Steam info/Discord server up

I had to take a break for a bit to re adjust but I'm back working on the game as usual now. I hope people enjoyed playing the second demo even though I had to cut some things I wanted in order to get it out. While I want to update it and fix some stuff like the memory usage later on, in the mean time I have to focus on finishing the main game, anything I add to the demo version would have to be remade in the current build so I have to be pretty selective about what I update it with. I can't say if there will be another demo version but if there is it will be along side the finished game.

Also there will also be a Steam release for the full game in case anyone was wondering, however, I'm still deciding if the game will have the explicit scenes fully intact or as a separate patch, it would still be free of course. I know it sounds lame, but I say this because anyone who has been following this game long enough would know it wasn't fully an H game initially, and having the game marked as adults only would likely severely limit any attention it gets, which means I have to rely almost completely on people stumbling across it...and to be honest, with no income, no publisher, and not much desire to do crowd funding or patreon I don't want to hinder the game's chance of success too heavily if I can help it. I know there's a lot of adult games now that generate sometimes massive amounts of money, but it's usually through other means of funding than just direct sales(often times these games are also never even completed for this reason), and I'd much rather fully devote my time towards finishing the game instead of resorting to that. I may release still it on Steam with the explicit content without a patch(depending on the amount of support for it, though not likely), but I still had to let people know the situation regardless.

As for what I'm doing on now, I'm back to working on the overworld map which I'm still around half way done with. The full size as you can see in the demo is pretty big but I may have to resize it a bit. The way the second demo is laid out is very different from the first and a lot more enclosed overall, but I had to change the area for the demo. The island in the main game won't have the rocks blocking off the ocean and no other way to get in the dungeon area except to find the scope. Like Zelda BotW the main dungeons will all be optional but doing the last one before completing them would be extremely difficult, and while the world won't be nearly as expansive as that game I want to try and make it more dense with more rewarding stuff to find. At the moment a lot the overworld areas excluding the ocean I think are a little too corridor like(which I know contrasts with the first demo which dumps you in a huge field full of nothing), the fixed screen nature of the overworld makes doing wide open spaces a little more challenging.  Also if you managed to find the fishing rod in the demo and caught some fish with it, you might have noticed you can't cook all of them over the campfire. That is intentional, some of the edible items you find have to be cooked in different ways, but I won't talk about that just yet. I'm also slowly trying to translate the game into Japanese with my frankly still beginner's knowledge of it, I want to do other languages as well later on but right know that's the only one I have any sort of understanding of so that'll be priority. Also in case anyone is interested, I got a Discord up now courtesy of Travelling Merchant's help.

Link: discord.gg/K8EFDAq

That's all I got for now, I'm also curious how many people who played the demo managed to find the area above.

Demo Walkthrough

*Note this is slightly outdated since version 1.3.

Since the demo has been out for a while and I don't think many people have figured out out how to complete it here's a walkthrough of it.

Spoilers obviously:

1. From the start of the game you wake up in a underground lake. There's a chest all the way to right but you can't get it yet. All you can do is go south until you find a passage that leads up into the next area.

2.  The next area is an alleyway with a door you can't enter if you check it. When you leave the alley you'll find a save point. You have to check the Take Items function, you'll find there's 3 weapons and a seabream in it.

3. When you leave the city area there's a large field full of fog you can't see well in. If you just keep going straight you'll see another chest in a graveyard surrounded by block but you can actually break these ones to get 5 matches.

4. If you keep following the path in front of you. You reach a deadend with a save point and a campsite. You can light the campfire with the matches to restore HP when you sit next to it. The campfire can also cook items like the seabream.

5. The building next to save point looks empty but if you check the blocked doors a couple undead break out that you have to kill. There's a bladebug in the corner you have to kill as well which is best done with the rifle since they have very high defense. Killing all the enemies yeilds a an apartment key that goes to the building in the city area with the first save point.

