came back for the good ending. it didn't seem all that different - the special final boss fight with spoilers powers was a cooler finale than the standard ending, but aside from that and the dialogue I had missed w/ Huppo, the character beats were pretty similar. Don't take that to mean I'm coming away disappointed - I was replaying to see what I had missed throughout the game more than I was to change the outcome of the story. i didn't really have my hopes set on the power of friendship fixing everything where the power of 4/5 friendship had faltered.
it was definitely an easier game on second go-around. knowing when I got healed, when people got killed (and so when to take their equipment), and how to better use everyone's abilities streamlined a lot of parts of the game where I was running thin. even near the beginning, I didn't realize on my first playthrough that wilderness areas had fixed encounters along the paths with no respawns. I stuck to the path to avoid depleting my healing items and missed out on the cyberknife and such.
I also stacked HP/MP recovery early and often. in particular, rumor + his cigar + empathy was enough to grind as long as i liked in the wasteland, which bought me the hammer of truth and got me fairly overlevelled to boot. I barely used items besides stimpacks for the back half of the game.
The power level of the party seems like a tricky thing to balance against - as soon as you feel self-sufficient enough to grind, you can get strong enough to overcome the limitations on healing and income. it did take me a second playthrough to develop the system mastery to pull that off though.
in any case, it's a cool game you've thrown together here and it stuck to my brain enough to come back for seconds.
mild spoilers past here, small bugs and notes
I forgot to mention it before, but I ran into a game crash at the start of the utopia slash encounter second phase. It happened after losing at least once in my first playthrough, but I can't recall if it came before or after her monologue and sprite change.
There's a room in Cramp's mansion - I think a lab? Got a bunch of notes to read, the eyeball trap you have to defuse in the mutant cells room, and the lion painting. It's missing a south wall, you can walk into the void around a cultist encounter. lost my screenshot though
I like stance powers; it was a shame that I only got to use Huppo's max-bond special stance for one boat section where I was already too overpowered to get much use of it.
The restriction on party restores added a cool layer of tension to the stock RPG mechanics. Towards mid- and late-game this wore off some (especially as party members got access to recovery skills) but early-game definitely nailed the vibe of being a pack of unwashed strugglers against a brutal setting. I don't specifically play games for masochism, but stuff like spending my last funds on a revival item and immediately using it after a random encounter because of Posh's paper-thin defenses is a level of strategic miscalculation most story-focused games don't offer. It made me much more inclined to do shitty or degrading things for money/survival than I would in another game (in a good way).
In all the RPGs that have you literally trash-pick items, this is probably the one where it felt the most appropriate and had the most riding on every dumpster check. I appreciated the variety of flavor text in those as well as the check that let me know which I had already searched.
The soundtrack rips, too.
Some spoilers below this point
The central goal didn't seem that important to me but I was invested in the ostensibly secondary "make enough money to live" and "don't let everyone die" objectives and I appreciated that several other party members were with me on those.
While I appreciate the deliberate mechanical screw-yous described above, I felt there was some stuff that surprised me in a worse way - for a game with "few to no full heals" I ended up getting plot-full-healed without warning sometimes after using up some precious recovery items. In other cases, I didn't get an option to go post-dungeon shopping or fully explore an area because I had "completed it" and "had no reason to go back".
The downtime mechanics were a nice touch and helped flesh out the party a lot. There was a little element of "I should pick the right option to maximize the bonuses this'll give me" but I still mostly was making choices on roleplaying instead of character optimization. That said, I felt as though I barely knew some of the later members, and they were forced into flatter arcs due to the brevity of their time in the story. There also felt like less and less of a party dynamic as the characters that knew each other died off and it became a pack of people only connected through Tilda. I liked the variety of combat roles, although I cheaped out on fully equipping and couldn't grind very often so I never got to see some characters or abilities shine. The burn book was a great touch, though, especially the cute little "Likes: Me uwu" notes.
I kind of didn't like what Omen's power brought to the story. Not only did she explicitly or nearly-explicitly spoil every character death past that point save the last, it seems to me to run against the struggle-to-survive-in-hell theme of the story to be able to point to someone and say they're going to die no matter what. I don't mind that conceit in every case and it can work pretty well, I think it just fell flat for me here, especially since it more or less became the core of Phede's and Huppo's arcs from the moment she joined. It also felt a little overemphasized compared to some of the other powers that would ordinarily lean on the plot - Rumor often couldn't get a good read on plot-critical characters, and Guuchi only managed to redo a bad situation once in a way that mattered.
