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Huh, I never had such issues... Civilization III does that for me, but never RPG Maker.

However, controllers are not supported in this version (not sure about the later ones). I think I saw some scripts, or plugins that would do that, but never gave it a second thought since I always use the keyboard.

I empathise, marketing is very difficult and I've never had the knack or drive for it either. I might try selling my next game, but I've had to do the Austrian paperwork for being a small business anyway for other reasons so there's less reason not to now.

I think liking the characters you're writing is always vital though

Yeah, that's another thing, I don't know how the legal business side works where I am. It might end up being more hassle than it's worth.

I think it's at least a bit bigger.  I finished the first in about twelve hours (a good chunk of which was just the Black Castle), and I'm already past that here.  More importantly though, I think it feels bigger.  There are more varied events and locations covering more ground, and it feels like more of a journey, whereas the first game felt pretty local and contained.  In terms of scope, I think it's plenty big enough for a commercial game.  Certainly many aren't even as big.

Honestly the main thing that I think brings it down from a commercial perspective is that the RPG Maker version is (I guess) pretty old, so it lacks any QoL features and doesn't cooperate with Windows very well.

I get not wanting to deal with self-promotion, though.  I experimented with that with ML, I hated doing even as little as I did, and I accomplished nothing from it.  I still plan to release my next major game commercially, but I'll probably just put it out there and not stress too much.

I'm "stuck" with the old RPG Maker, but it's the one I'm quite comfortable with now, so I'm not planning to upgrade. But I wasn't aware of problems in Windows, can you give me some examples? I have 10, and everything runs fine for me.

I second not stressing. In the current indiedev climate you either have to go all out, or accept that you won't reach that many people. I guess finding a popular streamer to bring the game out to the hip kids might help, but ugh...

Well, originally, it was supposed to be more epic and also commercial - the first one being free to give players a taste before buying the second one. However, with the amount of time we have, and the fact that I just can't seem to make things bigger (maps, dungeons, story), it won't end up that much different in scope from the first one. And seeing how successful I am in my pathetic attempts at marketing, I dropped the notion of someone ever paying for it    At this point, it's just doing it for the fun of creating, and because I like the characters.

[The Stuff Fairy Tales Are Made Of 2]

Hello everyone!

We'd like to tell you about a game we're working on, the sequel to our first (topic here), The Stuff Fairy Tales Are Made Of 2. Like its predecessor, it is a retro RPG, with many traditional features of the genre. The story takes place five years after the end of the first game. The main character, Paul, a scholar with some skill in magic, now has a wife and a child, but what should have been happy years were marred by a strange disease, the Crimson Slumber, that spread around the world, and left some of the afflicted ones – including Paul's wife – in a deep sleep they can't wake up from. Adele comes to the rescue with the story of a town far away where nobody slumbers. Thus begins the quest to find the town and the cure.





The features are similar to those of the previous game:

- a simple turn-based battle system,
- gathering resources for various recipes,
- puzzle solving,
- gathering information from NPCs and other sources to get closer to finding the cure.


The game rewards exploration and communication, which often yields vital clues to be able to progress, but also gives more colour to the world of the game. Paul's journal can be used again as a reminder what the player has already achieved and what is still to be done. The weakness mechanic doesn't make a reappearance, since Paul is more skilled now, but we added a "communicate" skill, which can be used in battle. Its use is limited to humanoid enemies, but it can provide additional information, some clues, or even influence the outcome of the battle. The game is quite linear, with a maximum of four party members at any one time.

We're getting close to finishing the game, but it will, of course, still need a lot of testing and balancing. For now, there is a demo available, which is quite representative of what can be expected in the rest of the game, although since we published it, there have been some modifications and additions that will make the experience a little more pleasant.

You can find the demo on the game's itch page. We'd love to hear what you think. And if you'd like to play the current version of the full game and give us some feedback, let us know 

Thanks for replying. You're an ideal player for our game 

Thank you for the kind words    Barbara is also my favourite (although, of course, I love them all, my babies  ) and one day, when I'm bored, haha, I'll make a small adventure with her as the main character. She was also a writer in real life, and collected some folk tales, too, so I'll have enough material to work with.

Overall, old folk fairy tales are really weird  The one about the sunlight that makes up the main story in our game was about a kingdom that had a golden horse that served as their sun, and a witch stole it (that's the gist as far as I remember). We toned it down a bit to make it more believable, and made some changes to the outcome. I'd expect that Central/Eastern European folk tales are quite similar, so I'm not surprised a story like that also turned up in a Hungarian game.

Thank you for the suggestion about the point of no return, I'll make a note of it for a potential future anniversary update.

About the second point:

Spoiler

Fly agaric can be found in the Dark forest, which is the one you have to go through to get to the Black castle. They can be missed, since most of the screen is dark. If I remember correctly, there is one for each screen you go through to get to the castle, each in a different spot.

Just out of interest:

Questions about the last section of the game

What did you use to get out of jail? I came up with multiple possibilities and Mr EntangledPear hated me for it because he had to test them all    And did you find the secret passage in the castle?

Thanks for the rating  I trust your opinion won't change when you've finished the game (hopefully you won't find some obscure bug that no one else has).

Answers to your questions

The part with the Death, both calling it and then having the consequences, was inspired by two different fairy tales. I'm glad you liked it, we thought it was interesting and brought variety to the game.

