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#1 TheRock

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Posted 20 November 2023 - 06:53 PM

ENHANCED MUSIC: Here

 

Quest file: Here

 

Use 2.53

 

Roughly 5 years in the making Dreams Realm is now a dream come true.
Explore the vast world. What secrets will you discover.

Quest features:
Adjustable difficulty settings
Sprawling, complex dungeons
Headscratching puzzles
Many vast overworlds to explore
72 heart pieces to find
Roughly 25+ dungeons
Custom Boss fights, most of which are made with the Newbie Boss script
Many scripted objects
A full trade sequence
Estimated gameplay of 33+ hours

 

Tips and cheats:
Need help? Go to the help thread here

 

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Edited by TheRock, 21 November 2023 - 04:53 PM.

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#2 Demonlink

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Posted 21 November 2023 - 07:36 PM

Give me some time and I'll try it out next week probably.

#3 Sans

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Posted 23 November 2023 - 10:18 AM

Sure thing. Also the beta can be Let's Play'ed if anyone ever want to do let's play there.

#4 Zeldagamer2020

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Posted 28 November 2023 - 08:40 AM

Could you please remove all ice block puzzles before you release it please



#5 TheRock

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Posted 28 November 2023 - 08:57 AM

Could you please remove all ice block puzzles before you release it please

Those are some of my favorite part. So no. :). Need help on one I can make a video on the solution. :)


Edited by TheRock, 28 November 2023 - 08:59 AM.


#6 Zeldagamer2020

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Posted 30 November 2023 - 11:30 AM

Thank you so much



#7 Deedee

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Posted 30 November 2023 - 04:24 PM

Will try to play this before it releases when I have time.



#8 Ether

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Posted 14 December 2023 - 11:01 PM

I've started playing this, currently mid-L1.

 

The cave music is SO MUCH LOUDER than everything around it. It's really jarring every time.

 

I'm...frustrated by the lack of a spacebar map in dungeons. I feel like having to remember where to go next is going to become a problem very, very fast. Visibility in L1 is also somewhat rude in places--the translucent overhead canopy obscures things like drownable water and numbers/arrows I'm trying to read, and sometimes makes me go "Wait, is this supposed to be an exit? I guess it's not. Okay."

 

EDIT: The L1 dungeon item plays a bit awkwardly with the interface. Using L/R to scroll through your items doesn't really work with it. I feel like just having 2 extra active item slots would wind up being more useful here. (Incidentally, every time I restart the game forgets that I have the sword equipped. This...might be a controller thing? I'm not sure.)

 

I died to the L1 boss a bunch and wandered off to go explore the overworld. The boss is a neat concept but I really wish the trek to get back to it were shorter. It's not a hard trek, but it's a lot of screens even with the shortcut.



#9 Ether

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Posted 15 December 2023 - 02:26 PM

I went back to the boss with remote bombs and beat it pretty trivially. Remote bombs aren't my favorite thing in general, but they definitely made the difference here.
 
Mt Cronel is...a deeply unpleasant area. All those tanky mobile enemies that you can't one-shot and don't have any ranged weapon or stuns to deal with, where if they touch you you get bumped into the lava, so you're taking a minimum of a heart and a half of damage, it's...a pain. It just takes forever to make sure the coast is clear enough to take risks, and for splitting enemy screens they don't even have the decency to stay down. The caves look similar enough that navigating which branchy path I want feels like flipping coins, especially with the lack of spacebar maps. The overworld placement of the caves...kind of helps, but only goes so far. Even when I get anywhere, the similarity of the entrance screens makes me feel less "Fuck yes, it's progress!!" and more "Okay. Did anything I just did even matter?" The fire gels' flames not lasting for that long is nice, at least, I do wish more quests shortened that timer.
 
The obstacle paths with a treasure chest that just end in bombs are frustrating, too. I don't need bombs. But putting them in a treasure chest forces me to take the risk anyway in case this one will be a heart piece or something.
 
