~ ~ ~ ~ ~
your base class
is who you are.
your base class
is your role in the world party.
everyone is assigned
their base class at birth.
this maintains
the balance of the world party.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Assigned Fighter At Birth:
Play as Josie, the sister of the Hero of Light, on a journey to stop your brother from obtaining the crystals of the elements!
Fight against your foes in a lively, simple-to-learn, hard-to-master battle system.
Grow a party of memorable and funny friends along your journey.
Controls:
Arrow Keys/Left Stick
Z key/A button: Confirm
X key/B button: Back/Skip/Forfeit
Made in two months for the Trans Representation Game Jam 2022.
Loving thanks to:
My friends and family
The kind folks who tested the game
The Pico-8 Discord community
Update 8/13
-new title screen
-fixed some weird apostrophe spacing in the dialogue
-added forfeit (hold X during fights)
-fewer options during first few fights, to help w learning the battle system
-balancing
-added turnqueue
-moved commitment tutorial text earlier
Update 8/14
-show hp/max hp in battle
-more tutorial text
-added chapter select menu to title
-turns are now not based on commitment level
-fixed crash with thief
Update 8/15
-more balancing
-nerf smash attack a little
-fixed bug with singing animation
-fixed bug with area-of-effect action animations
-various balancing/map redesign
Aside from copying word for word the opening to "Final Fantasy 1" it looks like a pretty good tactical game.
. . .
OK, @ohhcurtains, I see now this is a bit of a tribute to Final Fantasy. That makes me feel better. And yes I'm playing it earnestly now, really quite good including the story. Gold star for your fine work.
The battle music rocks! I really like it. And using RPG base classes to discuss trans representation is a pretty cool idea! In regards to gameplay, there's nothing really, I think it is perfect as is.
I think I get the point. Is it represented mechanically where characters with more understanding of themselves get a second ability outside of their starting class? But it seemed like Josie didn't.
The battles presented a reasonable challenge. I also didn't fully understand what affected the order of character movement. Having a high star score sometimes seemed to help, but sometimes didn't. In the last one, I was very fortunate when three enemies lined up so I could repeatedly Push them to make them lose their turns.
And, at the end, or close to it, I had this crash:
I also had one battle where all characters but one (Cid) were knocked out. I had no hope of winning from there, but it took a long time for them to finish off Cid. Could you add a means to restart a battle, either through an unused key combination or in the pause menu?
It looks like a good game overall, but I lost interest quickly because of the slow wall of text about philosophy after each battle. For me at least, that makes it hard to pay attention to the story. Besides that, I'm not sure why "commit" would restore stars or what determines turn order.
Added new tutorial text which more clearly explains the commitment mechanic.
This seems to have broken with a pico8 update or something. It gives the syntax error:
local ang+=fsf/100, unexpected character next to “+=“
Actually, @Munchkin and @ohhcurtains, I think that would be invalid in any regard.
local ang+=fsf/100
You are defining a local originally unknown variable then increasing its current value (unknown) to fsf/100
Maybe the line should read ang+=fsf/100 ?
oh that's kind of embarassing. not sure how I missed that. will fix soon!
This game rules.
The battle system is deep and I love how you learn a bit more about it with each battle.
The title is great, and the way the RPG class as gender analogy is reflected in the gameplay as the game progresses is clever also. I like the writing. The dialog is funny and conversational. Music is fantastic too.
I haven't played FF1 so I'm missing some context on the things you're riffing off of but I liked the interstitial bits, the way they're sort of a tutorial but can also be read in other ways and progress the story.
Now that the crashes have been fixed, the only bug I ran into was certain enemies sometimes glitching out on their turns -- yeeting across the screen or entirely off screen and then vibrating for a while before taking their turns... this only happened on a couple battles and it did resolve itself. I saw it with the snail enemy and one other but I can't remember which.
Thief is also spelled "Theif" in a few places.
Aside from that everything is super polished and smooth, and it's impressive you managed to squeeze in all this gameplay variety and story.
Thank you for this game!
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