Remastered Game Jam 2023


I have been participating this last month at the Remastered Game Jam. Here are the changes made to the project. As per jam rules, I'm going to elaborate on a few of them with extra pictures/gifs:

-Improved doors on all maps of the game.
-Corrected typos/Improved translation.
-Some tutorials have been removed or reworked.
-Cynthia now starts her fight with 120 armour points, unless you've already lost to her at least once.
-Cynthia's AI has been improved to make her Cure less over-prioritised and favour her coup de grâce.
-The vulnerability/resistance to state X icons have been changed to avoid being confused with the state in question.
-Resistance to Alteration X states now divide the chance of suffering the corresponding alteration by 3 rather than 2.
-Fixed a bug with locked door frames.
-Fixed a bug where doors opened from behind would briefly display the wrong frame.
-Fixed a bug where secret rooms in mystery dungeons were counted for success on each visit, not just the first.
-Other minor bug fixes
-Angel no longer automatically loses Auto Resurrection when she returns to the gallery, in order to reduce the number of times she has to pass through the pentacle if she was only interested in the regeneration source.
-The difficult fight in the second mystery dungeon now gives a solitary Angel a real chance of victory.
-A combat tutorial has been added if the player has passed Zoé's tutorial, to prevent them continuing throughout the game without knowing that ranged weapons are effective against flying enemies.
-Added a new chest in the old village.
-A new defeat scene has been added when the team is defeated by the minor demon.
-It is now possible to ignore all or some of the four hall scenes at the start of the competition. Players who activate them all will be entitled to a new fifth scene.
-Added some dialogue if certain names are chosen as name for Angel.
The chance of pre-emptive strikes/ambushes has been increased from 5%/3% to 6%/4%.
-There is now a 'Sell Gems' command that allows you to automatically sell all your gems.
-An in-game manual has been added, summarising all the tutorials.
-Spells and skills that inflict ailments have been buffed considerably. The Executioner receives a malus on his alteration chance to prevent him from being too strong.

New bigger doors:


The inner doors were one of the few 'amateurish' remnants of the first iterations of the game. ALL the doors of the game have been updated to be 1.5 square high so the heroes will no longer be banging their forehead on the top of the doors.

Game manual:


The other big change introduced by this update is the introduction of a in-game manual. Verloren has some out of the ordinary game mechanics that are easy to forget between two sessions far apart. And since there was no way to redo a tuto without a corresponding save players were out of luck if they wanted a reminder about anything. The game manual is also a good safety net for anyone who decide to not have any tutorials. Its presence may help me streamlining some tutorials in the future, too.

Sell gems buttons:



Selling all your gems (who don't have any other purpose by the way) can be quite time consuming. So when I played Persona 5 and see a 'sell all the loot' button, I considered including a similar mechanic into the game. It is now done, it will save some shopping time. Note that even shopkeepers who are 'buy only' will accept your gems.

New state vulnerability/resistance icons:


The state vulnerability/resistance icons were often confused with their corresponding state. I hope those new icons will be more clear.

Hall cutscenes


I have seen multiple players skipping those cutscenes to start the competition quicker, and as they aren't really mandatory for the narrative, I made them optional with that extra circle who allow you to start the competition right away. There is now a little surprise for whoever complete all those now optional cutscenes.

Points that were considered for the jam but weren't picked in the end:
-Increase the resolution to 16/9. Turn out it would be a huge amount of work since the game has always been developed with the classic MV resolution in mind, and that extra space that would be added isn't exactly adding much value to the game apart from empty space.
-Rearrange the starting quest: I wasn't very inspired on this one. I definitively need more feedback on the subject. It is still on the agenda and may come up in one of the future updates.
-Remake from the ground the world maps: that one is also still on the agenda, but as it comes way later into the game, it seemed out of scope for this little jam. I will probably pack it with a future big content update.

Files

Verloren-Linux.zip 857 MB
Version 37 Jun 12, 2023
Verloren-Windows.zip 819 MB
Version 38 Jun 12, 2023

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