EDIT: Oh hey, I think this is the first time I've actually seen my aquamentus edit in the wild! Cool!
 
The vires in particular got less awful when I realized I could set them on fire. Still find the cave system annoying in general, but being able to deal with them without releasing bats is something at least.


#10 Ether

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Posted 15 December 2023 - 11:58 PM

Played through L2 and L3. L2 is my favorite part of the game so far! Could really use less bats, they're a chore and they aren't fun, but otherwise just a solid multistate dungeon.
 
It's a little jarring how much easier the pre-L3 overworld area is compared to Mt Cronel. Like, god it's nice to go back to keese after the bats, but why did we even need the bats in the first place?
 
I have...very mixed feelings on L3. I think the gimmick is cool and the dungeon has a strong start before the navigation pains really kick in. Past that point...well, spacebar map would really have been nice, although part of it is also just the number of staircases and warps to arbitrary locations you can't do anything at yet that the dungeon expects you to hold in your head.
 
The three brothers puzzle in L3 isn't very clearly explained--I found the hints just fine, but there was absolutely no indication that statues go on the top row. Meanwhile those two floor tiles that don't show up anywhere else in the dungeon threw me off; I'm not sure why they exist at all. I needed the hint from the other thread to progress, and even once I solved it, the game stalls you out and forces you to backtrack and go find which previously-a-dead-end lets you get into the room from below. And then even when you go through that sequence, it's not clear what the room-shaking did and I had to just keep wandering around trying to find various loose ends?
 
I kind of ran out of patience after the three brothers puzzle, and...the basement cleanup that followed reeeeally didn't help. I was not in the mood for scouting out dead ends and sorting out the proper order I was supposed to visit them in. The kill all enemies rooms I have to clear every single time I want to check a section of the basement again to see if my path is clear yet isn't the worst part but god it doesn't help.
 
AND THEN THE ROUTE TO THE BOSS ROOM ALSO TAKES FOREVER AND CONTAINS A KILL ALL ENEMIES ROOM ON THE WAY WTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
 
(I did beat the boss first try so there's that at least.)


#11 Ether

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Posted 16 December 2023 - 08:11 PM

Beat Dreams Gate.
 
I liked it overall, but this is another one where it reaaaaaaaaaaaally could have benefitted from a spacebar map.
 
I'm not actually clear on what I did to open up that path in the room with the giant blade traps? Fortunately I wandered back to the area eventually, but it definitely didn't feel telegraphed, whatever it was.
 
I think the item for this dungeon is an interesting concept, but would work better as a passive item that always gives you the ability to interact with those books, instead of one you have to scroll through and equip. Especially because of the fact that you can only equip two items at once. It makes for slowdowns where you have to scroll to take out the grimoire, scroll to switch to feather to do the jumps, scroll back to grimoire, scroll back to whatever item you're actually using to play the game.
 
(I feel like the mystery seeds also have this problem, where it's an item that only exists to interact with owl statues and for nothing else. But with that at least, it has the excuse that if it didn't exist then you wouldn't have all of the Oracle trees.)
 
The multistate nature of the dungeon made for some bugs, I think. For example, I got the boss key twice, one for each state of the dungeon? There's also a key on the left side of the dungeon that you can only get in one state, but if you pass it in the other state then it beeps every time. I kept thinking there was going to be something in another room that'd bring down the barrier so I could get that version of the key.
 
(I swear I did actually like this dungeon and I'm sorry about the criticism.)


#12 Ether

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Posted 18 December 2023 - 12:22 AM

Did the stealth dungeon and Desert of Mirages.
 
I am...not a fan of stealth sections in general. And in a shocking turn of events, this amplified a lot of my other frustrations. Kill all enemies rooms that reset every time are worse when getting seen once forces you to repeat them! I got super lost trying to find the last key, and just wandered around aimlessly in a way that having a spacebar map would have solved! (I know that the passive subscreen map marks keys on it, but this one required finding a particular staircase tucked away. In this case the thing that got me unstuck was wandering into a room where I could see where I had to go from a different angle, and going "Oh right! That's what I was looking for!" and focusing on how to get there; a map would have solved this issue.)
 
