Phantasy Star: Fringes of Algo

Alright cool. I'll check it out when I get home from work tonight and I'll give you my thoughts.

Before anything else: I sincerely hope that you will persevere and finish your project, I would very much love to spend hours and hours playing that!

Ok, now some comments after about 20 minutes of play:

Visual Gorgeous, you did a splendid job with the environments and I love, love, love the mini map. The sprites are extremely well done, I love them!

Audio The fact that you hop between MP3s and midis will seriously damage the overall experience. I understand that far from all the PS songs were put into MP3s but I'd consider using rips from the game or even music that's not even from PS from times to times. As for the songs you use, I'd like to know the level of compression you use because the sound is muffled and scratchy at times. The loops aren't super clean either but unless you dabble with music software, I can understand how complex this must be to fix. The sound effects are very, very neat but could benefit from being a tad quieter.

Performance You already know it: the Palma map is an issue, takes a long while to load. This includes menu access time. I would make this the main tech issue to be resolved.

Gameplay Everything is very smooth and sleek so far, I love the menu navigation and the general feel of the game. However, since it looks like you're gonna emulate many aspects of the PS games, if you're going to make it a grind fest like PS I and II, consider making the initial fights less hard. Alis starts with 16 HP and 0 Meseta. My initial fight with two Sworm gave me 10 Meseta and left me with 4 HP. I had to go heal after one fight and it cost me half what I gained. Tedium: it kills a game. Further exploration led me to the warehouse where the critters are much easier to kill and levels come easier, the fault was thus mine by exploring an area I was not supposed to yet. However, the warehouse's initially accesible area is very small so it did meant mindless grind just so I could survive outside Camineet.


So yeah, as I said, I cannot wait for more and as soon as I get home tomorrow (I'm not home tonight), I will play through the entire demo and comment to my heart's content.

Well done sir, please continue.

Also: All my songs are yours for the using.


Edits:

I love, love, love your shops. So sci-fi, so neeeeeeeeeat! <3

Don't feel like you HAVE to emulate every old PS aspect, such as the crazy engrish. "Monomate is procured".

It would be nice to have a rundown of what stats increase when you level.

Aeroprism wrote:Before anything else: I sincerely hope that you will persevere and finish your project, I would very much love to spend hours and hours playing that!

Thank you, and it all greatly depends on that one 'technical' issue that needs to be overcome

Aeroprism wrote:Visual Gorgeous, you did a splendid job with the environments and I love, love, love the mini map. The sprites are extremely well done, I love them!

Thank you considering that sprite work is my primary hobby when it comes to fan games, it's good to know I nailed that.

Aeroprism wrote:Audio The fact that you hop between MP3s and midis will seriously damage the overall experience. I understand that far from all the PS songs were put into MP3s but I'd consider using rips from the game or even music that's not even from PS from times to times. As for the songs you use, I'd like to know the level of compression you use because the sound is muffled and scratchy at times. The loops aren't super clean either but unless you dabble with music software, I can understand how complex this must be to fix. The sound effects are very, very neat but could benefit from being a tad quieter.

Thanks for the guidance, yeah the tracks were very hard to get ahold of, and I had to loop them myself and not having any real audio knowledge definitely hindered me, I'm aware of this issue, and hopefully by the time further demo's are released will have better sound tracks and looping. I only really have access to Audacity and I'm not that great with it. Any help regarding PSG1 and 2 soundtrack rips in good quality will be greatly appreciated

I intend to use some non-PS tracks later in the game, primarily for some secret boss themes, and new dungeon areas.

Aeroprism wrote:Performance You already know it: the Palma map is an issue, takes a long while to load. This includes menu access time. I would make this the main tech issue to be resolved.

Indeed, you can see why I was hesitant to release while this issue persists, there are a few routes I can take to lessen the issue, the most simple one being splitting the Palma map up into a few separate pieces, however not sure what will happen when it comes time to get the Hovercraft, further planning needs to be done on that aspect. But that only really helps for Palm as it has 3 distinct island areas, Mota and Dezo are large uninterrupted maps.

Aeroprism wrote:Gameplay Everything is very smooth and sleek so far, I love the menu navigation and the general feel of the game. However, since it looks like you're gonna emulate many aspects of the PS games, if you're going to make it a grind fest like PS I and II, consider making the initial fights less hard. Alis starts with 16 HP and 0 Meseta. My initial fight with two Sworm gave me 10 Meseta and left me with 4 HP. I had to go heal after one fight and it cost me half what I gained. Tedium: it kills a game. Further exploration led me to the warehouse where the critters are much easier to kill and levels come easier, the fault was thus mine by exploring an area I was not supposed to yet. However, the warehouse's initially accesible area is very small so it did meant mindless grind just so I could survive outside Camineet.

I will take this into consideration. Perhaps boosting Alis' initial HP and lessening the level curve will suffice. However, you gain Monomate 50% of the time from the warehouse enemies, reducing the need for hospital visits, and by the time you are level 3 Sworm should be easy outside, especially with a shield for a little extra defence and the Short Sword you get from the Parolit store

I may increase the Meseta gained from Sworm as well.

Aeroprism wrote:Also: All my songs are yours for the using.

Thank you very much and I always liked the 'procured' message, but it can be easily changed if the consensus wishes it so.

Aeroprism wrote:It would be nice to have a rundown of what stats increase when you level.

Noted, will work on this for future versions.

Speaking of music, I can't remember if I already told you this but: if you ever need parts or loops from my remixes: just ask, it's extremely easy to do. Take for example my newest PS2 medley, suppose you'd like to use the Prologue, Violation and Power parts separately for your soundtrack, making clean, loopable segments out of those would take me about 2-3 minutes of work since everything I do is modular so go ahead and ask.

Also: if you plan to use songs from the original games, the rips available on the net are not loop-friendly but I can fix that relatively easily, if you can provide me with the source material.

That's something I'd like to actually do, most of your compositions and remixes are fantastic, if you could do what you suggested with the PS2 medley it would be handy, I'm extremely inclined to use your Violation as my PS2 Dezo Dungeon theme, it has so much atmosphere

The only rips I can find of the Generation games are from videos of the in game 'BGM CD' option on youtube, as far as I'm aware no one has cleaned up all the tracks, made them loop friendly and released them yet, or if they have they aren't easily found.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OatoaK5xbkQ

This for instance, has all the PS1 tracks that are needed, but again it's a vid, so yeah.

I've never looked into the Generations 2 game OST since I find them boring, lacking and generally inferior to the original Genesis tracks. I am not familiar with the Generation 1 OST, I will have to look into it.

As for my remixes, the only work you need to do on your part is indicate your precise needs. Example:

Song: Before the End
Loops needed: 2:02 to 2:43, 3:45 to 4:25 etc ...

Do that for every song you need. It does not need to be a medley. Suppose you want to use my Rise and Triumph for a bathe theme, you probably don't want to have the whole thing wind up at every battle so I can make loops out of single-theme songs as well: just use the format I suggested above to make your requests.