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6 Screenshots

About This File

Hello! I've been working on a short demo for a game, if I had to guess there's probably an hour or so of gameplay. There's much more I'd like to add if there's enough interest, otherwise I hope some people enjoy it as it is! Fair warning, the difficulty is very high.

Please download empire demo.exe if you don't have the RPG Maker VX Ace RTP.

Follow me on pixiv and tumblr for updates and art!

https://pixiv.me/livinginfinite

https://thelivinginfinite.tumblr.com/


What's New in Version 1.1.2   See changelog

Released

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- Continuation of the main story! Fail a mission to progress the plot. That should happen naturally, right?

- Failing a mission will also unlock a new skill tree for Xerenia.

- Items are usable in battle now. Make sure you get repulsion fields in the Armory if you're having trouble.

- The Huggies Titan has been added to the game.

Thanks to everyone for the kind words and support. As always, let me know if you encounter bugs.


User Feedback

Recommended Comments



I think I may still be playing on version 1.01, but man am I bad at the Evaluation thing-ma-jig the doc gives. My best so far is C/A.

Just checking, but is your bladder supposed to fill immediately causing you deal with popups right as the exam starts?

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23 minutes ago, Unbeknownst said:

I think I may still be playing on version 1.01, but man am I bad at the Evaluation thing-ma-jig the doc gives. My best so far is C/A.

Just checking, but is your bladder supposed to fill immediately causing you deal with popups right as the exam starts?

Yes, it is.

And you're not bad at it, the characters are just not particularly continent. (Well, Astrid is.) I'm actually amazed you did that well on it.

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1 hour ago, LivingInfinite said:

Yes, it is.

And you're not bad at it, the characters are just not particularly continent. (Well, Astrid is.) I'm actually amazed you did that well on it.

Yeah the popups make it virtually impossible. Only Astrid can do anything at all cause it locks you into being hit immediately basically. Astrid is consistently C/A. But thats better results for at least one person than I expected from a game designed by council tbh. 

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1 hour ago, blooper said:

Yeah the popups make it virtually impossible. Only Astrid can do anything at all cause it locks you into being hit immediately basically. Astrid is consistently C/A. But thats better results for at least one person than I expected from a game designed by council tbh. 

PROTIP: You can just not move at all and get A/A with Astrid.

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17 minutes ago, LivingInfinite said:

PROTIP: You can just not move at all and get A/A with Astrid.

Oh she actually just has no effect from it w

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So I was inspired to go back and play my way through the Blackheart demo again. I'll admit I miss the character's actually acknowledging how much they need to use the restroom/worrying about their appearance. Will that be added to this game as well? I'll admit it'd have to be a thing that turns off while on enemy ships or during the test which would probably be annoying to code.

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39 minutes ago, Unbeknownst said:

So I was inspired to go back and play my way through the Blackheart demo again. I'll admit I miss the character's actually acknowledging how much they need to use the restroom/worrying about their appearance. Will that be added to this game as well? I'll admit it'd have to be a thing that turns off while on enemy ships or during the test which would probably be annoying to code.

Hmm, I might add that back in. But yeah, I took it out specifically because it was interfering with the missions too much.

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On another note, are you going to be doing the full body art? As AredApple noted, desperation content would be nice. Don't take these suggestions too seriously, you do what you want, wouldn't want to start stressing over a pet project...

Also, I've found an exploit that will get enable you to Milia through the evaluation with an A/A rating.

Interestingly, using this same exploit doesn't work with Xerenia. Apparently not even cheating can save her continence.

...I won't post the actual exploit without LivingInfinite's approval. Just know that I didn't actually mess with any of the files or anything.

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I think the requisition system is broken. It seems that the amount of any one of undergarment doesn't stack between characters of the same FRMT level.

For example, with Astrid and Millia at FRMT level 5, you'll end up with 5 Phantoms/10 Guardians total instead of the implied 10 Phantoms/20 Guardians. I thought that maybe it was tracked separately for each character, but that's doesn't seem to be the case either.

I'm pretty sure its currently coded so that it sets the value rather than adding the value.

