Amber Full Beta 1.0.1

[Franka]

Strangely, I'm getting plenty of events now, so it's a bit of a mystery why I didn't get any before.

[jack1974]

I changed the shop thing, plus I also raised the limit by 1

[Franka]

I made it... on the very last day. Hooray!

[jack1974]

Haha good. I think if you made it with the "old version" which was much harder, the current version should be possible for everyone (for sure in Easy mode). I just tried to start a new game in young age and with 2 recipes on each level up you have much more variety and you can level faster
I'll be doing a new update to fix some other bugs and then probably stop for today

[Franka]

One thing though: Reputation training at the guild doesn't cost any energy. That's close to cheating, but I might not have made it otherwise, of course.

[jack1974]

I will have it consume at least a bit of energy - with the new changes, I think should still be possible to win without problems

[jack1974]

OK hopefully this is last update for today. Unfortunately the "age bug" repoted by Darciecobalt can be solved only by starting a new game. However it only changes the age of the character shown, so beside that (and possibly some random visual artifacts) it shouldn't impact the game.

Also in crafting mode I noticed I was triggering the "fail romance" once the deadline arrived, even if you actually crafted the item ALREADY!! this was the bug Franka found with Ruby leaving Icesilia too many times

[Minamber]

I just finished the game on normal difficulty (using mostly the 0.7.9 version), it was pretty good, but I think there are some things to improve gameplay-wise.

Getting all skills to 300 is really grindy, I had to abuse the adventurers' guild training quite a bit to raise my skills in time to make the cure and its components, which I only managed 2 days before the deadline. Although for some reason, the docks and market guys kept offering me mostly gemcrafting jobs, so that skill ended up much higher (around 360) than the others despite never training it. That was partly because for some reason the recipes for pebbles make 2 at a time and actually give 2 skill levels per craft. That's probably a bug.

You might want to make increasing skills a bit faster, like giving 2 skill points for tier 4-6 recipes and 3 for the tier 7 ones, that way it would also give an incentive to try to craft harder stuff rather than spamming basic recipes.

Also, you should seriously make shops sell more basic ingredients. I frequently took a job, then never got enough of the ingredients from shops to fulfill it despite looking every day. The menu says the shops restock daily, but that's definitely not true, it's more like every 5 days. If you only have a few recipes, and therefore are always asked to craft the same things, you can run out of ingredients really quickly. It's especially bad for the ingredients you can't find by gathering.

Which brings me to my next point: gathering is seriously not worthwhile past the early stages of the game (where it's a decent source of xp/money/ingredients). It takes a lot of energy, it makes you miss out on opportunities to raise your skills which is the most important thing to do to beat the game, and the results are far too random. You can't be certain of getting the ingredients you want, and on average you get far less money then for doing a job.

Speaking of jobs, it seems like task givers always ask for the same 5 stuff, mostly because they seem to ignore the lower tier recipes. As an example, my first tier 2 recipe was in jewelcrafting, and it seems as soon as I got that, the jobs were all about crafting the same garnet pebbles (I think it was garnet, not sure) over and over. By the end of the game nobody ever asked me to do things under tier 4 or so. It would be nice to change that, because crafting the same thing all the time gets boring fast, plus you run out of ingredients fast.
Another problem with the jobs is that hard jobs are seriously not worth doing. Their rewards are barely higher than easy jobs and they're often pretty tough to do with the really short time and high quality needed. I'd say you should make the rewards for hard jobs at least twice that of easy (with medium being in the middle ofc).

My last complaint is that you don't get nearly as many recipes as I would like from training and levelling up, which imo causes the game to feel more gindy than it should. At the end of the game, I would have liked to feel like the ultimate alchemist and know every recipe, but I only knew about 50. The fact that it's random what recipes you get to buy from the mages guild is also a bad idea imo, it took me at least 30 minutes at the end of the game to find the recipes for the diamond crystal and orichalcum ingot you need to make the 3rd ingredient for the cure (yes I know I could have just bought them, but that didn't really feel like the sort of thing an alchemist would do).


That seems like a lot of criticism, and I apologize for the long post, but I actually really liked the game, it just feels like it needs some polish before release to reduce the grind.

[jack1974]

Thanks for the feedback, those problems were present indeed in that version. But in the recent ones (if you check the changelog at the beginning) I did several improvements, of which some SHOULD (of course I didn't have time to test properly) adress your problems:
- more recipes unlocked, and picked "in level order" (still a bit randomly, but not like before)
- XP now increases proportionally based on Amber's level, so in adult age should be much less grindy
- shops sells more items (maybe not enough, but should be much more than version 0.7.9)
Of course with such long and complex games, testing it again from start is really tiring. But I plan to continue my new playthrough tomorrow, after 4 levels I have already 16 recipes, so I think should be better

I might make the gathering yield different result based on Amber's level, that will require a bit of time to "make the new list of ingredients she can find" but should make gathering worthwhile again (I must be careful though to not abuse it).

[Minamber]

Ok, I'll probably do another playthrough on the dark side path when version 0.9 comes out.

A few more nitpicks that I didn't get around to mentioning in that huge post;

I felt getting to lvl 10 in the young age part was a little too easy, I did mostly half xp/ half gold jobs with some gathering, and little studying, and I was lvl 17 with 4k gold at the end. My skill levels were a bit low (around 85) expect for jewelcrafting though, so maybe I was supposed to do more studying. Still, I don't see how you could fail the exam the first time unless you deliberately refused to do anything that granted xp.

I couldn't find a way to tell how much time I had left until the deadline for the young age (the announcement was way before it actually happened) or until the deadline for making the cure. Would it be possible to add some kind of countdown somewhere? I don't mind having a deadline, but I would really prefer being able to tell how much time I have left.

I felt it was weird that you could level skills beyond 300, yet there is no point in doing so (as far as I could tell). Maybe you could either put skill caps at 300 like the xp cap at 30, or maybe give a small automatic quality boost to crafting for levels beyond 300?

Edit: One last thing. You might want to raise the price of finished products in shops. It's very possible to get a job to make 3 gold ingots that rewards 250 gold, then just buy the 3 ingots for about 50 gold each, netting you a 100 gold profit for doing a merchant's job instead of an alchemist's.

That works for pretty much every gold giving job (at least the ones I got), so it's basically an infinite money cheat, limited only by the fact that it takes a little time to get the job and then turn it in.