Devs did a really good job

[Handsome]

I can't believe this game hasn't showed up on my radar before, it's a solid game.
And each time i have googled something im suprised to see that a dev answered peoples questions in discussions.
So nice work devs

[0x57A1CFA117]

I'm actually thrilled the game is made using GMS. As someone making a game using GMS, I'm familiar with the engine and while the engine is extremely flexible, I'm still surprised at how well some of the features and functionality work given that GMS is like psuedo-event driven but not -- this can make it difficult to do complex things that span across multiple events and yet still keep your codebase nice and organized. And it's awesome that the GMS logo is front and center, providing nice marketing and publicity for an engine that I love so much (no, I don't work for YYG, I just really like the engine; almost every aspect of it works how you would want or expect it to so I just really love it. And their tie with Opera GX now has more even more excited to see what they do). So yeah, I'd second the job-well-done! :P

[Mirai]

Dev. It's just one guy and he has done an incredible job over the years in every way, from making a solid game to being as socially active as he is.

[0x57A1CFA117]

The only thing, and I know it's been said before, is I wish the sprites were ... (I guess the word I'm looking for is) softer? It's not that their bad, it's just I feel like something about them could be smoother / softer / more blended -- especially when your back at the Chronicon and spending time going between the merchants and your stash, I tend to notice it more since I'm spending more time in one spot without a lot going on on the screen. I'm not sure what it is, maybe it's the lighting engine used, but I feel like it's the sprites themselves. I think it's unfair (as one site said) and even inaccurate (or inarticulate) to say that it's because the game is sprite-based because that just means it's 2D and not 3D models and I'm used to retro / pixel-styled stuff. In the dungeons, you don't notice it as much since theirs all kinds of stuff going on since they are kind've dimly lit (is the ambient light slider functioning correctly? I've cranked it all the way up and the dungeons don't look any brighter) but when I open a portal to go back to the Chronicon so that I can sell and make room in my inventory, the scene is kinda jarring to the eyes. The best way I can explain the sensation is, it's like going from an application that has a dark theme mode, to like a web browser looking at a web page that is bright white. I imagine it would take a bit more though then just replace sprites as, if I had to guess, for performance (and I could be totally wrong how the developer did it) the Chronicon is a single image with an additional layer containing the collision-mask. This would mean the room is "baked" (flattened) and would require re-doing the room's image. I guess it's this way because to construct a room's floor, walls, etc. (but not destructable stuff or lights or NPCs) out of individual objects would be a LOT of resource-consumption during run-time.

Someone had mentioned using ReShade and it makes a world of different, but I can't seem to get ReShade to load when the game does for some reason. I even turned off Steam Overlay and tried renaming the proxy-dll using several different filenames (dxgi.dll, d3d11.dll, etc.). I even tried d3d10.dll even though the game's store page states it requires d3d 11. I almost feel like an texture-filtering and anti-alias option would go a long way. Supposedly though (at least according to some of the stuff I've read online), the latest version of ReShade doesn't work on d3d 11 and downgrading has fixed it from not working in some other games -- so maybe it's a case of that *shrug*

Either way, it's a minor thing and I'm having a blast playing it!

Other than that, I can't believe how much functionality is in the game (just the settings screens alone!). You can almost tell the game was designed correctly right from the get-go. There's sliders for even the size of the map icons (aside from the map itself!); that's not something you would want to go back in and code if the codebase wasn't written to be flexible in the first place. I'm curious to know more about the developer, like what their background is, was this their first game? I feel like they had to have had some sort of coding background because I can tell from my own coding knowledge and extrapolating from a bunch of observations of the game that beneath the surface the codebase is surely written very flexible with a LOT of forethought as it was being written.