6. When you get back to the city you should save immediately because you won't be able to inside the building. The save room inside has ghosts around it making it unusable, the door across from it has a bunch of pits a couple bladebugs and a TV with static on it. You can knock the bladebug in front of the TV in the pit with a couple shots or if you are carful with the machete. Breaking the TV gives you a 2F key.

7. If you go into the other rooms you'll see one is flooded and has a chest you can't reach and the other has another chest surrounded by blocks, with wyrms sleeping near it. The only way to break the blocks is to use fire magic which the wyrms have, so you need to alert one and let it shoot at you to get the chest which just has money. The gold blocks in the room you have to leave for now.

8. If you go up the stairs there's the 2nd floor which you can enter with the key and the 3rd floor which is open and leads to a statue you can only check for now. When you exit the 3rd floor a ladder appears that leads to the 4th. If you go up to the 4th floor there's more gold blocks in the rooms but if you hit them all they won't do anything, the door in the middle room has to be unlocked first.

9. Going to the second floor there isn't much on it besides enemies, and a room with 4 clocks. Take note of the times on each one. The room with the 3 bladebugs has a pit but if you fall in it you'll just go down to floor below which has the chest in the flooded room. Don't bother attacking the slugs in this room because they will kill you very easily.

10. Back to the room above you'll notice there's some crates around that if you break one the other can be pushed into the pit. If you then fall down the pit the crate will be in the flooded room and you can push it up to the platform with the chest and then jump on it in order to get it. The chest contains an Aurora spell that lets you harm ghost temporarily.

11. You can now use the Aurora spell to attack the ghosts in the save room so you can use the save point. But you still need it to kill some more. On the 2nd floor there's one room that only has ghosts in it that if you kill them gives a chest with a balcony key. Take the key back up to the 4th floor and make sure you bring the aurora with you or else you will have to reload after the next step.

12. Unlocking the balcony you'll see there's a 4th gold switch that has to be hit along with others in the right order, so make sure they are all off before hand. The order is what the clocks earlier where showing you. The hour hands on the clocks point in the direction of each switch that needs to be hit.

13. Once you hit all the switches the gold blocks on the fist floor will disappear revealing a chest but you won't be able to go back down stairs because other blocks will appear blocking the exit to the first floor and the room that lets you fall back down.

14. If you walk around for a bit you'll notice there's footsteps in the background. But before you do anything else go into the room full of books on the 4th floor and get the chest that appeared which contains a taiyaki which can fully heal you. Once you did that if you go into the 2nd flooded room across from there you'll notice you can see where the ghost walking around is positioned. With the aurora spell on you can attack her which you should do using a pistol so she can't hit you right after.

15. The ghost is the boss of the demo named Mizuki. But if you try to fight her she won't flinch much and you'll most likely run out resources before you can take even half of her HP, so your only option here is to run. If you go back to the second floor, there's one room with a large table and some books you can't get by, on the other side is a passage blocked by a cabinet. Mizuki will follow you everywhere once she is attacked and you can bait her into attacking the table so you can get by. Push the cabinet out of the way without letting her hit you and you can go into clock room from the other side.

16. The clock room now has a red switch you can strike only from the side you entered. Hitting it lets you leave the room and opens a passage in the room that only had ghosts in it before. Going through that room takes you into the room with the pit that lets you reach the first floor. You can try and grab the item in the chest that appeared earlier but if you wake up the wyrms Mizuki will put both them and you to sleep with her singing so it's best to wait. You can't enter the save room so for now should just leave the building and save immediately once outside.

17. Once you've escaped if you go anywhere else Mizuki will still be following you but she is less hostile and will only throw fireballs/cyclone spells unless she is attacked. If you go back down to lake area with the first chest you can bait Mizuki into using her cyclone spell to break the blocks yielding an elixer which increases your HP by 100.

18. If you go back to the field and walk back to campsite a character named Satcher will be sitting there who sells items after you talk to him. Unless you did a lot of exploring though you most likely won't be able to buy much, but he does give away a few items for free.

