Another week has passed and guess what? I’m still game testing! So far, I’m about 38 hours and 48 minutes into the game. The screen shot below is my current date. I am a little under halfway into the game.

If you check my previous update, you will notice I am still in the same year. This is not because I haven’t been playing the game, nor is it because I’ve been running into a bunch of game stopping bugs. It’s because I’ve had to make so many changes and small fixes along the way. Also, the game is pretty damn long.

As a tester, I have to check every corner, open every treasure, participate in every battle and evaluate the overall balance with every step I take forward. The game time is only about 1/3 of the actual time I spent playing this game.

Believe me, I tried very hard to make it to the next year. My goal was to at least reach her next birthday. My current location is the final quest of the year and I just couldn’t complete it in time. The final quest of the year also happens to take place in the largest map of that year. And the maps and quests only get larger from here.

The good news from all this is, I’ve hardly ran into game stopping bugs. Every obstacle I’ve faced has been easily fixable or something I could ignore until I’m done with the game testing. It’s been so smooth lately that I was even able to engross myself into a recent battle. Check it out!

I became really excited when I was able to meet the second goal requirement. It was a testament that showed the changes I made to combat were working effectively.

On the subject of those changes; earlier last week I realized some skills were simply too strong. Also, the battles ended too soon and the enemies barely had time to do any damage to the player.

I’m not a fan of reducing damage but I’m really not a fan of having a hand full of skills being the obvious strongest choice. My goal for skills in the game is to give the player a wide choice of everything having strengths and weaknesses.

There are 3 specific skills I placed in this game that did the highest damage with the drawback of them inflicting a status effect on you if you use them. The problem I realized was, they were simply too strong even with the drawback. It felt like the player had no choice but to use these skills if they wanted to do the most damage.

So I looked over all of the skills and came to what I believe is a sound conclusion. I normalized the damage to be more in aligned with the rest of the skills. They are still the strongest skills, but the damage doesn’t exceed the other skills to a degree where the other skills feel like a waste.

But that’s not all I did, as I mentioned above, the battles felt too quick and the enemies didn’t have a chance to do any real damage. The skills I mention to you before was part of the reason, but I also felt the enemies were too weak overall. So after some deliberation, I decided to make my first major sweeping changes.

I changed the effectiveness of defense and resistance. They are about 25% stronger now. I boosted enemies Hp by 75% and def/res by 100% as well as speed by 25%.

These changes can be seen in the video above. Everyone is now more beefier, therefore, lasting longer. The enemies now have a chance to actually kill my party members. More importantly, status effect boost should be worth while now.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to retroactively test the changes, so I’m hoping these changes won’t ruin the first two years. (I don’t see why they would, I didn’t make as drastic of a change to those values, but I should run a quick test some time in the future just to be safe)

All of these changes and features I’ve been adding along the way were not planned at all. My goal was to simply test the game and fix things as I played through it. But I just can’t help myself. I want this game to be good. I want it to be fun and challenging at times. I want a good RPG and daughter raising sim.

I’m not trying to make history, I’m just trying to make a video game that someone like me would come back and play again.

Well, that’s all for this update. Hopefully I can speed up the play testing, but I doubt it. I know for a fact the maps only get larger from here. Hahaha…..😭