September 26 Update

Yes, I'm doing okay. This was the first week in a while that I worked normal hours, so I've actually had some time off in the evenings. I hope that you get through your nasty day without too much fatigue!

Sierra Lee

Hello Sierra how are you doing this week? I hope it is okay. My day is a bit nasty. People comes to the hospital because of traffic accidents, poor people. But that's how things are. Have a nice day!!

BleBle

From what I could tell from reading comments, you need eustrin final to afford both items, as it lowers the cost of Neranda's Will to 1000. As for Trin's Pin, I believe that was stated to be a bug, not 100% certain.

The biggest disappointment I find is you can't collect every thing. Even if I never used Dari's potion I still felt the need to collect it. Megail's armor and Nerada's shield are too expensive you can only afford one or the other. Dari's potion and Trin's pin are missable Dari's potion is in a temporary area and if you push the button before you collect it Trin's Pin is lost.

Q-Riff

Overall i think these are good changes. One of the biggest things in original 0.58 was that you couldn't make informed decisions. So far, most of the game was about making decisions, accepting trade-offs and moving forward. There was no "correct" or "incorrect" decision. Like yes, with bad decisions you would make a lot of variables worse, but the game won't stop progressing. In the 0.58 incorrect decisions lead to one and only outcome. The Game Over screen. Also to add to this from the narrative angle. Simon is good to adapting to situation. Here suddenly he sees an overwhelming force and just accepts his death, instead of you know retreating and rethinking his available options. =)

Seil

Hey, glad to see that Patreon stopped eating your comment. I don't have a lot to add, but I think you'll be interested by some of the information in the next update. ^-^

Sierra Lee

This is one of the issues I'm not sure I have a planned fix for, since I don't want to radically change the number of enemies. I'll keep it in mind, though.

Sierra Lee

This is a just a lore/tone comment not a balance comment but I've been thinking about the update and I have a bad habit of going full stream of consciousness every time an update comes out so… One thing I think this section did really well was act as a final juxtaposition between Simon and the last of the "traditional" Incubus Kings (I'm including Nyst, since without Xerces all he has going for him is his shard). Nearly every Incubus King in the game, including Esthera, has taunted, mocked, or been baffled by Simon's refusal to lean too heavily on his incubus powers or overdevelop them. But once all incubus power is stripped away, Simon is immediately ready to find other ways to survive. Others also mock Simon for being too dependent on his companions (and their absence does deeply weaken him), but even before he arms himself with their memories, the first things he can pick up are *random scraps of whatever he can find*. The Dream King was truly pathetic and could be relatively easily killed by a truly weak Simon. But even though Nyst somehow managed to retain a very reasonably powerful Incubus power, it was *literally the only attack he had* and thus was able to be defeated by Simon, who has much wider experience to draw from. The only person able to survive better than Simon was Tanurak, who also doesn't lean very heavily at all on his Incubus power, has more intimate knowledge of Tower mechanisms than Simon, and who also seems to draw his knowledge and power from a wide array of sources. Simon's adaptability and deliberate roundedness is what kept him alive as a slave in the OE and it's what kept him alive in this death pit.

Jeffrey Lebowski

I think these are all good ideas. Personally, I think that the grinding could also stand to be reduced a bit - it's a REAL annoyance to need to clear out the various places one or two fights at the time before running back to the healing circle - at least until you get Qum's skill, then it's like four or five fights. I appreciate the sense of isolation, but in my experience in the 0.58.0 version it quickly wore off and was replaced by the tedium of grinding and trial and error.

Seriathus

Simon and company are a major player in the world, but you're right, I wanted this update to have a major impact as the final players are introduced. Version 0.59.0 will finish establishing this while also setting the stage for the path to the end.

Sierra Lee

For me personally, this latest update has one more aspect. I don't know if it was intended by Sierra but it turned out to be a good lesson in humility - partly for Simon and the harem, but mostly for the player. I cannot be the only one who started to think that we are one of the main players in the TLS world - we killed three powerful Incubus Kings, defeated the Empress, we manipulate the politics and economy of several countries, no opponent has been any major challenge for a long time - the world will soon be at ours feet! So I stand so proud of myself and suddenly someone taps my shoulder, I turn around and BOOM - bitch slap and I lie on the ground. Frightened, I look up and see only the numbers - 0.58. A moment later I hear a mocking voice - "look everyone, the little boy thought he was so important and so powerful. Let me show you what REAL power is and where your place is in all of this ''

Thanks for notifying me. I've edited that into the last couple blog posts, so in theory when I copy paste new ones, it'll stay updated.