19. The area you have to go to next is a labyrinth hidden in the woods west from the campsite. If you went here earlier you could find a bunch of items that might be useful but hitting the purple crystals will just take you back to the campsite. There's one wall in the south parth of the labyrinth that can only be broken with fire magic. So you nee to lure Mizuki there and have her break it in order to leave the area. One of the harpies in the field tells you about it if you can get them to speak.

20. The next room is an area full of crates which if you break you'll find a potion hidden in the corner. The next room has an alter with a sword in it, but you should leave it for now and just exit the building.

21. Once you leave you'll be back outside near the start where you first entered the city. Go back to the save point and put one weapon away that you don't think you'll need, probably the machete. Make sure you still have at least one full healing item or 3 ideally and then go back to the alter and get the sword. Once you leave with it Muzuki will appear and block the exit forcing you to fight her.

22. Mizuki has 20,000HP and only the Sanzu Blade or an aurora spell will allow you to hit her. The Sanzu Blade you just picked up is obviously the best option to use because of the damage output, if you try using the rifle you can do a lot of damage but unless you found all the ammo it won't be enough to kill her. Mizuki can kill you very quickly in just a couple attacks but she isn't very aggressive, if you stay close enough she won't use her fireball which will force you to dodge and waste SP. If you attack with the Sanzu Blade you can defend if you keep the button held down and she won't be able to do much, but she will eventually change tactics if you rely too much on turtling.

23. The best option I've found is to slide or jump > attack 4x with the Sanzu blade until you run out of SP and need to recover it with a potion. If you get hit too much though you might have to use the potion earlier which will make the fight more difficult but it's possible to beat her without using any other weapons this way, if you get grenades from Satcher they will do 500 damage with aurora on so they can also be very useful.

24. Once she is defeated all the purple blocks in the area will disappear so you can now get the Observer's Stone from the wyrm's room and go back to 3rd floor of the apartments with the statue and place it there. This opens a portal back up to overworld so you finish the demo.

25. You can explore the overworld a bit but there isn't much else to find here right now except some items, Satcher also shows up here near a campsite once Mizuki is defeated.

That's it, I left out how to get a lot of optional items but the demo can be cleared pretty fast if you just follow those steps and you learn Mizuki's attack patterns.

New Style

Recently added:

-Changing head gear: In the demo you can't take off Sasha's headphones because I drew them as part of her sprite before I figured out out how I was going to handle different equipment. There ended up being way too many sprites for me to make a whole bunch of variations just for headgear but I managed to find a easier way to do it using only a handful of sprites. I can't use the same method for outfits though so expect there to be less of those. I might post a tutorial on how to do it at some point if there's enough interest.

Being worked on:

-The overworld map(45%)

-Training room

Will work on soon:

-Other weapon types

-Weapon upgrading

-Fishing

-Water transportation

Spring is Here

Recently added:

-Rainstorms, it will sometimes get dark and start to rain in the overworld at random times. I don't want to say too much how much it effects the gameplay yet but tall structures like the spear shaped rocks around the ocean and mountains attract lightning.

Being worked on:

-The overworld map(40%), I put off finishing it because I wanted the demo out sooner and I wasn't satisfied with the intro areas yet. I want to finish it before most of the dungeon and interior locations so that it's easier to figure out how the player progresses through the game. The demo posted here only features a little bit of the overworld, most of it is actually in a dungeon like area though it's much bigger than a regular one.
-Fishing, I wanted to put this in the demo but I thought it would be better for a later update.

Will work on soon:

-Training room, someone suggested adding this as I know it takes some getting used to the combat. It will probably be added to the extras menu.
-Weapon upgrading, while the weapons in the demo have different stats and levels already implented there's no way to actually upgrade them yet. I was thinking of having an item that you can use to do it but I might use another or multiple methods.
-Gear, there's only one extra piece of gear you can find in the demo and another oufit that I decided to save for later. You can't take off Sasha's headphones in the demo but you will be able to equip other headgear over them in the future.

