At another wall -

When working on an RPG, the hardest time to continue on it is when you get to the point of a movie scene or when you finish working on a town/village. A movie scene takes a lot of trial and error to make the movement and switch operations go exactly how you want, while you have to keep the conversation interesting yet detailed enough for the player to both enjoy (by enjoy I mean like the story or laugh at the conversation) and understand. Making a map after a town/village isn't really annoying, but rather hard because you lose motivation after you create most of the town/village (after the item/weapon/armor shops and inn, all that is left is pointless npc's or inanimate objects usually, which is boring and kills motivation). I finished the second village, and have to continue with a movie scene (two sacks of BS for the price of one).

I have had two testers (Henry and Arua) try out the game (The second village had only one building finished when Henry tested it, and the whole village was halfway created when Arua tested it). Henry was pretty much laughing at everything (even things not meant to be funny, such as the graphics... which is surprising considering how horrible his RPG looked) and was only able to beat one optional boss. I found Henry's reaction time and strategy in the turn based battle system (like final fantasy) horrible, and for this reason he was considered my "newb RPG player" subject. Arua went through the game fairly well, and did a lot better than Henry did, by having better reaction times and defeating all three of the current optional bosses. Arua claimed the game was pretty fun, but was a bit too hardcore in terms of reaction times and smart choices in battle.

I personally believe the reason why the RPG is currently challenging is because I originally intended for Arua to use a Spear/Lance, but he insisted on a sword, so 4/5 of the available characters (not including special ones) are currently using swords, and thus the party usually has a challenging time against lance/spear users (which are fairly common). It's unfortunate, but I cannot implement a weapon type swap system with what I'm given (in other words, each character can only use one weapon type). It sucks to say, but the next two characters ALSO use a freaking sword, however after them are two characters that don't, one that uses a spear, one that uses magic, making a pathetic total of 3/9 characters (again, not counting special ones) who DO not use a sword in the next few parts of the game. There are going to be a total of 16 (none-special) characters in the game, and I find it somewhat sad that half of them use swords. In case you haven't figured it out, the weapon system is similar to Fire Emblem's, being Sword > Axe > Spear > Sword, while Maces (I'm not sure if these will be in the game, because I originally added them considering there was a weapon swap system), Bows, and Guns (also not sure about these being in the game) are not weak to anything (but stronger against certain things).

Arua's comment convinced me to weaken the bosses a little (scratch the optional/secret ones) for newer players to turn based RPGs. I also realized stat upgrading items are useless early on (despite me putting them in) because stats do not carry over during the class advancements (which there are 3 levels of), but at least that means even if you arrive at the advancing points in the story before you reach the current max level, you won't be any weaker (and you can save the stat boosting items until the final advancement). Last but not least, I hope to finish the next part of the game (as in recruiting the next two characters, adding at least 1 more optional boss, and beating 4 regular boss battles I planned) by the time we are halfway through July.