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1 hour ago, Unbeknownst said:

I think the requisition system is broken. It seems that the amount of any one of undergarment doesn't stack between characters of the same FRMT level.

For example, with Astrid and Millia at FRMT level 5, you'll end up with 5 Phantoms/10 Guardians total instead of the implied 10 Phantoms/20 Guardians. I thought that maybe it was tracked separately for each character, but that's doesn't seem to be the case either.

I'm pretty sure its currently coded so that it sets the value rather than adding the value.

Oh, good point. Yeah, I didn't want people spamming requisitions for unlimited underwear. I'll look at it.

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On 6/10/2017 at 8:07 PM, jas419 said:

Exceptional work as always. You did a great job between the face styles, and I think it works well with RPG maker in a way. Good job!

Thanks! I'm glad you think so.

On 6/11/2017 at 3:22 PM, Etuhanlo said:

No pictures for titan or colossus </3

Yes, that is on the list of things to do

33 minutes ago, ARCT3CH said:

Your skills of an artist are wow! I'm impressed. 

Thank you!

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LivingInfinite,

As always, your work is incredible and the time and attention you put into this game is remarkable. Virtually every comment on here points to this, and the characters, artwork, and level design are all fantastic. That being said I would like to provide some constructive criticism, because this game does not merely exhibit a "very high" level of difficulty but is next to impossible, making this a broken game. Just some observations:

-All enemies are ridiculously overpowered. This is supposed to be an elite fighting unit, and yet 3 hits from the first enemy you encounter knocks them out.  Your only choice is to attempt to outrun them, but this is pointless because...

-Combat is restricted to tight spaces, so even if you manage to escape using the smoke bomb you have two seconds before that exact same enemy simply re-engages in combat, and even if you do manage to run away you're still screwed because...

-Using the shift key is of no use as all opponents are lightning fast and can easily catch up. So then you decide to simply face the enemy and grind them down but this isn't possible because all the characters are ridiculously weak and...

-Players become 'clinched' almost immediately, and escaping is pointless as the next turn will have them immediately clinched again. The entire gun mechanic has been rendered pointless and weak melee attacks become your only option. You could try to heal but...

-Using health restoring items in combat isn't possible. This is the only RPG I've ever seen that doesn't allow healing during combat. Also, once characters faint they don't regain consciousness after the battle and there is no item to restore them. Again, this is the only RPG I've ever seen that does that.

If it is your intention to never, ever, have the squad actually complete a mission without a half hour of tedious save scumming while moving forward through the map a few squares at at a time then mission accomplished. But for anything approaching a balanced, enjoyable game that actually allows progression, this is unplayable. This is a shame because it voids all the obvious hard work you put into building the confidence, continence, and reputation systems. What is the point of having these if the gameplay will inevitably force them forever downward? Most of the skills available to these characters will never be accessible because the necessary stats will always be bottomed out.

In closing I'm just going to paraphrase a common guideline in game development:

"If you think the game you created is just the right level of difficulty, than it is way, way  too hard for anyone other than you."

 

Edited by ussa89 (see edit history)
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1 hour ago, ussa89 said:

That being said I would like to provide some constructive criticism

I'm sorry, but I think what you just did was way more impressive than just any old constructive criticism. I feel like I just read a college research paper, or the summarized findings of a scientific study... and I gotta say, the progression of content looked like something I'd see in a professional narrative work... your critiques flowed from one to the next like a first rate story. Kudos.

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24 minutes ago, writerforce6 said:

I'm sorry, but I think what you just did was way more impressive than just any old constructive criticism. I feel like I just read a college research paper, or the summarized findings of a scientific study... and I gotta say, the progression of content looked like something I'd see in a professional narrative work... your critiques flowed from one to the next like a first rate story. Kudos.

Aw shucks... :big-eyes:

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1 hour ago, ussa89 said:

LivingInfinite,

As always, your work is incredible and the time and attention you put into this game is remarkable. Virtually every comment on here points to this, and the characters, artwork, and level design are all fantastic. That being said I would like to provide some constructive criticism, because this game does not merely exhibit a "very high" level of difficulty but is next to impossible, making this a broken game. Just some observations:

-All enemies are ridiculously overpowered. This is supposed to be an elite fighting unit, and yet 3 hits from the first enemy you encounter knocks them out.  Your only choice is to attempt to outrun them, but of course this is pointless because...