Things to fix:

-Mist Field layout, this area is easy to get lost in by design but there's a lot of parts to it that are unfinished and parts I'm not sure I'm satisfied with. It'll probably receive some heavy changes in later versions.
-Enemies dropping items, if you play the challenge mode you'll notice the enemies drop ammo and money here, and they also do this in the overworld.  But they do it the form of a chest that can sometimes get the player stuck in some places or not able to open them since they can only be opened from the front, so I'll probably just make it a regular item drop from now on.
-Potential lag for low end computers, since I'm using Game Maker this always going to be an issue I have to think about. The overworld is in one very, very large room with thousands of objects so it's by far the worst offender. I'm still working on ways to optimize it further.

Demo Released

If you haven't seen or played the demo for Moon Rhapsody, I hope you do as I could use the feedback to improve the game.
As I've said on the download page it's not set at the beginning so it doesn't explain a lot and is actually a little different from how the rest of the game is structured, it might feel more like a walking simulator at first. The reason I put out a demo showing off this part and not the earlier parts is because I was still ironing out a lot of aspects in the game's overworld and didn't think it was ready to show off but I wanted to put out a demo so people could actually try the game. The first dungeon I had made I basically completely scrapped as I didn't think it utilized the game's mechanics well enough and was overall kind of boring in design.
While I had the basic layout for demo done a while ago, I had several systems to implement and bugs I still needed to fix and the whole process ended up taking weeks longer than I anticipated it would. Although now that I have most of that taken care of, I think finishing the rest of game won't be quite as difficult(Hopefully). Below are the initial concept sketches I used to make the demo, some areas have been changed around a bit and not everything is marked.

Change of Perspective

One last update before the year ends, I hope people are enjoying their holidays. I wanted to release a demo before the end of 2019 but a lot of what I had still needed a lot of work and ironing out. But it's getting pretty close to being ready now.

This shot is of the same town I posted before, but as you can see I decided to go for a more 3D perspective akin to a PS1 pre-rendered game when you explore it. This is probably going to be the only 90% safe town in the game, so the player will be in and out of it frequently, thus I wanted to give it some more character.

If anyone's curious how I did this, I made a simplistic 3D model first of the town, then took screenshots of each scene I wanted and then finally drew over them in Aseprite.

That's all for this year, the last 3 screens below are from a large part of the game I haven't touched upon too much yet, but I will show more of it soon.

World Design

Central region in MR's world map

The main thing I've been trying to focus on for the past several weeks is trying to put the entire overworld together. I feel like for a game like this, the world design is the most important factor besides the gameplay of course as it kind of serves as sort of a foundation for everything else in the game, like how you progress and where certain enemies, items, puzzles, and etc are found. So I think making the overworld first(After building or getting a solid gameplay engine first actually) is a good way to make designing the rest of the game a lot easier, I'm about 25-30% done with it so far and I'm trying to get the rest done before the end of January.

The way the world is structured, I don't want to spoil too much, but you can get an idea from looking at the screenshots I took. It's mostly a bunch of islands, some tiny with not much on them some taking up large portions of the map with the largest one being in the center. You can swim between a lot of them but it's probably better and safer to use a boat for longer distances.

From VGmaps

Now if you look at the game's most obvious comparison, the Zelda series. You'll notice all the 2D games (save for the DS ones which I don't want to talk about) tend to have a similar structures, typically being set in some form of Hyrule. You generally have mountains and rivers at the top of the map, forests/town/castles arranged some way in the center and ocean/lakes/deserts close to or at the bottom. Even other games that would take inspiration from Zelda like Seiken Densetsu 1(FF Adventure) and Alundra would follow this kind of design as well. Minish Cap is a little bit different and the areas feel more sectioned off like the 3D games.

But despite most of them having similar design, I still love the way they are put together and always preferred them to way the 3D games are often designed, even with OoT/MM being my favorite games in the series.

So what it is it about them that makes the maps in these games good? A lot of Youtube videos and other blogs might have gone over it already, but it's because they are designed almost like a giant puzzle, or a dungeon above the ground.

