. The tutorial seemed a bit off because it already took too long, and I didn't want to have more cutscenes/explanation leading up to it. Most people don't give a damn about the story. They just want to play. It's balancing that which is the hard part.

DIALOG

Sounds like something I'd say, actually. Most of the dialog in the intro is to show what the characters are like, so you can see which ones you like or hate. Most people either like or hate the blonde brother (Dakota) from the start, and there isn't really a middle ground. Aidan is boring, so's his sister, and the rest of the damn family. Believe me, Aidan gets a lot cooler later. But what you said about replies is something I should've paid more attention to.

DEBRIS

I actually was adding rocks and flowers for extra forest detail, but later I just said, "screw it." Guess it's time to go back there and throw them in.

LOGS

Shhh, that's until I make my own trees, then I'll edit the huge log.

INVISIBLE BARRIERS

Yeh, that was a last minute thing, because I didn't feel like throwing in another bit of poor dialog like "We can't go back there, because that's the wrong way." I'll come up with something.

BIG RAVENS

That was actually a sprite transfer from one of my (many) other games, and the graphic just happened to be pretty huge. Still, I don't want people to miss them, because they become very important, as they're the ones who save your game.

MIDIS

Honestly I just threw music in. I thought it'd be very boring without, and I only made one track in the whole thing, which nobody's gotten to yet. But let me know what MIDIs absolutely need to go, so I can kick them out first.

ETHER WAVE

I'll probably just up the speed and/or lower the flies' speed. The idea was to have an attack that was convenient, but only hit as hard as your melee. It should probably be your primary attack, given you know when to recharge and you get plenty of EP.

BOSS

I might just have to make another release to fix the boss before I get much more feedback, but for now all I can say is that you should be level 3 or 4, hitting for 5s on the boss.

It shouldn't be a button-mashing contest though, since phase 2 SHOULD take a lot more strategy.

FIN

Well thanks Cesque, that was a pretty good list of suggestions. I'll take each and every one to mind. Hope to hear more from you in the future.

Yeah, I didn't mean you should throw more dialogue in, I meant you could slightly alter the current one to give the tutorial slightly more sense.

To put it shortly: No, they ARE too long. Cut them by, whatever, half a second, but it'll still be an improvement :P

Think about players grinding for experience to beat a boss. Think about them! Do you really want them to suffer? Do you?

You can give them a trunk to perch on, or something of that sort ;)

(seriously though, I don't really mind their size, just mentioned it as a weird thing)

I wanted to give a bit of confusion in there, but admittedly, I had no idea how to pack all of the events I did into something this short. It's broken, to say the least, and the cutscenes will need a lot of revision.

That made me laugh. For grinding's sake, I raised the experience flies gave when you killed them, and made a few changes in response to your suggestions. I'll write up a list later.

Regarding the ravens, the other thing I had was crows, which don't do much but provide a few jokes. Obviously there's a size difference, but if it's more subtle, p'raps the crows will actually mean something (besides what I planned for later).

Wait a moment.

Instead of decreasing the annoying fadeout period from overworld to the battlefield, you decreased the time needed to grind experience?

You're making GAMEPLAY changes to make up for COSMETIC effects?

Just reduce the damn transition times :P

Yeah, that was one of the few changes. I halved the transition time. Hopefully that's not TOO fast, eh?

But I ALSO raised experience, because due to the random number of enemies you get per fight, sometimes I wasn't hitting level 3 before the boss. Even with 5 experience per, I'm still having trouble hitting level 4, but now the boss is, in your words, piss-easy.

=(