I didn't ragequit the quest, so in that sense I guess it was a successful stealth dungeon. But I feel like it had flaws that made it so, so much worse than it had to be.
 
Desert of Mirages I have mixed feelings on.
 
It was fun to explore it the first time, to try looking for all the secrets. I liked the idea of it. The overworld got...somewhat less fun as I kept retracing it over and over. I feel like I was constantly bumping into cacti, and I think the palette worked against me here. There's a lot going on in those screens, with very bright saturated colors, and the cacti just don't stand out. The cacti hidden behind palm trees are especially rude, particularly because there was also a staircase behind one. I didn't feel good when I found it, I just felt "Oh fuck no, do I have to check behind all the other palm trees now too?"
 
The continue points in the dungeons here are less than ideal. I died to the miniboss a couple times and had to walk back across the overworld to retry the fight.
 
As usual I spent a lot of time in transit just trying to find things I'd already visited before, and as usual I did not enjoy this! I, uhhhh...also took an embarrassingly long time to pick up on the fact that there's two separate dungeons here and not just one.
 
There's a sequence in the caves that disables your feather. Since the feather and potion are right next to each other, this led to me wasting my potion by accident twice and that wasn't great.


#13 Ether

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Posted 18 December 2023 - 04:57 PM

So...I've spent ages capped out on money, bought a wallet, and I'm already somewhere in the 900s. This game throws a lot of rupees around as treasure, but rupees don't seem to actually be good for anything. It's frustrating, finding new towns and checking their shops and seeing nothing to buy. At this point getting rupees feels worse than getting nothing at all.
 
Windy Valley as an area just felt...bloated. Big for the sake of being big and for no other reason. It could have been a half its size and would have been better for it. It's not like I'm starved for places to explore at this point in the game.
 
Citadel of Winds similarly felt like unnecessary padding. Wandering around pressing switches in the right order so I can find more switches to press isn't engaging gameplay.
 
I did wind up enjoying Sky Tower a lot, though. Just a chill place with good music where every direction has some kind of progress. I thought the puzzles were clever and did a good job of making the dungeon item feel like more than just a glorified key. Once I got the passive subscreen map and realized that F2 was clearly broken into three sections, even my usual navigation issues weren't a concern.


#14 Ether

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Posted 19 December 2023 - 08:18 PM

Magmarite Mines (mostly finished except the boss) is another one I have mixed feelings on. There sure was a heavy reliance on constantly switching between items. (By this point in the game, I've also taken to setting up the cane at the start of rooms.) And with pegasus seeds, you can't even use EX/L/R. I reeeeally think you should strongly consider letting players equip 4 items at a time instead of 2.
 
This is another dungeon where it's way too complex for its own good and most of the challenge is remembering which of the paths that you've already been through have loose ends available now. This was not fun. A spacebar map would have helped at least a bit...the sidescrolling bits mean it wouldn't have fixed everything, but god, it needed everything it could get and the passive map was absolutely not up to snuff even a little. This is the first dungeon where I actually threw up my hands and just made my own map, and I hate that I felt the need to do that. (The thing that tripped me up wound up not being an obscure staircase, but me failing to realize that I could hit a certain pillar from the vantage points I already had available. I think this was a clever trick, but also one where I only figured it out because I was looking at my map and didn't have to walk to that one screen first before thinking it over.)
 
I liked the unique things about it, and I do feel like I'd have enjoyed the dungeon a lot if the navigation pains weren't so bad. (Both the lack of a map, and also just...transit in general. Even when I made a map it still took ages to figure out where to go and then go there, because there's like a dozen different pairs of staircases.) Dungeon item seems very powerful, but interesting.
 