I understand your point about the inability to leave once you reach the witch tower. We tried to remember why we did that, and I think it was because it would have meant changing all the NPC dialogues to reflect your new knowledge. So purely practical reasons, but maybe if we return to this game sometime in the future to improve it, we can put the time into adding the dialogues.

To be honest, the love potion recipe was meant to be just a joke (also so that the apprentice's selection wasn't that small), so it's not possible to make it - the Spanish flies are not obtainable in the game.

As to the aged rum money - for this, we added something that can be caught in the Silver lake and can be sold for a higher amount of money. It takes some time if you go from zero, but it's not impossible to make enough to buy the rum.

The meditation can only be used twice - once before and once after Andrew joins you. It was supposed to be rare, but I guess it could be increased to three (in the 20th anniversary edition  ).

I'll be happy to hear your overall thoughts after you're done 

You found a good strategy. That's how I fought her too 

I think I know now what you mean about those battle animations. Like when there's a hit, there's a small delay, then the target moves backwards a bit and gets back to the original position. I did try to find where that delay is set up in RPG Maker, or the battle script, but I wasn't successful. Maybe I could try asking in the RPG Maker forum, since people there know much more about its inner workings than I do.

Have fun with the rest of the game, and don't forget to save often in different slots 

Thank you, world-building and character interactions are my favourite parts of developing, so I'm glad it paid off 

You're right about the Black Castle dungeon, in a way we wanted to give a chance to gain experience before the boss, but it is quite long. For the boss, it's really useful to have three party members, one of whom can use some luck based skills that help a lot. Leveling up just a bit is a good idea.

I'll have to think about the battle animations - again, for this game, only for some kind of anniversary updated version, but more for the one we're working on, which might have the same problem. It never bothered me when I playtested, but I had someone else mention it, too, so I should keep it in mind.

Thanks for the feedback so far, and I hope you kick the boss's butt.

I'll keep this in mind when polishing up the sequel, thanks  And in some years, when we make an anniversary edition of this one, with some improvements 

Thanks for giving it a try. I'm aware that my mapmaking skills are not that great, trying to do better. As for the second point, I would guess highlighted points of interest are doable in RPG Maker, but to be honest, I wouldn't really want to do that. For items/interactions that are necessary, a hint is provided (or you can't move on without them), and the rest is earned as a reward for exploration. I do understand a preference for letting the player know that they missed something, but our philosophy is a bit different.

That's absolutely fair - I guess I think if you want players to feel rewarded for exploration in that more open way, you might need a slightly higher feedback density. Not as in more stuff to find, but more little notes on what you don't find or the things you can't take with you in some of the places that don't have as much to find, if that makes sense. I quite like games where I'm encouraged to explore and poke around but I felt like as it is, I wasn't really sure which behaviour the game was trying to encourage as there was such a big difference between the high density stuff like home and other houses in the village that really had very little that gave anything back for interactions.

If I understand correctly, you mean the player should get some kind of response for all/most objects, even if it's just to say something like "You can't take it." or something? I would agree, and noticed when I playtested the game we're making now that there are inconsistencies in how much interaction happens in different places, so that's definitely something I'll need to work on if I want to encourage the player to interact more.

I saw that you have a demo available for the sequel, are you interested in detailed feedback on that?  Or are you past the point where that would be helpful?

I do think that using a different font for the sequel would be nice, if it's possible.  The default RPG Maker font is just not very readable, in my opinion.  I realize this would mean a lot of retesting existing dialogues, though, unless you used another monospaced font (which might not be an improvement).

I'll probably post about the sequel separately in the forum, too, and ask for the demo feedback there, but definitely, I'd love to get some 

Changing the font would definitely mean a lot of extra work (this type is very convenient, and we have tons of dialogue for many conditional branches), so that's not what we would consider. Interesting that it can be seen as hard to read.

Thanks for giving it a try. I'm aware that my mapmaking skills are not that great, trying to do better. As for the second point, I would guess highlighted points of interest are doable in RPG Maker, but to be honest, I wouldn't really want to do that. For items/interactions that are necessary, a hint is provided (or you can't move on without them), and the rest is earned as a reward for exploration. I do understand a preference for letting the player know that they missed something, but our philosophy is a bit different.

Welcome to Exilian! I'll try to have a go and post some feedback soon, it looks a really interesting concept for a game and I do like fairytale and folklore themes in things I play

Thank you! I'm happy to have a chance to share our projects  I'd love to hear what you think. We mostly took the fairy tales as starting points for the subquests, and developed them into something playable. Some of those old tales are pretty crazy 

Hi! I hope to give this a try when my project settles down a bit.  How long did it take you to make a game of this size?  Were you aiming for a 15 hour playtime, or is that just how the content you came up with turned out?

Do you find it easy to create puzzles?  I enjoy putting simple puzzles and riddles in my dungeons to give them a bit more flavor and variety, but I am not a genius puzzlecrafter.  Some of them come easily, others not so much.

I feel you, I'd love to try out so many games made by fellow indie developers, but always remind myself that I should be working on my game instead 

This one took us about four years to finish - I was still working full time then, so only worked on it in my limited free time. I didn't want an overly long game as our first one, so we purposely made it shorter. But the 15 hours wasn't a goal, it just happened  Funnily enough, I don't think our second game (which we're working on now) is going to be much longer, even though it's more complex 

To be honest, puzzles are mostly created by my partner, who has a more analytical/logical thinking. I don't know what I'd do if he weren't helping me. I think puzzles are fun, and, as you say, add variety, and I wouldn't want to leave them out completely. I'd probably have to ask for some help because I'm quite useless at designing them.