-Combat is restricted to tight spaces, so even if you manage to escape using the smoke bomb you have two seconds before that exact same enemy simply rengages in combat, and even if you do manage to run away your still screwed because...

-Using the shift key is of no use as all opponents are lightning fast and can easily catch up. So then you decide to simply face the enemy and grind them down but this isn't possible because all the characers are ridiculously weak and...

-Players become 'clinched' almost immediately, and escaping is pointless as the next turn will have them immediately clinched again. The entire gun mechanic has been rendered pointless and weak melee attacks become your only option. You could try to heal but...

-Using health restoring items in combat isn't possible. This is the only RPG I've ever seen that doesn't allow healing during combat. Also, once charcters faint they dont regain consciousness after the battle and there is no item to restore them. Again, this is the only RPG I've ever seen that does that.

If it is your intention to never, ever, have the squad actually complete a mission without a half hour of tedious save scumming while moving forward through the map a few squares at at a time then mission accomplished. But for anything approaching a balanced, enjoyable game that actually allows progression, this is unplayable. This is a shame because it voids all the obvious hard work you put into building the the confidence, continence, and reputation systems. What is the point of having these if the gameplay will enevitably force them forever downward? Most of the skills available to these characters will never be useable because their the necessary stats will forever be bottomed out.

In closing I'm just going to paraphrase a common guideline in game development:

"If you think the game you created is just the right level of difficulty, than it is way, way  too hard for anyone other than you."

 

I understand your frustration with the difficulty of the game. I've attempted to do something that deviates a fair bit from the typical RPG Maker battle system, so I expect a lot of tweaking would be required to get it to where it needs to be.

That said, I'm not going to have the team mowing down countless enemies like in most games. I thought it was fairly obvious that these are not the sorts of characters I envisioned, and it's not something I'm willing to compromise on. They're going to fail most of the time, and most of the content would be accessed via failure. I have some ideas on how to encourage failure in more varied and interesting ways than currently exist, but please don't misunderstand my intentions here.

I'm aware that there's things that send a bit of a mixed message right now, like the skills that require high confidence to use, but hopefully if I can get more work in on this it will be clearer what I'm trying to achieve.

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I'm thinking he wasn't being serious... the first mission can be cleared without dying, and when if you do there isn't a game over.

The high difficulty makes it more fun! There are still some tweaks that should be made but the core gameplay is alright mostly.

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38 minutes ago, LivingInfinite said:

I understand your frustration with the difficulty of the game. I've attempted to do something that deviates a fair bit from the typical RPG Maker battle system, so I expect a lot of tweaking would be required to get it to where it needs to be.

That said, I'm not going to have the team mowing down countless enemies like in most games. I thought it was fairly obvious that these are not the sorts of characters I envisioned, and it's not something I'm willing to compromise on. They're going to fail most of the time, and most of the content would be accessed via failure. I have some ideas on how to encourage failure in more varied and interesting ways than currently exist, but please don't misunderstand my intentions here.

I'm aware that there's things that send a bit of a mixed message right now, like the skills that require high confidence to use, but hopefully if I can get more work in on this it will be clearer what I'm trying to achieve.

Thanks for the reply. I understand how the standard formula of grinding through easy enemies to level up wouldn't fit this game. It's just that right now the combat system isn't so much 'progression through failure' as it is 'failure without progression'. But I can totally see how some tweaking could make this the perfect Dark Souls level of challenging but fair.

Like I said at the start, this is an exceptionally well made game in every other aspect. Thank you so much for putting in the effort to provide us with your work, I'm excited about what future updates will look like.

Edited by ussa89 (see edit history)
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15 minutes ago, ussa89 said:

Thanks for the reply. I can totally understand how the standard formula of grinding through easy enemies to level up wouldn't fit this game. But right now the combat system isn't so much 'progression through failure' as it is 'failure without progression'. I can totally see how some tweaking could make this the perfect Dark Souls level of challenging but fair.