I don't mind MSPaint graphics in general and I think that they complement the atmosphere of the game quite well. The aesthetic swap-outs at the end were a nice way to bring home the impact of the style's crudity/messiness. The overworld sprites were a little weak but I liked the visual character designs and the portraits and battle graphics showcased those well.
I'm not entirely sure but I think the broken glass weapon for Aide might be taking off health even in the fights where he's not in the party - when he rotated in, he often had 1 hp left.
Don't take all of this to mean I didn't like the game! I think it's an excellent production for the scale; this is just the byproduct of my digesting it for a few days since I finished it.
I can see in the soundtrack that there's multiple endings; I think I got the "good" one with two rounds of the final boss and maxed-out relationships for Sloppy, Phede, Omen, and Gucchi, but is there any guide to make sure?
Thanks for the comment! I always appreciate constructive criticism. I'm glad you enjoyed the game on the whole. I'm definitely not a graphic artist and am better (in my opinion) at music and world-building, which seemed to be the parts you enjoyed the most.
Some or most of the full heals that I put into the game were to prevent crashes or to make hard boss fights easier. Whenever the party shuffles around, there's a risk of game crash if Tilda is KO'd. For instance, if the party shifts from Tilda / Huppo / Phede / Posh to Tilda / Mendy / Sloppy / Rumor and Tilda happened to be KO'd, this would lead to a random game over screen. The simplest way to fix this was to just admit defeat and full heal the party before swapping everyone out. Maybe a better programmer could have figured it out, but, alas...
As for the ending: Did you max out the bond with Huppo? You need that to get the best ending. Huppo, Phede, Omen, Guuchi and Sloppy all have "ults" that they learn when their bonds are maxed out, and you need all those to get the good ending.
lmao no I turned down bug-smushing in the very first downtime and missed out. I'll come back for that sometime, now that I have my hopes up for a huppo VN portrait
That makes sense, although it sounds more like an RPG Maker problem than a you problem. I can hardly complain too much about free heals, I suppose.
The alternative that I just thought of would be healing any KO'd party members back to 1 HP during the team shuffling. That would probably fix it but might be a little weird.
Even then it'd be risky unless you put some kind of low-health alert in. I kept getting blindsided by Aide showing up to battles at 1hp, I don't have the attention span to remember to heal whoever's rotating in for a boss fight.
Of course, you shouldn't fuss with this sort of thing at this point. The game's been finished for 2 years and it'd take a lot of re-tuning specific encounters if you had to account for players showing up half-dead and resourceless. I only brought it up because it occasionally, and seemingly arbitrarily, undermined the scrambling-to-stay-alive gameplay dynamic that I was otherwise appreciating.
Great work! This game oozes charm (even the 'bad' art can be pretty charming) and is impressive for a one-person job.
The world, writing, and especially characters are delightful - much more than I would have thought just looking at the visual presentation and memey-ness. The humor is a nice touch without dragging down the plot/characters and keeps the bleak world from feeling oppressive.
The battle mechanics are enjoyable! While there may be some tension with the lack of easy party restore systems, there are frequent save points and the game overall is not (mechanically, but perhaps emotionally at times) punishing, at least on normal mode. So don't be scared off on that account.
I hope to see more from you in the future, but I know life is busy and appreciate what you've shared. Thank you!
This is the second time I beat this game so… I’m dropping a review.
An interesting mix of LISA, Undertale and other emotional games, Trash Planet reflect about the future of our world and how it will become a hostile place if contamination continues on. There’s this interesting bond system and some tracks are hella good. The length it’s more than decent, it can take more than 10 hours to beat the game and there are several places to discover. The playable characters are all different with their own personality, life story and attacks, but I don’t recommend getting too attached to them.
With some surprises at the end, you will love and suffer while playing this title.
Fullscreen was stretching the game instead of keeping the aspect ratio, so I played around with my NVIDIA control panel settings. To get it not to stretch, I went to Display -> Adjust Desktop Size and Position and I chose Scaling Mode -> Aspect Ratio and Perform scaling on GPU. Might be something to add to the readme if there is one.
I've only played a few minutes but I like the music so far!
