Disclaimer: The wording in this article might be clumsy. My sole intention in adding context was because it was a good moment for me the history of All For Her's development. Explaining how I get there and what I would like to do next. Please keep in mind I don't intend to sound rude in any way shape or form. Thank you for understanding.

Hello to anyone who will read this!

First of, thanks to Steel and Teal from Studio Blue for granting me the opportunity to participate to this game jam. I was quite a ride. This month was very stressful for me, but I don’t regret it.

I’m creating this topic to talk about my entry : All For Her. There is a lot of constructive critiques and interesting propositions regarding the game and I would like to tackle them on. This will also be the occasion for me to talk about the development of the game.

If you still haven’t played the game yet, I am going to spoil it here. This is no Shakespeare, but I believe any game can be more interesting if played blind.

With that out of the way, let’s begin.

Accessibility

The font, the tainted screen… I’m going to put these together and call that “Accessibility”.

First, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: the font. Why has a cursive font been chosen as the main font of the game? A lot of people noticed it was a weird choice. And indeed, it is no conventional font to have. The answer can be resumed in one word: theme.

All For Her lets you play as children. And because cursive writing is the style of writing generally taught to children at school, I decided I wanted a cursive font as the main font for All For Her. With that said, I wanted the font to be readable despite being unusual for this type of game. In the end, in my research, I decided to go with that font: Huruf Miranti. I thought this font was readable enough for anyone.

It seems that I was wrong as many people including Steel were having trouble reading it. I got mostly suggested to change the font altogether for something more readable and NOT use cursive font. I disliked this idea because I was afraid to step away from the childhood theme I wanted to tackle with that font. Steel however suggested a way better idea to me: increasing the font size. Now… This is by far the hardest way to tackle the problem. In RPG Maker, increasing the font size isn’t enough. With the font size comes a couple of other things to consider such as: line height, default message lines or icon size among other things that require external plugins to set up.

But this is the way I decided to go with this problem. Hopefully, the text will be big enough to be more accessible to anyone.

Now, let’s talk about the tainted screen. Some of you had trouble reading what’s on screen because it was so dark. This is not a complaint everyone made, however this is not a problem that should be ignored. So I’m intending to lighten up the screen a bit.

What I’d like to do with it though is, not only using the taint of the screen to convey a dark atmosphere, but also using it to deliver gameplay messages to the player. For example, the screen will progressively lose colors as the SP of the main characters lower. This is one idea I am considering to put into practice.

Atmosphere

I already told about the screen taint in the previous part so I’m not going to repeat myself here.

However, most judges have expressed their distaste for the lack of musical ambiance around the mansion. Actually, outside of the title screen, there is 5 background musics played during gameplay: one music for the introduction, one music for Stephanie, one music for the crossroad, one music for the final battle and one music for the ending.

These musics plays at specific moments to mark important moments. On top of that, after you unlock the final door, the theme of Stephanie keeps playing on purpose in the background to make this moment of the game more impactful after all that silence.

Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t intend to not address the issue. But making a BGM play in the mansion isn’t the way I intend to go here. I would like to make… more. I would like to do like Inner Sanctum where footsteps can be heard. I would also use this opportunity to, again, give a gameplay message. Whispers coming up when approaching key places or simply getting stronger as the characters lose their sanity. There is definitely ways to go around that and this is something I’d be interested to dig in the future.

Now, what about the lack of horror elements in the game? I already made it clear on the submission page, but I’ll say it again: All For Her is an Adventure/Mystery game. I thought of it as a horror game at first, but I decided to focus on the adventure aspect of it instead. But why did I gave up the horror aspect of it? Starmage, Inner Sanctum’s developer, suggested I moved away from the horror genre because of the lack of sounds to use in RPG Maker MZ. But it’s not that. There is actually another reason why I actually avoided horror in All For Her.

The essence of a horror game is to take the player by surprise to give them strong emotions. But I have a problem with that. And that problem comes with the sanity system. Because I wanted All For Her to be a fair game, due to how important this mechanic is, I didn’t wanted the player to end up losing sanity without warning. I didn’t want to back stab my players for horror sake. I didn’t wanted to make them feel punished for something they weren’t aware of beforehand. On top of that, I wasn’t feeling confident to be able to make good use of the horror aspect. Eventually, this lead me to limit the horror tropes to the minimum to compliment the adventure aspect.

