A downloadable game for Windows

A Fool's Errand is a game made for the RPG Maker MZ Touch the Stars game jam, in this game you play as Toil, a jaded police officer. While on his break he gets a call from the Utopolis Police Department, telling him he's needed for an urgent investigation. A famous action "star" named Edward Matthews has been committing many petty crimes, and they want you to find him, but things aren't as they seem.

In terms of gameplay, expect to find your investigation lead you to a strange place, where you'll have to prepare to fight many supernatural enemies in a large dungeon.

Credits -

- Rowan Brite - (That's me!) Art, Gameplay, and Writing

- Weaselworks - Music

Check him out! (He also has the OST published so you can listen to it there too!) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7vMbfpr3Cc9-4BL95_r3CQ

- Zacchary Dempsey-Plante - Pixellari Font

-Bestiary Plugin by Casper Gaming

-Damaged Battle Sprites Plugin by Ozuma

- Creators of RPG Maker MZ - Making a really fun program that's opened many doors for me.

- Friends and Family - Encouragement :)

StatusReleased
PlatformsWindows
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(1 total ratings)
AuthorTinyawesome
GenreRole Playing
Made withRPG Maker
TagsRPG Maker, Short, Top-Down, Turn-based
Average sessionAbout a half-hour
LinksYouTube

Download

Download
A Fools Errand Expanded.zip 125 MB
Download
A Fool's Errand JAM VERSION.zip 109 MB

Install instructions

1 - Download the zip file (Expanded for update, Jam Version for original)
2 - Extract the zip wherever you'd like
3 - Go into the now unzipped folder and find "AFExpanded.exe" (For the original it should be called A Fool's Errand.exe"
4- Open up the program and play!

Development log

Comments

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(+1)

Congratulations on releasing the expanded version! I just got to play through it, and I really like all the changes you made to flesh out the story and characters more. As always, I love the custom sprites and music for the game, and all the new additions for both are just as excellent and help to make the game feel more engaging and vibrant! The new enemy sprites to represent their remaining health are very cool and add a good feeling to the combat. The new maps and scenes that flesh out Edward's backstory and the post-game events definitely help in making this feel like a more proper RPG.

I do feel like the game still leans toward the easy side, and I never felt much of a need to spend money on anything aside from recovery items and a few accessories, especially with all the nice items to be found in the dungeon and forged with demon dust, but I don't really consider that to be a problem. It's definitely better that a turn-based battler is too easy rather than too hard, and I appreciate having the opportunity to be able to manage my character's attributes in several different ways. However, I did find that I had to reconsider my selection of equipment for the "extra fight," and I especially liked encountering a challenge that forced me to think about my approach.

I didn't run into any significant problems during my playthrough of the game, but here's a short list of the small issues I encountered, if you ever feel up to modifying the game again at some point:

  • A few indoor tiles seem to have odd collision, mainly the brown and gray shelves found in "The Skeleton Closet."
  • The initial story trigger of talking to the boss in the UPD building repeats if you speak to the boss again. It didn't affect my actual position in the story but just felt odd.
  • One of Dan's dialogue boxes when talking to him after the demon den sequence displays twice in a row.
  • The "enraged" status effect has a messy text pop-up with the word "undefined" appearing in it after the enemy's turn.
(+1)

I'm really sorry about the bugs you've encountered. If I come back to the game I'll fix them, it's just that since some of these problems are due to MZ not saving or deploying properly, it'd kinda be a dice roll if it fixed, and I don't really want to deal with it since I'm not doing anymore serious work on the game. Maybe in the future I'll come back to it if I do a game in the same world or in MZ or something, but for now I've got different projects that I gotta focus on. Regardless though, I'm happy you had fun with it and that it felt more complete, I hope you'll stick around for when I finish another project.

(+1)

The bugs are really no problem! My playthrough of the game wasn't negatively impacted at all by any of the little things I came across, but I just wanted to mention them in case you ever wanted to touch this game again. Sorry to hear about the issues with RPG Maker MZ; I didn't know that it had compilation issues, and I can see how that would be really annoying to try and work against.

I did think this was a very quality RPG Maker game, so I'm definitely going to look forward to anything you have coming next. Is there anywhere else you share game development stuff? I would be interested in keeping up if so!

I don't really have a place to check things out but if I make another project it'll probably be posted here somewhere.

However... If you know about any places that I could set up a good way to post devlog stuff that might actually help me out since I've been considering doing that for a while and going more public, but it's gonna take a lot of setup.

And again, I'm happy you liked the game, I really appreciate the feedback.

(+1)

I have a friend who occasionally schedules posts on Twitter to showcase random GIFs of his game development in process. He says that it's something you have to regularly keep up with if you want to see some traffic, and games that are visually interesting are more likely to get noticed. I tried using it a long while back to show off some of my own game development stuff, but I found it to be too much of a hassle to keep up with, especially because I don't particularly care about trying to get attention.

As for more text-heavy devlogs... I'm not sure if there's any special place you could go to post things like that. I have gotten some hits from all the devlogs I made for my larger games here on itch, but part of that might be because I'm in the pool of "featured" users on this site, so anything I do shows up in a special featured feed. Honestly, I think the best thing you can do is to just continue making games if you're passionate about it! Your follower count will only go up if you keep putting stuff out, and I've had several bursts of traffic on random things I've made across my time on this site.

Thank you for the advice, if I set up any public place to show off stuff I make I'll definitely post about it here, but for now if you're interested in keeping up with my stuff just make sure to check my itch every so often.

This game's description caught my interest, so I decided to give it a try. My expectations were definitely subverted! By the description, I thought that this was going to be something more like a detective story with less of a focus on combat, but I ended up being okay with a combat-heavy dungeon crawler instead.

I really like the custom spritework you've done; in particular, all the sprites for the major characters and enemies are very nice. I also appreciate the effort that went into constructing all the maps in order to make the city feel more like a living place rather than a linear path back to the dungeon.

There are several issues I have with the balance of the game itself, though. My main issue is that the ability to save anywhere really reduces the risk of exploring the dungeon, as it's not too difficult to just save once or twice per floor and make a run to the bottom on the first day. The treasures in some of the deeper floors are quite strong, too, which encourages such a playstyle. There's also little reason to want to fight the enemies on the deeper floors, as you can always go back to the top in the same day and use the powerful equipment to grind on the weakest enemies. I got up to Level 5 while farming for the demon dust I needed to craft one piece of gear, and at that point, I ended up being very overpowered and defeated the boss in four turns. Almost all of the shops in the city ended up being unnecessary. If you end up revisiting this game after the jam is over, I would love to see the balance of this game tightened up.

Overall, this was still an enjoyable experience! Congratulations on finishing this game and submitting it to the jam!

(+1)

Thank you! I really appreciate the criticism. The game was intentionally very easy as there were probably gonna be a lot of people with various skill levels at rpgs playing the game jam game but during playtesting I also felt it was too easy. I do plan on doing a large overhaul to make the games balancing more fun and hopefully fix some bugs I didn't get the chance to crush, I hope you'll check it out when I make the update!