Heart of Fire

[Scout]

I'm afraid I don't know what could be causing that-- that's weird, it sounds like an old bug, but I thought that got fixed.

I can't really think of any way to debug your problem. :/ I think you'll just have to keep going... if you're going off an older version by accident, you shouldn't have much trouble, anyway. Sorry!

[monele]

Well, let's see... my file is named "Heart of Fire-1.1.zip" and is dated... 1st of May 2008 (which might be the date I downloaded it rather that the date it was actually created at). Were there multiple versions of the 1.1 version? ^^;

[Scout]

Nope, that really is the most recent version, then...

I don't think I can help you. That's really weird, since that shouldn't be happening, and it's the first I've heard of anything like that going on in that version... could you describe what is going on? By "not useable", do you mean that items are greyed out on the menu? Do they not show up at all? Or...?

[monele]

I'll have to give it a new try tomorrow but for now, what I remember is this : I could use the items I got from the start (allowing me to replenish spells and health). Then, unsure here, I think I got loot once and could use it. But what's sure is that the rest of the time, I saw "you found this and that", but when I tried to use these items on the map, no such luck. The inventory stayed as it was from the beginning. Using items did remove them from the inventory. AND... I could see those extra items when meeting a merchant. It's like there are two inventories, one that pops up when I try to use items, and one receiving new items and popping up when I sell.

On a code level, I can see how that could happen with object references and all, but it's still a strange quirk . I wonder if I saved/loaded at some point.... More info tomorrow

[EwanG]

I've been trying to promote the Lemmy winners on some of the other gaming boards out there in the hopes that more RenPy exposure equals more authors and players. On the Penny Arcade forums, I got the following response to this game, and I promised I'd pass it along:

Fighting felt like going through the basic RPG motions, keep spamming attack and magic and heal if HP is low. Potions are way too cheap to make healing a hard choice. It seemed balanced so that any combination of classes would be able to make it through the game easily. It might have been better if you didn't have a choice of class, so they could better balance the game toward being challenging every fight. It could also help in the story department, since they can make assumptions about what kind of class a character is and flesh out their backstory a bit more that way.

Since there are a set number of battles in linear succession and items act as permanent upgrades, there is no way of significantly changing tactics in the middle of a game. The game is in need of more significant choices for the player to make.
I'd rather see them try their hand at another game than trying to make this one better though.

Since you know the devs, let me relay some bugs I found:
In the final fight it seemed like the boss had Counterstrike as well as my knight, so they kept hitting each other in one turn until my knight almost walked off the screen.
You don't seem to start out on the first option of a menu sometimes, but an invisible option instead.
On the item screen it doesn't show the status/help message of the first item you've selected.

FWIW...