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came back for the good ending. it didn't seem all that different - the special final boss fight with spoilers powers was a cooler finale than the standard ending, but aside from that and the dialogue I had missed w/ Huppo, the character beats were pretty similar. Don't take that to mean I'm coming away disappointed - I was replaying to see what I had missed throughout the game more than I was to change the outcome of the story. i didn't really have my hopes set on the power of friendship fixing everything where the power of 4/5 friendship had faltered.
it was definitely an easier game on second go-around. knowing when I got healed, when people got killed (and so when to take their equipment), and how to better use everyone's abilities streamlined a lot of parts of the game where I was running thin. even near the beginning, I didn't realize on my first playthrough that wilderness areas had fixed encounters along the paths with no respawns. I stuck to the path to avoid depleting my healing items and missed out on the cyberknife and such.
I also stacked HP/MP recovery early and often. in particular, rumor + his cigar + empathy was enough to grind as long as i liked in the wasteland, which bought me the hammer of truth and got me fairly overlevelled to boot. I barely used items besides stimpacks for the back half of the game.
The power level of the party seems like a tricky thing to balance against - as soon as you feel self-sufficient enough to grind, you can get strong enough to overcome the limitations on healing and income. it did take me a second playthrough to develop the system mastery to pull that off though.
in any case, it's a cool game you've thrown together here and it stuck to my brain enough to come back for seconds.
mild spoilers past here, small bugs and notes
I forgot to mention it before, but I ran into a game crash at the start of the utopia slash encounter second phase. It happened after losing at least once in my first playthrough, but I can't recall if it came before or after her monologue and sprite change.
There's a room in Cramp's mansion - I think a lab? Got a bunch of notes to read, the eyeball trap you have to defuse in the mutant cells room, and the lion painting. It's missing a south wall, you can walk into the void around a cultist encounter. lost my screenshot though
I like stance powers; it was a shame that I only got to use Huppo's max-bond special stance for one boat section where I was already too overpowered to get much use of it.
I had a lot of fun with this!
The restriction on party restores added a cool layer of tension to the stock RPG mechanics. Towards mid- and late-game this wore off some (especially as party members got access to recovery skills) but early-game definitely nailed the vibe of being a pack of unwashed strugglers against a brutal setting. I don't specifically play games for masochism, but stuff like spending my last funds on a revival item and immediately using it after a random encounter because of Posh's paper-thin defenses is a level of strategic miscalculation most story-focused games don't offer. It made me much more inclined to do shitty or degrading things for money/survival than I would in another game (in a good way).
In all the RPGs that have you literally trash-pick items, this is probably the one where it felt the most appropriate and had the most riding on every dumpster check. I appreciated the variety of flavor text in those as well as the check that let me know which I had already searched.
The soundtrack rips, too.
Some spoilers below this point
The central goal didn't seem that important to me but I was invested in the ostensibly secondary "make enough money to live" and "don't let everyone die" objectives and I appreciated that several other party members were with me on those.
While I appreciate the deliberate mechanical screw-yous described above, I felt there was some stuff that surprised me in a worse way - for a game with "few to no full heals" I ended up getting plot-full-healed without warning sometimes after using up some precious recovery items. In other cases, I didn't get an option to go post-dungeon shopping or fully explore an area because I had "completed it" and "had no reason to go back".
The downtime mechanics were a nice touch and helped flesh out the party a lot. There was a little element of "I should pick the right option to maximize the bonuses this'll give me" but I still mostly was making choices on roleplaying instead of character optimization. That said, I felt as though I barely knew some of the later members, and they were forced into flatter arcs due to the brevity of their time in the story. There also felt like less and less of a party dynamic as the characters that knew each other died off and it became a pack of people only connected through Tilda. I liked the variety of combat roles, although I cheaped out on fully equipping and couldn't grind very often so I never got to see some characters or abilities shine. The burn book was a great touch, though, especially the cute little "Likes: Me uwu" notes.
I kind of didn't like what Omen's power brought to the story. Not only did she explicitly or nearly-explicitly spoil every character death past that point save the last, it seems to me to run against the struggle-to-survive-in-hell theme of the story to be able to point to someone and say they're going to die no matter what. I don't mind that conceit in every case and it can work pretty well, I think it just fell flat for me here, especially since it more or less became the core of Phede's and Huppo's arcs from the moment she joined. It also felt a little overemphasized compared to some of the other powers that would ordinarily lean on the plot - Rumor often couldn't get a good read on plot-critical characters, and Guuchi only managed to redo a bad situation once in a way that mattered.
I don't mind MSPaint graphics in general and I think that they complement the atmosphere of the game quite well. The aesthetic swap-outs at the end were a nice way to bring home the impact of the style's crudity/messiness. The overworld sprites were a little weak but I liked the visual character designs and the portraits and battle graphics showcased those well.
