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User Guide

Title: Aeris' Adventurer

Aeris' adventure is a top-down RPG, takes place in a high fantasy world. In this game, you venture to find your wife who has vanished without a trace. You fight your way through the valley in search of her, talking to the locals to find out where she might have gone.

Controls

W for up
S for down
A for left
D for right
E for NPC interaction
Esc for settings
Click for magic

In this image, you can see the mechanic for switching scenes. The left button = to stay in the current scene, while right burron = to move to the next scene.

In this next picture, you can see some of the combat. By clicking, you cast a fireball that takes 10 mana to cast. You need to try and hit the enemies with this fireball to do damage and eventually kill them.

In this final picture, you can see the NPC interaction. In the bottom left, you can see the NPCs name, their title and pronouns, and a picture of them. In the middle, is what they're saying goes. And to the right, is simply the button to continue to the next conversation.

Feedback Summary

I received a lot of feedback, mainly around bugs and some of the existing features. Though I did receive some suggestions of features. Honestly if it wasn't for a specific person (who I won't name, but we all know who), I honestly wouldn't have gotten my game to this standard. Their feedback and suggestions were simply immaculate. A lot of the feedback I received did seem to imply the game was too easy and simply not fun, due to high time to kill. There wasn't too much to test during the testing sessions as I was mainly focused on mechanics at the time and barely had any world building done.

Some of the feedback I received and ended up implementing include the following.

NPC interaction only works with one NPC at a time. This causes the following when 2+ are present in a scene
Enemies that shoot projectiles
Player regenerates health very quickly (Nerfed from 5/s to 1.667/s)
Enemies take to long to kill (Damage buffed from 10 per hit, to 17. Dropping shots needed from 10 down to 6).
Players collider seems a touch to big, have to squeeze through the gaps
Trees collision is deceiving
Water tiles block fireballs

For the full list, see here; https://sorceresseve.itch.io/aeris-adventurer/devlog/821670/devlog-6-testing

Asset List

Some sprites/assests were created by myself using Aseprite and/or Photosho, such as the grass, fireball, and the inner house walls and floor.
I used the Slates tilemap by Ivan Voirol for a lot of the spirtes. https://opengameart.org/content/slates-32x32px-orthogonal-tileset-by-ivan-voirol
The NPC named Safi was from this Pipoya's Character Sprite https://pipoya.itch.io/pipoya-free-rpg-character-sprites-32x32
Most character sprites were made using CharacterManaJ https://osdn.net/projects/charactermanaj/ which appears to be a fork of Pipoya's own one with more features, I can't fully tell.
The music is from EmilyFantasy over at https://rollforfantasy.com/music/songs.php
- This one was used for the main music https://soundcloud.com/emilyfantasy/children-of-the-forest
- And this one was used for the boss music https://soundcloud.com/emilyfantasy/a-new-hunger
The fireball sound is from https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/fireball-whoosh-2-179126/
Junicode was the font I used; https://www.1001fonts.com/junicode-font.html

Compared to Concept

Compared to the concept, the game looks a bit different. I had to change the scope due to time constraints, honestly pushed myself a little too hard.

Differences

For one, the attack method is completely different. I opted to go with a magic system instead of sword combat, and I never ended up implementing the dodge feature due to this change.
I very much wanted to add in XP/Gold for some kind of upgrade mechanic. I ended up scrapping the idea due to the inability to get the enemy spawner function working how I wanted and not spawning them inside collisions. This effected a few of the features I had planned, but were definitely out of scope originally.
I didn't manage to get many NPCs in, nor finish the inside of the house. This left me with less story elements, and thus less inclusivity as I had originally hoped for.
The map is a little different. The original concept of the map was showing 4 scenes, and whilst I only ended up with 3 scenes, I did expand the main scene into a valley, which ended up being effectively the same size for what I had planned for the Forest and Fields scenes. So I will take that as a win.
Due to the lack of gold, it obviously doesn't exist as a GUI element. I do have a Mana GUI element, which I think balances out the GUI elements to the amount I had planned anyway.
I didn't originally plan on adding in cheat modes, but figured due to the increase of difficulty after the feedback I had received it might be necassary.
The Health (and Mana by extensions) GUI wasn't originally meant to have a bar that refills, I was originally planning on only having the number system, to make things easier. Figured why not and decided to make it animated instead, which personally adds to the game a lot.

Similar/Same

The art style matched what I envisioned, though the GUI had some differences
I did manage to get in some Easter Eggs. Not as much as I had planned, but there are some secrets (which aren't that secret I have learned so far).
The movement controls and health system is effectively the same, with the only difference being the lack of arrow key support. I received feedback to add it in, but ran out of time today to implement that. (I don't play with them, so forgot about them).
I did manage to add in to the NPC interaction pronouns and titles, so I manged to get some inclusivity that way (it is evident that the main character is married to a woman like I planned).
The cave ended up exactly how I wanted.