RPG Unknown/Hiatus Malise and the Machine - Public Demo Available Now!

[CrazyPerson]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

On the gameplay: I gotta say, my greatest gripe is that the ATB never stops.
In most ATB-style games I've played, there was at least an option to make ATB timers stop while you're selecting an action:
That way, you have time looking through the skill list and picking the right target,
rather than just frantically pressing buttons because every half-second you spend in menus is one your characters lose in combat.
It also means NPCs essentially cheat the ATB: You'd expect that if actor A fills their bar before actor B, actor A gets to act first.
However, because it depends on who completes input first, and NPCs input instantly, NPCs get a lot more first-actions in than you'd expect.

I can see what they were trying to do: There's some interaction where you can be attacked by other enemies while struggling out of a grab, and it affects the meters.
Unfortunately, more often than not, what happens is you have one character in the struggle mechanic,
while the other character is ready and would really love to attack, but can't be controlled until the struggle minigame is over.
In the meantime, of course, the enemies have no such limitations, and will happily use the time to charge up a grab on your other character.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure this would be easy to fix - I remember the devs writing about threading issues,
which makes me suspect they've implemented the ATB stuff by running a thread for each actor in combat.
That means pausing would potentially take some cross-thread trickery and more debugging.
IMHO a the whole threading is a bad plan (this should be written iteratively, with an outer timer loop and each timeslice advancing all characters by a small chunk of time),
but I'm unfamiliar with the limitations of RPGMaker, perhaps implementing advanced enemy AI with state machines is simply not a thing you can do...

 

[krisslanza]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

Process my payment Pateron! I need this demo! Aaarrrgh!

 

[Potato]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

Also what this release needed was a shop! You earn money but can't spend it.
Not something fancy juste somewhere where you could
buy potions and stuff because it limits the amount of time you can
spend on a single playthrough because you have a definite amount of
time you can heal your character. And since I walked around a lot
to find solution to the puzzle well I found myself at the final boss
with no healing possibilities. But its ok... you don't need to XD

 

[nanaya1234]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

Process my payment Pateron! I need this demo! Aaarrrgh!

^

 

[Eromancer]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

On the gameplay: I gotta say, my greatest gripe is that the ATB never stops.
In most ATB-style games I've played, there was at least an option to make ATB timers stop while you're selecting an action:
That way, you have time looking through the skill list and picking the right target,
rather than just frantically pressing buttons because every half-second you spend in menus is one your characters lose in combat.
It also means NPCs essentially cheat the ATB: You'd expect that if actor A fills their bar before actor B, actor A gets to act first.
However, because it depends on who completes input first, and NPCs input instantly, NPCs get a lot more first-actions in than you'd expect.

I can see what they were trying to do: There's some interaction where you can be attacked by other enemies while struggling out of a grab, and it affects the meters.
Unfortunately, more often than not, what happens is you have one character in the struggle mechanic,
while the other character is ready and would really love to attack, but can't be controlled until the struggle minigame is over.
In the meantime, of course, the enemies have no such limitations, and will happily use the time to charge up a grab on your other character.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure this would be easy to fix - I remember the devs writing about threading issues,
which makes me suspect they've implemented the ATB stuff by running a thread for each actor in combat.
That means pausing would potentially take some cross-thread trickery and more debugging.
IMHO a the whole threading is a bad plan (this should be written iteratively, with an outer timer loop and each timeslice advancing all characters by a small chunk of time),
but I'm unfamiliar with the limitations of RPGMaker, perhaps implementing advanced enemy AI with state machines is simply not a thing you can do...

Well, very importantly, this ATB system is nearly identical to the later Final Fantasy games (minus the fact that enemies queue up in this instead of attack simultaneously, so this is actually less aggressive), so to suggest it is somehow broken is incorrect. Whether or not it is too fast is just a matter of changing a number, doing so would be pretty pointless so early in the process. The inclusion of a 'Wait' option for the ATB system is something that I'll consider once things are more concrete.

Don't get too worked up about the balancing quite yet! Consider that you're only seeing a partially completed system from the perspective of LV1 characters with a solid chunk of the mechanics and important skills (such as a character being able to break an enemy hold on her ally with a skill) either missing or in some cases functioning at a very limited level (enemy H targeting algorithm for example).

 

[nanaya1234]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

hey Eromancer your still processing stuff right? Are you planning on informing patrons whose payments didn't go through?

 

[Eromancer]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

hey Eromancer your still processing stuff right? Are you planning on informing patrons whose payments didn't go through?