I'm not entirely sure but I think the broken glass weapon for Aide might be taking off health even in the fights where he's not in the party - when he rotated in, he often had 1 hp left.
Don't take all of this to mean I didn't like the game! I think it's an excellent production for the scale; this is just the byproduct of my digesting it for a few days since I finished it.
I can see in the soundtrack that there's multiple endings; I think I got the "good" one with two rounds of the final boss and maxed-out relationships for Sloppy, Phede, Omen, and Gucchi, but is there any guide to make sure?
Thanks for the comment! I always appreciate constructive criticism. I'm glad you enjoyed the game on the whole. I'm definitely not a graphic artist and am better (in my opinion) at music and world-building, which seemed to be the parts you enjoyed the most.
Some or most of the full heals that I put into the game were to prevent crashes or to make hard boss fights easier. Whenever the party shuffles around, there's a risk of game crash if Tilda is KO'd. For instance, if the party shifts from Tilda / Huppo / Phede / Posh to Tilda / Mendy / Sloppy / Rumor and Tilda happened to be KO'd, this would lead to a random game over screen. The simplest way to fix this was to just admit defeat and full heal the party before swapping everyone out. Maybe a better programmer could have figured it out, but, alas...
As for the ending: Did you max out the bond with Huppo? You need that to get the best ending. Huppo, Phede, Omen, Guuchi and Sloppy all have "ults" that they learn when their bonds are maxed out, and you need all those to get the good ending.
Thanks again for playing. <3
lmao no I turned down bug-smushing in the very first downtime and missed out. I'll come back for that sometime, now that I have my hopes up for a huppo VN portrait
That makes sense, although it sounds more like an RPG Maker problem than a you problem. I can hardly complain too much about free heals, I suppose.
The alternative that I just thought of would be healing any KO'd party members back to 1 HP during the team shuffling. That would probably fix it but might be a little weird.
Even then it'd be risky unless you put some kind of low-health alert in. I kept getting blindsided by Aide showing up to battles at 1hp, I don't have the attention span to remember to heal whoever's rotating in for a boss fight.
Of course, you shouldn't fuss with this sort of thing at this point. The game's been finished for 2 years and it'd take a lot of re-tuning specific encounters if you had to account for players showing up half-dead and resourceless. I only brought it up because it occasionally, and seemingly arbitrarily, undermined the scrambling-to-stay-alive gameplay dynamic that I was otherwise appreciating.
Hey, think I caught a bug. I have both the yellow and blue keys, but it's saying I don't have the blue one.
(Edit) Reloaded that area and it worked the second time around
Weird. Glad it worked the second time!
Great work! This game oozes charm (even the 'bad' art can be pretty charming) and is impressive for a one-person job.
The world, writing, and especially characters are delightful - much more than I would have thought just looking at the visual presentation and memey-ness. The humor is a nice touch without dragging down the plot/characters and keeps the bleak world from feeling oppressive.
The battle mechanics are enjoyable! While there may be some tension with the lack of easy party restore systems, there are frequent save points and the game overall is not (mechanically, but perhaps emotionally at times) punishing, at least on normal mode. So don't be scared off on that account.
I hope to see more from you in the future, but I know life is busy and appreciate what you've shared. Thank you!
Thanks for the comment! Glad you enjoyed the game. Charm is what I aim for most and I'm happy that came across.
This is the second time I beat this game so… I’m dropping a review.
An interesting mix of LISA, Undertale and other emotional games, Trash Planet reflect about the future of our world and how it will become a hostile place if contamination continues on. There’s this interesting bond system and some tracks are hella good. The length it’s more than decent, it can take more than 10 hours to beat the game and there are several places to discover. The playable characters are all different with their own personality, life story and attacks, but I don’t recommend getting too attached to them.
With some surprises at the end, you will love and suffer while playing this title.
Waiting for TP2 and Hail Vira.
Thanks so much for playing the game! Twice?! That's awesome. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Hail Vira till the end!
Fullscreen was stretching the game instead of keeping the aspect ratio, so I played around with my NVIDIA control panel settings. To get it not to stretch, I went to Display -> Adjust Desktop Size and Position and I chose Scaling Mode -> Aspect Ratio and Perform scaling on GPU. Might be something to add to the readme if there is one.
I've only played a few minutes but I like the music so far!
I can add that to the installation instructions! Thanks for commenting