some of the fonts are pretty hard to read. I wonder if it has proper manual saving or the shitty one from stardew valley and the like. probably the latter.

looks cool.

bought!

Oh god, some of the fonts are at a different resolution from the main artwork and there's some ugly nearest neighbour scaling making them really hard to read. The saving in Stardew Valley is manual, you go to bed and it saves.

yeah, but it only saves when you go to bed, which is bad. by proper manual saving I meant anytime, anywhere.

Uh oh. Sounds like the grind is frontloaded.

I don't really thing that much could have changed from this review to now, but we'll see.

It's not bad, it's a design choice.

From ConcernedApe:
"I can totally understand why you'd be frustrated about it. There's a couple reasons it works the way it does right now, though:

First, I don't want save scumming to be easy. I know you aren't being "forced" to do it, but if it's really convenient it creates a strong incentive, which I think detracts from the experience of the game. I've always tried to be very careful about "optional" things. As a bit of a completionist myself, I know that if something is possible you're probably going to want to do it. I see saving at the end of the day as the Stardew Valley equivalent to "permadeath"... it's an incentive to care about your decisions during the day, knowing that you can't just reload a second earlier until you get the right outcome.

Second, having it save at the end of the day makes things a lot simpler from a technical standpoint. Many things in the game reset on new days, so their state doesn't need to be kept track of if you're always starting up on the dawn of a new day. I don't want it to sound like I'm making excuses or anything, I could probably make a quicksave feature work but it would take a substantial amount of work at this point.

I hope you can look past this inconvenience and still enjoy the game, but if it's a deal-breaker for you, I understand! Thanks for trying the game out, regardless. : )"

That's normal for the genre. Each day is a new play session, saving anytime, anywhere encourages people to reload at the drop of a hat in order to savescum. A "suspend" save should be enough - you can save it any time to quit but the save is deleted when you load it (so loading again would bring you back to the start of the day). Bingo. If something in the day goes badly you have the option to replay the day, but replaying the whole day means that loading has consequences. Otherwise people would just save-reload constantly throughout the day to maximise efficiency, like a tool-assisted-speedrun of Super Mario Bros or something.

People can save scum any game if they're willing to copy files around outside of the game. Yeah, a load-once suspend save for that sort of situation is a good idea. Allows you to suspend the game but doesn't encourage save-reloading (and people can save scum it if they want).

True, I still have my multi save files for F.E.A.R 2 but then again, it was one of those mandatory autosaves where you have no real control of when you can save the game, especially vexing for a control freak like myself, which is why I suppose that I'm annoyed with anti-manual saving with games!

But as I said before, I can deal with the save-at-the-end-of-the-day as it is a helluva lot better than permadeath, another bane for us control freaks! :) but yes, a suspend, or even an exit save mechanic would have been a brilliant solution, though that would be a nightmare to implement at this stage of the game! <=Pun intended!)

I hate autosaves too. I don't mind "save at the end of the day" because it still leaves the choice of whether to save or not in my hands. :)


Has anyone noticed that the original title of this thread (as shown in the URL) is check_these_upcoming_titles_from_crytivo? I guess at some point they decided to make this one all about Serin Fate. Well the problems in the review mostly seem to be balance issues. The comments (not just from the dev) do seem to imply that this has been heavily reworked since early access.

But, those font issues make me want to stop looking at it. :P

Christ, I thought we were well past the era of the micro-script!

...Looking at you soulbringer!

Yeah... The fonts have me very hesitant about this. And there appear to me a billion different ones bad in different ways.

* The cutscene font? OK.
* That journal title font ("Sera Berry Pie") is one of the worst fonts I've EVER seen.
* The balloon font as seen in "Owlglitz Level 8" is essentially unreadable. At first I thought it was entirely made-up glyphs supposed to be another language!
* The menu fonts in the next shot aren't bad. They look like SNES fonts run through a Super Eagle or similar upscalier with decent settings.
* "Midtown" on the map? Same as berry. Entirely a war-crime. And then over the mountains? I only found that trying REALLY HARD even to see.
* "dialog" font in the screenshot with the muscledude and barrels isn't too bad... But good luck seeing R and A as separate glyphs.
* That equip page is eye-gouging. It's not just the fonts but also the colors and icons all working together against the player.
* The all red screenshot... try to see that the same "berry" font is used in a different color at the top of the screen. It says * "Heart oF" [no typo, it's a capital F!] somethingsomethingsomething...
* The next shot showing what looks like a skill screen, yeah, that's not going to work. It's readable (if you ignore the overlaps)... except the green ones that are already learned. And the whole thing is sooooooooooooo busy a page. I understand wanting to do unique image for each, but have the "cloud" consistent across. It just doesn't work, in conjunction with this font. And the XP numbers at the left ont he same are too small to read with a crappy font.
* Even though the dialog font is generally not bad, the Sennia box shows that it's terrible contrast to have white on light blue.

JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE DOING A GAME WITH PIXEL ART DOESN'T MEAN YOU HAVE TO DO CRAPPY PIXEL FONTS! USE REAL TYPE!

I'd argue that pixel fonts are better in a game with pixel art. I strongly dislike the look of high resolution fonts mixed with pixel art.

The problem isn't pixel fonts, it's bad pixel fonts. There are some gorgeous and eminently readable pixel fonts in classic games. Some of my favourites are:

Earthbound: http://earthboundcentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/applekid.png

Link's Awakening: https://www.splintered.co.uk/experiments/images/1530347852.png

LucasArts golden age: https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/334686/lucasarts-scumm-outline


There are two problems in this game. Some of the fonts are inherently bad and then some of them are being nearest-neighbour scaled by a non-integer number. This gives a kind of "lumpy" look that makes them harder to read.