Finally had a chance to get into this a little. Color me impressed! Even though I consider myself pretty jaded (I guess all of us would), the game brought out strong pangs of nostalgia. Something about going into the first shop in Sealo and reading the equipment descriptions really affected me. I wanted to do a recording of the first boss and toss it up on Youtube, but alas, somehow I captured twenty minutes of video that were rendered completely impotent by random black frames. I was too worried about causing fits of epileptic seizures to upload, forgive me! I wonder what Fraps does differently from Camstudio; could have been the FPS setting I recorded with too.
Chrono Alter is an excellent and worthy fan effort. Here are some issues I'd point out in case you'll be able to address them in your next project:
1. Transitionary tiles, especially for rounding of pathway edges. Taking another look at Sealo Forest I think you did well with the transitions from grass to dirt paths there (still a bit too much squareness in the transition from animated to non-animated grass tiles though). But in the first two towns the lack of transition from grass to other features, like pathways and buildings, really stands out. I'd have to guess that most of the resources were lifted from
Seiken Densetsu III or
Tales of Destinry, both of which should have everything you need. The question is how constrained your tileset space is for each environment.
2. Ah, man, those NPC animations! Chrono Trigger sprites simply weren't meant for three-frame animation in many cases, and seeing them in motion here really brought that point home. Looks like you often had two frames flowing naturally, but then you'd have to skip a frame that was present in Chrono Trigger to maintain a three-frame animation limit. Is there
any possibility of creating some kind of custom script to expand the number of frames per animation? If so, I think the game's aesthetic would improve considerably next time around.
The battle animations turned out very impressive for attacks (I love that sword dive in Crono's "Cyclone!"). I suspect making enemies animate in-battle isn't an option in RPGMaker currently, but is there anything you can do for the main characters' idle poses? It seemed to me that Marle animated much more smoothly than Crono or Frog do, because she gets three frames for her idle pose IIRC whereas Crono and Frog seem to have two.
3. Helpful gameplay tweaks I immediately saw the need for:
*Some NPCs move so fast they're difficult to catch up to. For example, I had a hilariously difficult time talking to that lady who offers Crono a free stay at her house in Sealo; it was literally a ten second game of cat-and-mouse for me. However, I don't recall having this problem with NPCs who are milling about around town -- could have something to do with their walk paths. The lady who took Crono in was walking and making turns rapidly, whereas outdoors NPCs seemed to be either stationary or at least had limited motion.
*I'd love to see dead time during battles eliminated completely -- too much time is spent waiting for a character's ATB to fill up , and I wonder if there's some way to make the battle engine jump to the next character or enemy's turn. Doesn't mean you necessarily have to have a non-ATB setup like Chrono Cross or Final Fantasy X;
Xenogears had a most excellent compromise between ATB and battle speed. Maybe there's a battle speed option I skipped over that addresses this though.
I
really enjoyed having USB game controller support! At least RPGMaker allows you that much.