Like I said at the start, this is an exceptionally well made game in every other aspect. Thank you so much for putting in the effort to provide us with your work, I'm excited about what future updates will look like.

Ha, well, I haven't played a lot of Dark Souls, but from what I gather you're supposed to succeed eventually, which is not exactly what I have in mind. Anyway, I do appreciate the feedback, and I'm glad you thought the game was worth putting some effort into critiquing.

45 minutes ago, juntaglom said:

I'm thinking he wasn't being serious... the first mission can be cleared without dying, and when if you do there isn't a game over.

The high difficulty makes it more fun! There are still some tweaks that should be made but the core gameplay is alright mostly.

Glad you enjoyed it so far. It's actually random which mission you get after the tutorial, though. The small ship is doable, the medium ship I'm not sure, but the large ship is not actually beatable without significant save scumming, to my knowledge. So I understand how if someone rolled the large ship and thought you were actually supposed to win, it would be an unpleasant experience.

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Out of curiosity, is it possible for the FRMT rankings to change at all for the party members? I gathered from earlier posts that artwork for the Titan/Colossus diapers isn't done yet, but is it possible for, say, Millia to go down to 3 or is it currently locked in place?

 

Regardless, I really like what you've done thus far. It's a very interesting concept and I love the artwork.

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37 minutes ago, LivingInfinite said:

Glad you enjoyed it so far. It's actually random which mission you get after the tutorial, though. The small ship is doable, the medium ship I'm not sure, but the large ship is not actually beatable without significant save scumming, to my knowledge. So I understand how if someone rolled the large ship and thought you were actually supposed to win, it would be an unpleasant experience.

Was the large ship the one whose bottom corridor had a bunch of doors lined up in a row with a pirate enemy at the far end of them? Because if so, that's the one I rolled when playing as the glitch character who crashed the game when hit by attacks... son of a bitch, I just had the worst luck if that's the case.

By the way, a quick thought provoking question that you might want to attempt to address as the story progresses. So the game is confirmed to have advanced bio engineering enhancements. And the pirates clearly have access to this technology. Wouldn't interplanetary governments also, then, have access to this technology? The pirates had to steal it from somebody. And if interplanetary governments have access to this exact same technology, why in god's name aren't they using it to create their own enhanced super warriors to even the odds? You'd think that they'd at least be able to modify their soldiers of sorts to have no fear so that they'd respond to pressure better... which would of course have a profound effect on battle continence.

I'm not saying you have to incorporate that scenario into the game - that'd be less fun for us - but I still think that you should come up with a believable explanation for why it isn't being done. There are of course many avenues you could take with this - perhaps the biological modifications are too painful for the code of ethics to allow government to do them, or perhaps you can't modify a living organism that isn't in the early stages of development. But no matter what, leaving it unexplained is probably a bad idea, because right now it looks and sounds like a plot hole.

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11 hours ago, DiaperGirl said:

Out of curiosity, is it possible for the FRMT rankings to change at all for the party members? I gathered from earlier posts that artwork for the Titan/Colossus diapers isn't done yet, but is it possible for, say, Millia to go down to 3 or is it currently locked in place?

 

Regardless, I really like what you've done thus far. It's a very interesting concept and I love the artwork.

Thanks! That is something I want to be possible, but until I actually put the Titan and Colossus in the game you can't be demoted. You can go up in rank, though, if that interests you.

11 hours ago, writerforce6 said:

You'd think that they'd at least be able to modify their soldiers of sorts to have no fear so that they'd respond to pressure better... which would of course have a profound effect on battle continence.

Believe me, this sort of thing has been considered. I will address it at some point.

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The one thing about this game world (and also that of Blackheart) that has always sort of bugged me is why continence is so strongly linked to reputation, despite literally every character having issues with it. When a crewmate sees that Millia has leaked through her Guardian and loses reputation, I always think "I bet this girl isn't doing any better..."

Particularly, it seems that as you go up the chain of command, continence unilaterally gets worse. And Oveldia must know that everybody has this problem. The Widowmakers would probably be a far more efficient military force if they just let it go (PUN) and all wore the Colossus.

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