A downloadable game for Windows

Welcome to Fidel & The Maker's Trial!

A short but challenging turn-based game about the desire to build a game but the struggles that present themselves.

COMBAT


Fidel & The Maker's Trial uses a unique combat system called the "Confidence" system. Battles start  with reduced MP, but most attacks will build your confidence up (your MP). This makes it important to strategize what skill do you want to use to expend your built-up confidence, or do you want to guard and tank a hit to build up a little more confidence. Every encounter is a puzzle to solve the most optimal way to win.

CHALLENGING PUZZLES!


Fidel & The Maker's Trial
also features puzzles; this includes jumping puzzles, block pushing puzzles, invisible path puzzles, and ice block puzzles. You may find the early puzzles mind-numbingly easy, but as you progress you may need to take a moment to consider the solution.
Keys and back tracking, along with hidden secret puzzles, areas, and items, the game builds a sense of exploration reminiscent of a long running, dungeon-exploring franchise.


NO RANDOM ENCOUNTERS!
In Fidel & The Maker's Trial, I cobbled together an encounter system that is based on crossing paths with the shadowy blobs you find. Enter their territory and they'll pursue you aggressively! If you're quick, you might manage to avoid them.


CAPTIVATING MUSIC & SOUND DESIGN (sort of)
Music and (some) sound design work in Fidel & The Maker's Trial was done by me. There is a special package available that includes some of the unique songs I built for this game, along with a track filled with all of the various sound effects. You are welcome to use the sound effects in your own project so long as credit is given.

Some songs are not featured in the package because they are either part of an on-going project and therefore not ready to be released, or they are part of one of my own album releases, which can be downloaded from my bandcamp page, nephilimnovel.bandcamp.com


ABOUT
Fidel & The Maker's Trial
is the first "full" game I've built in RPG Maker as a means to just test some programming knowledge (very basic knowledge) along my road to learning game design and programming, to hopefully one day build my magnum opus - but that's not today. The original design of this game was to learn RPG Maker at a more fundamental level, and therefore I did not use any plugins whatsoever. However, as of the 1.3 update, I implemented some basic QoL plugins to improve some minor aspects of the game.
I'm not an artist, so I hope you can look past all of the default tiles and art assets used and can enjoy the game for what it is. Completion time will take about 2 - 3 hours.

StatusReleased
PlatformsWindows
Rating
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
(2 total ratings)
AuthorNolanAlighieri
GenreRole Playing, Puzzle
Made withRPG Maker
TagsRPG Maker, Singleplayer, Top Down Adventure, Turn-Based Combat
Average sessionA few minutes
InputsKeyboard

Download

Download
Fidel & The Maker's Trial 1.4.1 339 MB
Download
Audio Collection.zip 33 MB

Install instructions

Download the .zip file and unpack the zip.

Inside the zip folder is the executable "nw.exe"
Launch the game via this exe.

Development log

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Comments

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(+1)(-1)

Game full of bugs, impossible to play in a pleasant way.
The enemy AI system works very poorly.
Enemies keep getting stuck inside game elements and if you don't look at them, you can avoid their attacks.
What logic exists in this dynamic?
The Yanfly's plugin BattleEngineCore is used without exploiting its real potential.
Rolling stones that generate other rolling stones. 
The color choice for the menus is terrible.
It could have been interesting, but instead, it turned out to be very boring and frustrating.
In my opinion, the project should be completely reviewed and corrected.

Hey! Thanks for taking the time to play Fidel & The Maker's Trial! The game is a year old and since then I have definitely learned a lot about RPG Maker and game design as a whole. Some implementation of concepts was poorly conceived, though, I must admit, the game has been thoroughly bug tested, so I'm concerned to hear that it is "full of bugs, [and is] impossible to play in a pleasant way". If you have a moment to spare, I would appreciate an explanation of what bugs you found and where, that way I can fix them and make sure the game is in a better state for those who wish to play it in the future.