Yep, Patreon's actually still processing the last 15% or so of the payments! For some reason it stopped processing them from between noon yesterday and this afternoon, but is now back at it. I sent an email out yesterday evening to anyone who was marked as 'Declined', so if you didn't get one you are probably still marked as 'Pending'.

 

[nanaya1234]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

Yep, Patreon's actually still processing the last 15% or so of the payments! For some reason it stopped processing them from between noon yesterday and this afternoon, but is now back at it. I sent an email out yesterday evening to anyone who was marked as 'Declined', so if you didn't get one you are probably still marked as 'Pending'.

thanks for the confirmation.

 

[samjaza]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

Its still just sitting in my pending list, i just want it to go through so i can download it.

 

[vgbe]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

So there is no way to buy into it as this point until the next demo release?

Bummer, been studying hard for the past two weeks so I haven't been keeping up with news.

 

[YummyTiger]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

Well, it is possible that the next release could come significantly faster than this one. A LOT of development time is dedicating to getting a project started and setting up the foundation for the game (menus, battle system, scripting, etc.) Eromancer has that in place, for the most part, so the content may start coming faster.

It sucks to wait, but perhaps when things settle down, you can message him and he may offer some alternative way to get the demo. In my experience, he is a pretty good guy. It's looking like he could end up being a great English developer. I eagerly look forward to seeing more.

 

[Papanomics]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

I gotta say that I'm really into it. Especially Neon. I hope that sounds will be implemented in certain parts of H battles.

The music is pretty kick ass too.

Malise doesn't do much for me, but the design of Neon? Great job.

 

[Stiltzkinator]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

Played through the demo, here's what I thought.

Spoiler

I would have to agree with some of the other comments on the over-active ATB pace. This seems like the kind of game where you would want to tactically decide your attacks in order to limit your openings, but the pace can get so out of hand that you feel you just have to mash buttons instead. I feel that having so many timers running at the same time is very frustrating, particularly, as noted, when a character is trying to struggle, and the other character is waiting for their turn. It just feels like wasted time, and there's no real reason for the other character to simply stand idle while one is struggling apart from the current battle UI limitations.

But going even further, I feel that having too much happening at once actually detracts from the experience. RPGmaker isn't the most stable software around. I'm running this on a fairly high-end system (can process the weather effects without any noticeable issues), and RPGM still has some hiccups here and there. Another thing that got to me after playing a while was how much the battle prompts seem to move around. When your characters are getting, er, 'handled', part of the UI moves down to the bottom of the screen. This isn't anything worth noting on its own, except that if you are manically anticipating the next character turn, and an enemy suddenly grapples the other character, it can really throw you off. Perhaps this is an intended effect of the battle system, but I found it to be more frustrating than entertaining.

It's not like slowing the pace down means the game would doom the game to becoming super easy, either. I've been comparing this game to Arumero Soft's Creature Hunter, in that it's a turn-based RPG where your characters have skills to defeat the enemy, but the enemies are more interested in peppering your party with harmful status effects. They even have the same 'second, pink ATB bar' that fills as they're preparing an H-attack. Making decisions on which skills to use on which enemies based on the current circumstances was what made that game fun to play, even apart from H content, as you had to try to maintain enough control of your character to do much.

This probably sounds like a lot of criticisms, but that's not to say I hated the demo. The aesthetics are great, and it looks like most of the custom systems that were implemented are working well enough. While the ATB situation feels like a bit of a nuisance, the H-chains do give you a fair amount of time before they complete. By no means a bad game thus far, it's just that the battle system, arguably the core gameplay aspect of an RPG, could stand ot be more 'fun'.

 

[AExMachina]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

Finally got to play this and I'm kinda disappointed. The visual side is stunning and sexy but the actual gameplay detracts from the experience so much you don't really get to enjoy it. The combat is far too fast and even if you slow it down it just makes it easier, you still don't really have time to appreciate the view. I was under the mistaken assumption combat would be turn based as usual in RPG Maker games.

Another thing I disliked was the constant invisible random encounters, which is something basically all the better Japanese H-games have moved away from. They instead use enemy sprites moving around that start combat when you collide with them, which allows you to try to avoid combat and generally reduces the amount of fights you get into if you are just trying to move around or find something. Running away is rather easy thankfully but it was still incredibly annoying to be interrupted by a fight every 10 steps.

 

[CrazyPerson]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

Well, very importantly, this ATB system is nearly identical to the later Final Fantasy games (minus the fact that enemies queue up in this instead of attack simultaneously, so this is actually less aggressive), so to suggest it is somehow broken is incorrect.