The 3D Zelda games starting with OoT would take a more hub based approach and have a giant empty field in the center of the map, and all the more interesting locations off in the edges and corners, and instead of solving puzzles in these locations to reach the dungeons, you typically would instead being doing a lot of back and forth quests with NPCs so you could get an item or song that would allow you to progress. There was still some puzzle solving, but it was mostly for heart pieces and other secrets. Both Wind Waker and Skyward Sword tried to an extent to go back to way the 2D games were structured(WW succeeding at that a lot better than SS did IMO) but it wasn't until Breath of the Wild that Nintendo would really make a push to revisit the roots of the Zelda series.

I like many others, was extremely hyped when I first saw BotW and started learning more about it, and in many ways when the game was finally released it did managed to feel like a return to form for the series which many people were saying was starting to stagnate and drift away from what made the series special in the first place. But, call me a contrarian if you like, I was one of the people who was somewhat disappointed with the game and I still think OoT, MM, and even WW are better than it. The reasons again have probably been discussed ad nauseum in many other places, so I won't get too much into that, I just want to talk about the way the world is designed since that's what this post is about.

From ZeldaDungeon

If you look at BotW map zoomed out you can see it looks a lot like the earlier games in the series but way, way bigger. It specifically looks like a call back to A Link to Past and the original LoZ with the ocean off in the bottom corner. However, when you are actually exploring BotW's map it doesn't really feel anything like the older games in the series, to put it bluntly, it feels like a number of other modern open world games, specifically like Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption...but with a Zelda theme. 

That's not to say the game is bad, far from it, it's actually probably the best take on an open world setting to this day. But I think that's mainly because of the influence it does retain from the earlier games in the series. The best parts of BotW in my opinion are the first few hours on the plateau before the world fully opens up, and another location that you stumble upon later that actually heavily inspired me to make Moon Rhapsody. The parts where you don't have many items and abilities to work with and you have to figure out what to do without any guidance or clues are where I felt the game shined and it's systems worked the best.

But even during those moments, BotW never really feels like you're playing an old school Zelda game in 3D, at least I didn't think so, and that's because again, the older games were designed with the world being like a giant puzzle or maze that you solve over the course of the game. Almost like a metroidvania type of game. Had BotW been like the first few hours over the entire course of the game, I probably would have enjoyed it better, but would that approach have made the game better than all the other games in the series? A lot of people nowadays might say giving more freedom and more ways to play around with the world from the get go makes games automatically better, that's probably why open world games have taken off so much since GTA. But if you ask me I think a game just throwing you in a open environment with some weapons and enemies and telling you to have fun is kind of lazy and boring, so as you would expect I don't play a lot of open world games these days(I barely play anything ever actually).

But I can't just write of that more open world design is inferior to linear design, because if a game doesn't give you at least some freedom to experiment or do what you want, you don't even have a game to begin with. The key is of course is finding a balance that works for the way the game flows. If a game is too open and doesn't present enough challenges that are essential to progress regularly it will get too boring, but that will also happen if the game just strings you along and goes through the motions with said challenges. The "challenges" need to either be always interesting or more spread out so they don't get too repetitive, ideally it would be a mix of both but as one would imagine it can very hard to achieve a proper balance that would satisfy most people.

So going back to Moon Rhapsody, what is the approach I'm trying to do? Since I'm one person making this game I couldn't really make something as large scale as BotW even if I wanted to, but I also want the game to feel more open and allow the player to create their own fun in some ways that older games couldn't. So Moon Rhapsody's world will be like a puzzle that can be solved in many different ways. You might find an item that can help you get by an obstacle easily or you might end up having to take a different way, sort of like Deus Ex I suppose. But the end goal for me is to make a game that gives the player lots of freedom, but limits them in some way throughout the whole course of the game so that it remains challenging and interesting all the way through instead of the player getting overleveled or overequipped at some point and having the difficulty fall off. That's also why it's more of a survival horror game instead of ARPG even if it might look like the latter, because I want players to always feel in danger, and like they might not have enough resources or the right tools to make it through the next area. There will always be a way though if you look hard enough.