Concerning any plugins in this game, as stated on this game's store page in the "about" section,

"The original design of this game was to learn RPG Maker at a more fundamental level, and therefore I did not use any plugins whatsoever. However, as of the 1.3 update, I implemented some basic QoL plugins to improve some minor aspects of the game." If you'd like to know more about this, I provide more details in the 1.3 devlog post, titled "Version 1.3 Launch - Polish and Quality of Life changes + A sequel is coming."

There's no point in remaking a short tech demo game that was made as just a way to explore the engine, though I appreciate the suggestion. I would rarely recommend any game developer to remake their old games when they should focus more on making newer better titles.

Anyways, all the best! And thanks once again for taking time to play my game.

Hello. 

I am writing to you about the bugs I have found in your game. 

Minor bugs: 

1) The ghosts get stuck inside columns and water. They eventually get out of it but it's definitely not the intended behavior. 

2) One of the first 3 boulders (those near the lever) generates a boulder of its own, I'm not sure if it's intended or a bug. 

Gamebreaking (or close to it) bugs: The ghost near the save point doesn't have a timer. 

After the first fight it will keep chasing and triggering battles. 

You can try to run away to avoid it but you can't avoid two fights in a row. 

The battles. They seem to be chaos-based. There is no valid strategy, everything is left to chance. Gaining and losing MP seems to be totally random, making the fights quite dull and unnecessarily repetitive. My advice on revisiting and reworking parts of the game comes from the fact that the underlying idea is nice but not well developed, in my opinion.

Thanks for the information! I've found the source of the boulder bug and fixed it! I'll look into the enemy aggro timer bug and also do another play-through of the game for further bug testing before releasing the new patch. I definitely appreciate you taking the time to help me improve my game!

Concerning the ghosts getting stuck in objects, that's an unfortunate side effect of the method I used to create their AI behavior. I can't recall for what reason, but I needed to turn the "through" command on when the player enters their region in order for them to function properly. The side effect of that being that if the player escapes their region while the enemy is - for example - inside a pool of water, then the "through" command will be turned off, and result in the enemy getting caught there. Unfortunately, I don't think it's worth spending the time to completely rewrite every enemy's behavior for this game when I would rather focus my time on my current project.

Concerning the battles, other than the bosses, none of the enemies use troop commands to create battle behaviors. Enemies will use skills randomly (within some basic conditions) determined by the skills I assigned them. The MP restoration can feel random, even though it is not. Most skills that hit the player will restore MP. The problem with this game's design philosophy is 1: "most skills" is problematic. Ideally, it should be ALL skills. 2: MP can only be restored by getting hit, which creates 2 different unwanted behaviors: 1) The player is encouraged to get hit (sort of a masochistic game). 2) The player is punished when an enemy misses their attack.

If you liked the core foundation to this game but (understandably) hate the bugs or ill-conceived construction of the game, you may be interested in the game I am working on. It resolves a lot of these problems: The on-field, wandering enemy AI has proper behavior without relying on weird usage of the through command. I also removed the cool-down aggression timer entirely; defeating an enemy will clear it from the map until the map is reloaded. The MP (now officially called Confidence Points - or ConP for short) formula and general philosophy is far better conceived. All enemy actions on the player character will restore some amount of ConP - this still has the side effect of missed actions not restoring ConP. However, the player has other ways of generating ConP: guarding will restore ConP, as well as using your basic attack will restore your ConP. (Also, enemy hit rate has been increased, so enemy's have a higher chance of hitting the player). There is also an improved starting formula to determine the player's starting ConP so you don't start at 0 (and there are a number of difficulty options the player can set to adjust how the ConP behavior works too!)
That, among many other improvements: Way, way more custom work including tons of plugins, more levels that include puzzles that are more interesting than just "push a boulder", NPCs, and actually - coincidentally - just this week I've been working on battle AI, so battles also include some scripted enemy behaviors.

I wish I could promise you a date (or even relative time frame) for it's release but every time I make that promise I way underestimate the workload ahead. So all I can say is: it's coming.

Once again, thanks so much for the feedback!

(+1)(-1)

going live with ya game