So, RPG Maker 2k3 is... probably not the wisest choice for a game engine. Yes, I know great things have been done in it, but frankly many of them were hamstrung by it. Try GameMaker instead.

The prose (the actual words part of the writing) serves, but it's not really *good*, which I wouldn't count as much of a big deal except this is a JRPG so prose is, like, 85% of the game. I strongly suggest you practice your fiction writing; write short stories and post them on /r/destructivereaders and the Absolute Write critique forums.

The "whenever you see an item with an exclaimation mark over it" text is way, way too long in addition to being unnecessary. You spent, like, six seconds telling me something that was completely obvious! The exclaimation marks are a good idea - they're a self-teaching mechanic. Don't fuck that up by then deliberately explaining it in a long winded hunk of text.

Having the first meaningful thing you do in the game being a search-and-fetch quest is a pretty shitty idea. Either this is unrepresentative of the rest of the game, in which case it's a bad and boring intro, or it is in which case you have bigger problems.

The searching is a _little_ dull. I'd make the exclaimation marks come up as soon as you enter a room instead of when you approach the object; that way you can _immediately_ determine what's interesting in there. Make sure you don't have dead ends and empty rooms with nothing in them - walking around waiting for the game to tell you "you can do something interesting now" is not fun.

Speaking of, the important things really ought to be visually distinguished from the unimportant things. Bright colors attract the eye; the rope or pole or whatever I can interact with should be saturated while the floor behind it and objects I can't interact with should be less saturated, or in other words should be "washed out" and dark. Does that make any sense?

Here, this guy explains it all better than I ever will: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HermanTulleken/20150729/249761/Color_in_games_An_indepth_look_at_one_of_game_designs_most_useful_tools.php

I realize you're working with RTP assets (which is kind of a problem in and of itself) but you can always modify their coloring with a free tool like GraphicsGale or GIMP (the former is actually designed for drawing pixel art, I recommend having both but for this purpose GraphicsGale is the one I'd recommend more than GIMP).

Anyway, I looked in every room and didn't find the glue, so that's where I stopped.

Is the music RTP? It sounds good, either way.

Sorry about the key mapping issue, it's a bug with the library the game uses for graphics and input that I can't fix. I tried a workaround but since I don't actually have a non-US computer to test it on it never worked. :P

The resources the tutorial pulls up are meant to be used as reference material. You're _supposed_ only look back at them when you decide there's something you don't know how to do, like pull something out of a list. I should probably remove them, actually, since the hint system seems to be better at teaching basic syntax anyway.

The last hint you can get from the hint system actually straight-up tells you how to solve the level. It looks from the telemetry that you only called hint() once. The first hint should probably mention that you can call it again for more hints.

It'd be great if I could pull off a Mario-style invisible tutorial, but... if you have any ideas on how a game can teach programming language syntax without text, I'd sure as heck like to hear it.

I never actually expected anyone to try to type in the passphrase! You're supposed to change it to something shorter and type that in.

Looking at the telemetry, it looks like you actually accomplished an acceptable solution to the level; calling objs[0]._trip() should've opened the door. What happened there?

Did you know you can pull up hints by calling hint() or did you miss that? It *is* only actually mentioned once.

You ran into pretty much all the remaining bugs that I know about. :P They're bugs in the underlying graphics library and they're damn hard to work around. The rest of the game is way less glitchy, I promise. Maybe give it another shot someday?

The bug only happens with _input_, not stuff in the info screen. I assume you're referring to the attributes being truncated? You can see the whole attribute by entering "print(objs[0].whatever)".

Ultimately I think the hints are necessary - I know nothing frustrates _me_ more than being locked out of half a game because I'm just not thinking along the same lines as the level designer. Considering how easy it is to cheese the game - you can almost literally just call the win_game() function yourself after all - I figure it's on the players to restrict themselves to solutions they find satisfying.

Changing out the first four lines for:

self.direction=getattr(self,"direction",False)

(translates to "return the "direction" attribute of self, unless it has none in which case return False")

makes it work, but that's a relatively obscure trick and you shouldn't be expected to know it offhand.

I'm planning out a more dynamic and reactive hint system that should just tell you stuff like that when it notices you have that kind of trouble. Aside from that, all I can say is that you should have the docs up and study them from time to time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hmm. What specifically do you think it needs?