Now that the game jam have passed, I feel a bit more confident to make some kind of “scares” without having the player being punished unfairly for them.

Also, as this was a recurring criticism, I’ll address this too even though there is not much to say about this: dolls need to be faster. Got it. I heard you.

Skills

Something is… wrong. With the skills. A lot of people complained to have been confused by the fact that damaging skills supposed to allow them to defend themselves does not actually before the very end of the game.

Someone who is not used with RPG Maker might think that these skills are meant to defend themselves against the cursed items around the mansion, which they do not. They are only meant for an in-battle use. It isn’t helped by the fact that battle isn’t the main focus of the game. This is a serious design flaw.

So… Where do we go from here? I may have an idea: if one of the player characters have learned at least one offensive skill, the next time he encounters a cursed item, the player will be granted the possibility to use one of them. On-screen would be a hint that would tell the player what kind of skill must be used against it. Eventually, this would solve a lot of headache to future players.

This is just an idea though. It is possible that I end up with something completely different in the end. However, this is a problem that needs to be addressed.

Direction

Memory card #3, one of the mandatory items to finish the game, has been the bane of a huge number of players. Actually way too much players struggled to find it for either one of the following reasons:

- they didn’t payed attention to the animation displayed by THE mirror,

- they avoid interacting with mirrors since the first mirror they usually interact with is the cursed one,

- or they misread the information displayed when interacting with the mirror.

To solve the first problem, maybe displaying the animation more frequently than once every 4 seconds would have an easier time dragging their attention. Or maybe update the animation to make it stand out more.

I didn’t thought the second problem would actually become an issue as all cursed items share a specific animation to warn the player. Events that does not showcase this animation are safe to interact with. Besides all cursed items display something off: either a skull, a demon or the fact it is ripped off for example. Despite that, this lead some rare players to be overly safe. As a result, maybe changing the cursed mirror to something else might solve the issue.

For the third problem, I was surprised by this more than anything else. Not gonna lie here, I didn’t see that one coming. I wasn’t expecting the player to translate this as: “remove the mirror” or “break the mirror”. To me it was perfectly logical the player would deduce he have to look at the other side of the room. I didn’t fathom the idea they would end up trying to find something to get the mirror off the wall by wrongly thinking the sheet of paper would be behind the mirror. Now, the fix is easy: just add one word. From there, there shouldn’t be any more confusion.

After that there is the issue of the save point which is not clearly indicated. I didn’t thought it would be relevant as the black cat stated to come see her if the player needed anything. It was my way of inviting the player to meet up with her if they need something… like saving the game. This information was unclear so I might tweak things a little so the player knows where to go to save their game.

Info dumps

There is many instances that can be qualified of info dumps. The main instances of info dumps there is are within the Memory cards themselves.

The initial idea with Memory cards was to make them play a literal sound effect where Gabrielle actually talks and the player would be able to keep moving around while listening to them. But a few problems came in the way of this idea.

- First, English is not my first language. So having to act as a person talking in English might actually be difficult for me. It might cause people to misunderstand what I am saying. Wrongly done voice acting might impact the quality of the game more than no voice acting at all.

- Second, I’m a male, as such I am not sure my voice would fit an adult woman. I could use Audacity to make my voice sound different, but this might cause the voice acting to sound wrong.

- Third, these Memory cards hold required context to understand the story. As such, the Memory cards should play once they are listened with the black cat. And because of that, it wouldn’t make sense for the players to be free of their movements while they are making the cat listen to the Memory cards.

As a result, the Memory cards display their scripts in text boxes as it is the easiest way to work around that. This is… not perfect. But it would at least work for a game jam entry.

Now that I had more time to think about the issue, I am considering the use of a plugin such as the Gab Window from Visustella to solve the understanding the problem. There might even be an option that allows or not to activate only the voice acting, the text or both.

As for the issue of the black cat, the initial text boxes might still be there with cutscenes during it that could represent her memories coming back. And the game would give the option to the player to skip these cutscenes if he already listened to the Memory cards through their inventory.

