Gallade's Quest (SMBX 2.0 Beta 4 REQUIRED!)

[Shidomaru]

After a playtesting and polishing period that took WAAAAAY longer than I would have liked, my last episode is finally here...

I present to you my SMBX masterpiece: Gallade's Quest

Plot:
A young man named Leonardo wakes up to discover, much to his shock, that he has been turned into a Pokemon, a Gallade to be precise. Luckily for him, he's not the only one, and he's soon welcomed into Ralts Village, a shelter for other people who have suffered the same fate. There Leonardo meets his new best friend Alex the Magnemite, the village's wise leader Magdalena the Gardevoir, and many other colorful and interesting characters that live there.

Leonardo just happened to arrive in the middle of a mysterious crisis, though, as 6 of the village's children have mysteriously vanished overnight... And that's just the first of many adventures and perils that Leonardo and Alex are going to face!

Features:

Zelda-style item inventory: This episode's crowning achievement! You will gain new weapons, moves and items to expand your abilities and be able to tackle new challenges!

Life-up collectibles: The Sitrus Berries act like Zelda's Pieces of Heart. Collect enough of them and you'll earn more hearts to be able to endure more hits!

Shop: See? I learned how to make a shop too! You'll be able to buy healing items, bombs, ammo and more!

Day/Night cycle: Little thing I added just to show off my improved Lua skills. More dangerous enemies come out at night and all buildings in the village are closed (other than the Infirmary). However, there may be a special secret that only triggers at night somewhere...

Simple NPC scheduling: The village's NPCs will be in different places depending on the time of the day! And they'll say different things too.

Fast travel: At one point in the game you'll unlock the ability to instantly fly back to the village, and go back to the entrances of the game's dungeons from there, as long as you've already entered them once.

Screenshots:

Spoiler: show

Download:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/qjhed5fq ... t.zip/file

Final thoughts:
This will be my final SMBX episode. The reason being that real life has caught up to me, and I'm in DIRE NEED of getting a job! This means I no longer have time to make episodes anymore, and I never will ever again. I would have loved to stay in this community, I had even bigger episode plans (I was planning to make an episode where EVERY enemy was custom-made with Lua!), but I'm forced to throw it all away, otherwise I will starve.

I will only stay for a little while more, long enough to gauge the responses to this episode and maybe deliver an update if something is too badly broken (I hope not, 'cause it took my friends almost an entire year to playtest everything here!).

My time in this community was fun, but real life is forcing me to go. A big thank you to Hoeloe, Enjl, KBM-Quine and many others who were nice and gave me all the help I needed with the Lua stuff and everything else.

...And that's it. May this community make even better games in the future.

Farewell.

[hjk321]

I've beaten the first proper boss, and so far it's a very solid metroidvania! Every enemy has its own moveset and there's enough of them to keep you on your toes without getting overwhelmed. The day/night effect is pretty convincing (although I think you're just teleporting between two sections?). There seems to be a lot of thought behind the level design and tuned to gallade's reduced platforming ability (compared to more traditional episodes). I thought the arm blade was a little finicky but the leaf blade made it a lot easier. The hint system helped me out a few times but it never felt overbearing or handholdy.

A few minor things I noticed that could stand some patching: Alex jitters when you move which can be pretty distracting since he's always on screen. Maybe updating his position in onDraw instead of onTick would reduce the issue? And right now continuing from a save always puts you back in the village and the backtracking can be pretty annoying. Maybe you could save the player's current area and treat it like they're respawning from a checkpoint when they load up the game again?

Overall I'm excited to keep playing! I'm very new to the forum and we've never crossed paths before but I'm sure I speak for many here when I say we're sorry to see you go but grateful for everything you've released up to this point. Good luck out there.