Well. It's been a while since I played FF, but I'm not sure I agree with the comparison.
Thinking back to FF12, I think they indeed had fully active-time battles. However, they got rid of prompt-based battles, from what I recall.
Unless I'm confusing it with another game, they introduced the "gambit" mechanic by which you could implement rudimentary AI for your characters,
so things like "throw out heal when ally reaches 30%" were not reliant on your speed-button-mashing skills anymore.

Also, I think the game had auto-attacks - if you did not issue any commands,
your characters would just attack the focused enemy when ready without waiting for player input.
Instead, player could influence the battle by inputting actions at any time, which would be executed by the character once their next turn came up.

With Malise's battle timers, I'm much more reminded of the FF7 model,
where ATB gauges charge based on character speed, and ATB full pops up a user prompt what to do that turn.
Because I hate being rushed in RPGs, I would always set that to the paused model, where gauges were paused while I was sifting through pages of skill menus.

At the end of the day, I suppose it comes down to where difficulty should come from:
In both the gambit and the paused-prompt model, the difficulty in combat comes from finding the right choice, not reaction/input speed.
In general, I feel frustrated when I feel I'm struggling against "the game UI",
as opposed to struggling against the game mechanics that are specifically made for that purpose.
This is why minigames exist: When you boil down mechanics to a handful of inputs with specific and immediate effects,
you get a lot more flexibility in making player react and mash, because there's less UI to get in the way.
Players know what to expect and what to do, so "you're too slow" feels a lot nicer in a minigame than when navigating a menu.

In most games, "that isn't what I meant to do" is not a fun thing,
and that's what happens when I end up button-mashing a complex changing-defaults system.

Disclaimer: Despite the large rant, I'm not trying to flame the demo -
quite the contrary, I think there's some really nice things getting started there.
I just figure there's not much helpful feedback to be had from "this works right",
I think it's more constructive to examine "what is bothering me, and why is it bothering me?"

 

[iamnuff]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

crashed a couple of times because it couldn't find the proper sound file.

Pretty sure it was looking for BGM named "knee-deep" or something.

Also, yeah, battles are a little hectic. Most of the games i've seen with a "turn meter" to see who acts when, had the game pause when your turn started.

 

[PM21]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

Were the two final scenes written by different people? The scene for Neon almost reads like a script meant for a voice actor.
Neither are bad, IMO, in fact Malise's is currently my most favorite thing ever, it's just that the styles are so different from one to the other. Not sure if that was a style choice to better represent their characters, but going from one to the other is a little jolting.

And this is just a nit picky complaint: while this project has some of the best 3D artwork I've seen with how expressive you've made the characters with eye direction and subtle scrunching of the face, in the final pose of Malise's end scene when her upper lip is puckered to show her top teeth it just seems weird. I notice that a lot in 3D art. It's not entirely unnatural it just seems like a common expression used in 3D posing and it stuck out to me because everything else is so good.

Y'know I feel like I should amend my last a bit. It only looks strange in that final pose but it serves to give her lips a nice pout in the portraits and everywhere else. Just one of those things that seems strange. I know you spend a lot of time on each picture and portrait so i don't mean to offend, especially when I can't be more descriptive other than 'it looks strange'. Like I said, nit-pick.

 

[Eromancer]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

crashed a couple of times because it couldn't find the proper sound file.

Pretty sure it was looking for BGM named "knee-deep" or something.

Also, yeah, battles are a little hectic. Most of the games i've seen with a "turn meter" to see who acts when, had the game pause when your turn started.

Just in case you're stuck on that bug, check out this Patreon post:

You must be registered to see the links

Basically, approaching the pictured gate from that direction while it is closed will cause the bug to trigger. To complete the area though you have to go a different way.

 

[Wuumaster]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

Demo's looking fairly solid, Eromancer. Looking forward to what comes out of the future.

Would like to add my voice to the list concerning:

a) The ATB gauges feel like they fill too fast. Maybe, for a future release, have an item that brings up a dialog and lets you swap between Fast (current), Normal, and Slow speeds?

b) The music is pretty damn awesome. Seriously. Just need to point that out.

 

[C'pn Jack Sparrow]

Re: Malise and the Machine (New RPG!)

So there is no way to buy into it as this point until the next demo release?

Yeah, in a similar boat as I only just became aware of this project (Yeah, I guess I am the person living under a rock), and really would like a way to buy in an get the demo.

If not, is there an estimated time table for the next demo release, in case I decided to donate my support for the game going forward.