I just put out a brief (1-2 hours) demo of my first serious RPG Maker game, if anyone cares to check it out and comment or contribute. It has a cyberpunk setting and takes a fairly non-conventional approach to dungeons and bosses. (I'm avoiding the built-in Dragon Quest-style combat system altogether.) Here is a link to the .exe. (http://www.mdawn5.com/mddemo.exe), and here are a few sample screen shots:






It's definitely M rated, if that sort of thing matters to any of you: (hopefully) disturbing violence and some language, a few prostitutes for good measure.

Looking forward to checking this out. :D

Really cool, thanks for the demo. :)

So timeliness is not my strong suit this semester. I've been buried in work. But I did get to dig in last night. Great atmosphere, great character art, love the music, great detailing in the environments, some interesting staging (especially when the one character is walking to his private room). That stuff is engaging on all levels.

I do have one suggestion, though. I had a little trouble with the room full of green slimes. No big deal. I'm up for a challenge. But the end result was I got through that room not by puzzle-solving with the transporters, which is what I tried to do for about 20 minutes, but by blindly barreling through. And I'm not really sure if I'm supposed to run like a madman and hope I don't get into to many fights or if there is a successful strategy. All of which is to say I was glad when that part of the game was behind me. It felt like I got through out of luck. Then I got to the security camera maze. I might be a moron and just not getting it, but the strides I made there felt random and sometimes unrepeatable. First time up, I immediately get caught by security. That taught me to look out for those guys--they can see me through the fence. Second time I hustled behind the buildings, went into the shed, nothing inside, snuck around the side and got caught by the cameras. So I learned to be very attentive to where the cameras were. That's what you want. Let the player learn from their mistakes. Third time I went to the other side of the shed and got caught by the camera even though I couldn't see it. Fourth time I tried the dog, security walked up, I got in the shed, I exited the shed as security was going in, so our bodies literally passed through each other, and then I had some safe zones to run around. I went into the warehouse, I turned the power off, I came out, I played with the car, security came over, I tried to sneak around them and got caught. So up until that point I was making progress with each attempt. But then I couldn't get past the security by the dog anymore, or I'd pass by a camera I couldn't see. The more I tried to repeat my initial steps, the more I seemed to be at the mercy of things I couldn't see and therefore couldn't avoid. And that's when I stopped having fun. Once other people have gotten a chance to play this game (and they should), I'd be interested if they had a similar experience. That feedback will be more helpful to show whether there's a game design issue there. But here's at least one response and some encouragement to keep going with it.