Sierra Lee

Thanks for giving your feedback! I'm glad that you enjoyed it overall.

Sierra Lee

So I was just providing the RTP link to someone and noticed the old link used on the blog posts is broken. The new one can be found here for when you get around to updating https://www.rpgmakerweb.com/run-time-package or https://dl.degica.com/rpgmakerweb/run-time-packages/RPGVXAce_RTP.zip

Lord Forte

install the Run Time Package for VX ACE. Have a link: https://www.rpgmakerweb.com/run-time-package

Can understand why it needs tweaking. I enjoyed that it was difficult though; felt appropriate for the situation but I love difficult games so not a reliable viewpoint. That aside I think it's one of the best sections of the game it changes the atmosphere and gameplay up. It's also interesting to see Simon essentially lose everything and survive using his own internal resources with very few external ones except those he can scrounge or fight for. Really enjoyed it overall.

Succusmurf

This is my first time not waiting for the public release, I have it on Steam and normally just play it there. I seem to be running into an issue though, I get an error when it try to start stating "RPGVXAce RTP is required to run this game" I did some google and saw that in the past a different link was the solution to this. Is there anything else I can do to fix this issue?

That's a RPGMaker issue, I'm afraid. IT happens when you exit an area with a dim light filter by teleporting. To solve it, you have to enter the cave and come out from the entrance instead of the teleport pentagram

Seriathus

This is my first time trying an early build of TLS, along with making a post, so bear with me please. First of all, I just wanted to say I really enjoyed the atmosphere and vibe this update gave off. It's quite possibly my favorite section of the game so far, which is why the frustration I had over playing through some parts of it felt so, well, frustrating lol. I think everything you've laid out here covers all the problems I was going through, so I'm very happy. One thing I haven't seen people mention is, once I finished all of the content (minus the IK gauntlet, couldn't figure that one out), I was backtracking through all of the areas and noticed what I can only presume is a bug. When I went back to the very beginning section's blindness cave, after leaving it my game had a permanent darkness filter over it, and saving and loading didn't fix it either. Equipping the lantern removed the blindness debuff I had, but nothing about the dimmer game. Only way I could fix it was by going to a previous save. That's all, thanks for the update!

Maybe Simon can wipe his bloody palm on a volleyball and start talking to it. :)

It's up to you. The flavor dialogue will be mainly accessible by walking over the save point repeatedly, while the rest is likely to be more mechanistic.

Sierra Lee

I believe that most comments about RNG are primarily about status/debuff resistances. The strongest argument for 0% resistance, in my opinion, is that players experimenting with weaknesses get false negatives. I still haven't decided what type of hints will feel right, but reducing brute force testing by hinting weaknesses would be good. Almost any RPG involves experimenting to see what works, but you don't want too much and people seem to find this one frustrating. The primary reason I don't want to eliminate it entirely is that, again in my opinion, deterministic RPG Maker combat is less interesting. If you never have an action fail, or a surprise attack get through, then winning is often extremely simple. I think RPGs are more interesting when you need to adjust strategy sometimes. For example, if Nyst is 100% vulnerable to debuffs, then the player will shut him down in the first few rounds and the fight will be trivial. However, a 50% chance means that 12.5% of attempts will get bad luck and be impossible to win - this didn't happen to me, but in retrospect I realize it's too probable. At 85% vulnerability, three unlucky turns in a row will be quite rare, but the player will still need to adjust strategy occasionally instead of following a simple script. But as it happens, the new Nyst isn't supposed to be a real challenge, so I've just removed his offensive resistances entirely. One thing that hasn't been commented on is that I specifically removed almost all critical hits and evasion from this section. I felt that those would be a negative form of RNG because it involves hoping for random luck instead of occasionally having to deal with bad luck. However, in cases where the current game works like this (mosquitos, bears, etc) I intend to try to reduce it.

Sierra Lee

I find myself divided on whether to replay this section for 58.1; I am a sucker for extra Simon dialogue, but my first playthrough already took me through a hundred saves and two hundred deaths. By the time I got to area two, it felt more like I was playing Atreyan than I was Simon. But you know, speaking of, it's been a while since I last played Ouroboros. I really ought to give it another spin. Such a great story.