There's a certain section I didn't see coming and I thought it was a really cool twist. (Incidentally, it took me ages to figure out what item to use to start that section--I kept trying to use bombs, and I feel like that should have worked too.) I do think the block puzzle was a bit complex for it. It's a perfectly good puzzle, but in practice, I took one look at it, paused the game, took a screenshot and made absolutely sure that my solution would work. And that kind of took me out of the action. Also I'm a little disappointed that I never got to re-explore the southeast, after leaving my mark on it.
 
(I finished that section late at night, and since I was low on health after it I decided to just restart and come back later. It was a bitch and a half to find that part of the dungeon a second time, and re-finding it doesn't seem to have actually helped, and I was slightly bitter about this.)
 
It's still unclear to me what lighting all the torches in that one room actually did.
 
There's a quirk in the sidescrolling sections where it's very hard to line yourself up properly with a ladder when there's walls around it on both sides. This isn't the only place where it's been a problem, but it's definitely more prominent here.
 
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand once again, the trek to the boss room takes forever and contains multiple kill all enemies rooms that reset every time. This time I only damaged it once before it killed me, and I'm already dreading the next attempt. This is the kind of thing where I'd be fine with the difficulty if I could just fight the damn boss, but adding the long walk to get there feels unreasonably punishing.


#15 Ether

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Posted 21 December 2023 - 12:25 AM

Beat the boss. It felt a little finicky in terms of whether bombs were actually hitting it, but once I stopped trying to make the dungeon item work and switched to remote bombs it got a lot easier.
 
TheRock pointed out after my last post that there's a faster way to the boss. Even then, though, that's ten screens since the sidescrolling sections require traversing too. And it calls for switching to pegasus seeds (or precision that would slow things down even more) to leave the miniboss room. It's...better than what I was doing before, but it's still not ideal.
 
I got walled by the pre-L7 area but it was 100% my fault with no excuses. It was just my brain going "Naaaaaaah you already checked this house, pay it no mind" and then proceeding to search behind every single tree on the map multiple times in a vain search for the maze path. Please ignore me.
 
I played L7 and I bet you guys were expecting me to hate the spacial fuckery + shutters + lack of map, and I was definitely expecting to hate it, but actually I had a pretty fun time on this one for the most part! The gimmick was unique and I didn't feel like the dungeon was rude about it.
 
There was one key I got extremely stuck on where a spacebar map would have trivially fixed it--not a hard key to get, but one where I kept consistently failing to check a certain set of one-ways. And I feel a little silly here, because it was close to the entrance and available from extremely early on, so I don't reeeeeeaally have an excuse on this one. (In this case, I think the fact that there's three entrances to the relevant room threw me off, because I was checking the subscreen map but having a bar of lavender instead of dots made my brain just ignore it? This seems like my brain's fault if I'm being honest with myself.) But also, if there'd been a spacebar map then I could have spent less time doing boring things like trying to retrace all my steps and more time actually doing the parts of the game that are fun. 
 
I'm not 100% on this, but if I'm remembering right I think there's at least one key that doesn't seem to have been marked on the passive subscreen map. In the dark map, somewhere around the center, the room where the center-left is sections off and the outside is full of charging darknuts.
 
The holes in the floor should really be solid black if you're not falling through to another floor. (This is also true in other places like Element Shrine, off the top of my head.) Also, it seems like both floors of the dungeon are called Rokara's Mansion f1? At least outside of the boss room, which is b1.
 
The boss was...messy. By the later phases it doesn't really feel possible to dodge, and hitting it is a coinflip since it's jumping so much. I wound up just tanking it with a potion and shooting it repeatedly in the face. The attack where it lands and freezes the screen is also annoying and feels pointless; you'd think jumping when it lands would let you move normally, but it doesn't seem to work that way. I'm also not wild about how the boss repeats its dialog every time you come back to the room. (Actually, I feel that way about all bosses in this game to a lesser degree--I don't like the way the game briefly freezes to show you their name every time. Even the first time, I don't like the name displays; I just want to fight.)



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