Thoughts...

Back again with another devlog. So since I've posted the 2.1 update Moon Rhapsody has gotten some more attention in various places and I've been able to get a more clear picture about what issues it has and what different types of gamers think about it, and overall I feel like current demo is.....okay, maybe not shit, but heavily flawed, and the game is probably more difficult than it should be.

Now some people may say the game is fine the way it is, but people comparing it to Dark Souls and saying it's even harder bothers me because that's just not the kind of game I wanted to make, and I'm honestly not even really that good at Dark Souls or many hardcore old school games. A lot of the difficulty I think comes down to the game simply not telling players the best way to play it, which I don't like doing because I personally like it better when games leave it to player to find the best solution, but I think the main problem for me at least, is it just doesn't give the player many options in terms of where to go at the start and ways to experiment.

MR is supposed to be a more open world type of game and with the current demo being broken into stages, it forces players to progress in a specific way, and unless they get a good handle on how the game works, they will probably get stuck and die repeatedly at some point.(Which someone did actually point out to me beforehand may up being a problem. )After playing through it a few times I think the mostly linear progression and non stop dungeon crawling definitely does hurt it.

So I wasn't sure if I was going to expand on the current demo or just make another version, but I'll probably make one more version that has an open structure like 1.0 and 2.0, but with more to do in it, but I'm likely still going to to make some changes to the current demo so it's not quite as punishing to new players.

Also, I've been looking at the overworld a lot and decided I had to make some heavy changes to it. Specifically I moved a very large portion of it to the south part of the map where I thought there was too much water and expanded on the space I moved it from. I had to do this also because of the main town Seiryu Village being part of that section was not in a good location and very hard to reach being essentially being all the way at the northern most part of the map. The only reason I had still had it there was because the map shrunk to about 1/4 of it's original size, so it would of originally been at the center. Now however it's much closer to the start and I can make the northern part a more interesting place to explore.

The girl in the artwork attached is Rune, a naga woman who loves hotsprings and teasing Satcher. She also like Satcher, often appears in dungeon areas giving advice. While Rune is friendly, most other Nagi outside of Seiryu Village attack Sasha or Nyx on sight.