Quiet Stranger

Thanks for writing this up. It is cool to see what you took from the feedback you received and your ideas or priorities on resolving them. Simon talking more to himself will be welcome on my end. I was kind of sad to see that it stopped before I left the first area. Of everything here I'm most interested in your thoughts on tuning RNG in this section. Is this something you can expand on? I saw a comment about not removing it entirely. I think we might be thinking about things in a different way so gaining some understanding would be interesting when you have time.

Grim8P

This one surprises me, though I'll still take it seriously. In my test runs, I usually bought it first thing and wondered if it was too strong, since it let me breeze through a lot of the third area. It was my main armor for the final gauntlet, too. But if it's widely regarded as not worth it, I'll consider a buff. You didn't mention Orilise's robes at all, but their total stats are pretty similar. They were meant to be the final armors outside of specialized situations. Also for the sake of balance, can you be specific about the fire/ice armor you mention, so I'm sure I'm not misunderstanding?

Sierra Lee

Hey, good to hear from you! Glad you're still doing okay. Good idea about having the boulders check themselves on movement. In theory it would just require modifying the solution code in a couple ways, then copying it to every boulder. I will have to consider this. I was not aware of that notetag! I haven't tested it yet, but based on the documentation that seems like it should handle the issue nicely.

Sierra Lee

I'm aware that some people argue for removing RNG entirely, but that is not what I intend to do in most cases.

Sierra Lee

It stops at 25, but yeah, I'll probably add some more.

Sierra Lee

The easier path will be something like a piece of equipment that lets you either push through the three bosses or dominate the standard enemies as you prefer, but loses a chance at the permanent rewards. Combined with increased clarity in the merchants, I hope it will be a fairly clean system. I'm less certain about how exactly I'll give tips via Simon. For one example I have in mind, some players who entered the snake cave took off the Feather before later battles and had a bad experience dying to snakes. I intend to add a line after the first snake where Simon observes that there are likely to be many more snakes ahead. Potentially also tips when the player escapes from a boss battle.

Sierra Lee

A bit of feedback I just thought of: Megail's armor is rather lackluster for the trouble you have to go through to get it. Stun immunity didn't seem to matter anywhere (probably it comes up in the Final Gauntlet?), but moreover Janine's Helmet does the exact same thing, and is both easier to get and gives better stat boosts. The extra health from Meg's armor is nice, but there are other ways to get more, and for the most part, the Ice armor and the fire armor are what you actually want. I'd suggest buffing it in some fashion - as is, it's annoying to get and doesn't really seem to give much return on the investment.

Sounds like you have a lot on your plate, here's a silly video to lighten any stress! This is how I imagine things would have gone for Simon had he not been given aid from his new friend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDeDhRG7bbg

WaxerRed

As far as the puzzle goes, you could potentially set a check in each of the boulders on move scrips to say if it's on any of the tiles and, if so, increment a variable for number of tiles filled/decrement it if the boulders is moved off the tile. Might be a little complex, but should be doable if you'd really rather not color code it. Also, you had some issues with the stun state on different enemies. You run YanFly's "Buff and State" script, right? If so, you can use a notetag to fix that by making a state last longer on a certain enemy. Look under the "Enemy Notetags" section of the comments in that script, or just use the [state x turn: +y] notetag except with angle brackets instead of []. Also, sorry I haven't posted in forever XD I've still been playing off and on, just... effing hells this year :X Still working my way through this update, it's definitely pretty challenging in a way I can't decide if I like or not, but I wanna finish it once before it's improved regardless

Lord Forte

I'm very much in favor of giving people the option to skip past, since there's a fair number of people that won't want to deal with what this sequence is. For the rest of the changes, I think they are all good ideas, though I've seen some people strongly saying that it shouldn't be "Reduce RNG" it should be "remove RNG" - but then, a bit of RNG is what RPG Maker is. All said, I look forward to the update and seeing what's changed!

Alright that is good to hear. I do hope for the Simon talks that there also will be more flavor text as well, something that shows that his sanity is eroding. That was one thing that I noticed that was several talks when going back to the circle in the beginning at certain number of times though does stop altogether at 15 I believe.

Edward Culham

When you say you'll be adding an easier path through, do you mean that the section will guide you more for all players, or that there will be an option to opt in to an easier path (like a shortcut or sacrificing more abstract rewards like the IK sword and shining sword)? I ask because I personally enjoyed not being guided and having to wander around and experiment, and I think it really adds to the tone that no one is *supposed* to survive here so why would the environment help you.

Jeffrey Lebowski