Now, more minor info dumps: is there a way to make the Sanity and the Skills tutorial (and maybe even other tutorials if needed) differently?

For now, tutorials are presented in text boxes, the simplest way possible to introduce a mechanic. Now, this is not bad on itself, but isn’t there a way to make things better?

Maybe the black cat would lead them to make an imagination exercise to learn them how to deal with Sanity problems. The players would be temporarily lead to a space where they can witness the effects of Insanity and how to deal with them without taking the risk of a game over. This would also be the occasion for her to talk about the Skills as they cannot be used while Insane.

The problem with that is, it would likely take more time for the player to go through this process than simply reading the text like it is now. So this needs some thinking.

About the introduction and Stephanie’s explanations, maybe it would be better to keep this as it is, but make some tweaks to make the ride more enjoyable maybe with stuff happening on screen to illustrate what’s going on.

Blank slate characters

Steel said something in the Game Jam result video: “I think would have liked a little more personality on the three mains”. This is one of the rare times somebody mentioned something like this as far as I remember.

Now, this isn’t much, but I still want to address this anyway and see what can be done in that aspect.

Henry, Gloria and Aasir (the default names of the three characters) are blank slates on purpose. The player can even change their names and near the end of the game they get to make a moral choice. So the player can imagine for himself what he wants his characters to be.

So what can be done to give “more personality” without breaking this blank state status? I think something that troubled the player is the fact the main cast hardly have any meaningful reactions to plot events happening in front of them. It indeed can make feel they are… hollow. Maybe a good idea would be to make them interact more without making them really talk. But this would imply the state they are in and ask a certain number of questions:

- How would they react to such and such scene if they are Insane?

- What could happen in that scene if one of them is unconscious when it happens?

- How to suggest a personality without influencing the player too much to deprive them the freedom to imagine them how they want the main cast to be?

These are the kind of questions that require answers in order to be applied in-game.

Battle

At the end of the game, the player is greeted with something special. The gameplay changes and the main cast have to face Gabrielle in a JRPG-style battle system. The battle system of choice is default ATB-style battle system on Active, which means the enemy can attack while the player makes a choice. Which would add tension in the battle. I felt like it was a great way to end it, in the style of Corpse Party back in 1996.

However some people seemed doubtful of this battle. The battle was indeed hard – like it was meant to be – but it was seemingly too hard and… I can understand that point of view. People who are not used this style of gameplay might quickly get confused and face several game overs before managing to understand what is going on. It was my bad for pushing that “hard” factor too far.

It makes some people suggest to not have this battle at all at the end of the game.

Games have been sometimes surprising the players at the end of the game with drastic changes in the gameplay. Games like Kid Icarus on the NES or, again, the first Corpse Party game on the PC-98 have done this. And some people do enjoy this kind of surprise. Not everyone of course. You can dislike this, it’s perfectly okay, but I want to keep this battle sequence in the game.

Somebody who played this thought there was something symbolic with this battle: fighting against big bad relatable villain with the power of emotions. And that’s the thing here. This battle isn’t there because this is an RPG Maker game. This battle is there because it have a proper purpose.

Now, I don’t say the battle will remain untouched. It can’t be. The battle should have better care in balancing especially when battle isn’t the main focus of the game.

So Gabrielle will take the nerf hammer in the face.

Conclusion

There might be stuff I didn’t addressed here. Maybe I forgot something. I tried to address as many critiques made about the game as possible and my plans to solve them for a potential revised version. I didn’t mention the bugs there might be. (I discovered one I hurried to fix when I reopened the project after the game jam.) But hopefully, the game was good enough for some people to enjoy it at least a little.

I know some people have been especially left down by my entry and didn’t found enjoyment worthy of a game in it and for that, again, you have my deepest apologies for it. If a revised version do see the sunlight, I hope you will find the enjoyment the original version couldn’t grant you. As for those who already enjoyed the game in its game jam version, I hope this possible revised version will grant you more enjoyment than the previous one.

If you have any question to ask me or suggestions, please let me know!

Thank you for reading and, for those who did, thank you for playing All For Her.