Okay, guys,
I've got a lot of things to field here, a lot of offers, and am trying to figure out how to juggle them. I've received a couple of private offers on both the programming and design front, and am getting some overwhelmingly positive feedback here publicly too. Thank you to one and all. I'm not 100% committed to any one developer yet on anything, but will be engaging in some more dialogue with a few others as of late to see what we can see.
There is one thing I'm going to put my foot firmlly down upon, though, and that's combat.
Turn-based is the way it's going to go. I am not willing to change on this.
Real-time combat is fast and can get your adrenaline going in a specific way, and I will absolutely not take that away from it. There's a time and a place for it.
But turn-based combat, where you have time to think about what you want to do, has an appeal all its own. It allows you to plan ahead a little without a tight time constraint. It allows for greater strategy from bosses, since a player is actually going to have to think deeply to work around it. It also incidentally means that you can pseudo--pause the game in the middle of a fight if you want, instead of, say, getting into a boss fight you know is going to take awhile, getting a phone call, pausing the game and then hitting the unpause key and getting attacked out of nowhere.
Both styles have their niche, but this is very firmly a turn-based RPG. There's not a lot I can say or do for those who don't like that particular setup, but we don't really have many of these, and I want to make a good one.
And yes, I am more than happy to have things translated into other languages, since that will increase the audience and bring the experience to more people who, hopefully at least, will enjoy it.
Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1