Just a side note: the manuals' toc is out of sync with realitiy. Can this be fixed at some point? And to have this pdf used for printing a 'real' manual, it's always better to have an even amount of pages, I think.
Hello. On 1.0.9 I noticed that when I walk the upper corner at Calibor's shop, while Calibor is hammering, I see a blue flicker on the top of the screen, both on C64C (with UII+) and on VICE, and on real hardware I can notice the audio slowing just a teensy bit. Is that an issue of mine? My the way, it's a beautiful game giving me lots of fun
I really would like an option to swap the two buttons. I cannot seem to get used to pressing the "back" button for the main action and vice versa. I am playing in VICE 3.6.1, and the emulator doesn't have an option for this either. If anyone know how this can be achived please reply.
I saved to a KFF. I don't know if I got a save failed error. But now I can't move down in the game. Can move joystick down in menus but not on map. Is there any way to extract save file ?
I've been playing the game for about 9 hours and so far it's fantastic, however during my gameplay two of the save slots seem to have become corrupted (If I try to save to one of those slots I get a "Save failed" Message). Is this a known issue? I'm using a Kung Fu cart.
I've released v1.0.9 which fixes the save to cart problem. Best to use and SD2IEC device (or a real disk) to save the save games before updating to v1.0.9, otherwise progress will be lost as the save games are saved as part of the crt file.
But if a new crt file is saved out via the Kung Fu Flash menu (thus including the save games), I can fix it if saving to disk first is not an option .
Great, thanks! :) - on my emulator I can't seem to save to disk. Is it possible to convert the emulator's save-state from an early version so that it works on 1.0.9?
I'm very glad to have found this. What I like most is how you are taking your own fiction into the game. I once wrote that I thought that Below the Root (Zilpha Keatley Snyder) for the C64 and a few other computers at the time was a rare (the only?) example of expanding on canon world fiction for previously published novels within a game - approved and directed by the author - and has been rarely replicated since. Of course you are breaking another barrier which is actually being the one to program the game! So I must ask -- without having read your books and only having just found the game, does this game expand upon your canon world lore in any way - or is it more of a "based on the books" approach? Thank you, - Robinson Mason
The game largely follows the books, using the same world lore. In fact, most of the dialogue text came from my novels. The game tells the same story as the novels, with the same characters and locations, but I did change some parts to make it work better as a game, adding some parts to allow for some extra side quests. I used the first 4 Briley witch novels to make the game, and will be using books 5-7 to make Briley 2, and books 8-10 to make Briley 3. After that, I'll need to stop and write more novels. ;)
Thank you for the quick reply! Appreciate that detail and will certainly check the game and books out. Book .... #10! Wow and great news to hear a "2" will be coming. Since you are the author of the game(s), I think it would be fair to say technically the added side-quests would then be "canon", too? Well, unless the main character died in-game during a side-quest, that wouldn't work ... haha.
An SD2IEC cannot emulate cartridges and is therefore unsuitable for Briley Witch Chronicles. You either need a device that can emulate EasyFlash cartridge or a real EasyFlash cartridge. Solutions for cartridge emulation are 1541 Ultimate II+, Backbit or Kung Fu Flash. If you want a dedicated EasyFlash cartridge for the game, that you can plug into your C64 and go, you are welcome to contact me.
I love your game: Zeta Wings, Soul Force. But I would play Brailey Witch Chronicles, but JRPG is not my type of favorite game. What do you think, i try or not?
Vice is the best choice if you want to run C64 on the desktop of your PC. If you want a more authentic experience (with low latency input & output), try BMC64 on a Raspberry Pi.
Denise emulator also is very good and when it comes to gaming, not only i would say, it's number-one of all C64-emulators, cause Denise has a RunAhead function for minimizing the input-lag (so it feels like playing on a real C64) and also keyboard-keys can be mapped to buttons on the controller, which also is a big improvement in the playability of alot C64-games, also here in "Briley Witch Chronicles".
Don't worry, you'll get access to the woodman later in the game. But I won't tell you when and how. You're around 15-20% of the game now. You'll get some strange quest... But I'll let you discover everything :)
Completed on normal played with real hardware utilizing an Ultimate 1541-II on a NTSC 64c with no issues (played a bit on my PAL machine as well, the dithering likely looks better in PAL, but I like things vibrant). This is my favorite C64 game now. Thank you so very much for the experience. BWC2 will be a day 0 purchase from me.
Wow! What an awesome and meticulously detailed game! The love for what you do shines through your work. I almost feel like the very early beginnings of my own Zelda/Druid type game are nothing. No idea whether life will give me the time to see it through to a final product, but at least there are so many awesome cross-development tools and tutorials for machine coding. I have some unique gameplay elements planned that i've never seen in any C64 game, and i've been playing them on and off since the late 1980's :)). Only 2 hours into this game. Only 1 glitch i've seen which another player commented on previously. It's a temporary graphical glitch which you can see here. It only seemed to occur the first time i entered this area as i aproached the left side of that fence. I glitched first on the fence then when i moved south and until the fence was offscreen it corrected and the graphics further down as seen in this screenshot resulted. Otherwise, flawless so far. Great gameplay. Having spent many hours playing Final Fantasy 7, 8, 10, 12 many years ago, the combat style was second nature and very intuitive. 10/10 from me!
I have played a little over 12 hours so far and all four save game slots are full. (I`m using Kung Fu Flash). is there any way to delete a couple save slots so I can keep saving as I go? I love this game and want to finish it!!
Once a slot gets full, it won`t let you save to it anymore. There seems to be a certain number of times a slot can be saved to before it won`t work anymore. Unless I`m doing something wrong.
Yay, BWC normal mode completed after about a month of on/off playing! Two foxes missed, but no biggie. Easily the most addicting C64 game for me since Last Ninja 2, and I didn't even like these sorts of JRPG styled games prior to this.
Oh, but I encountered a weird bug (the most recent update), which happened sometime after starting the final part of the game - I think this happened a little bit after Briley's dream sequence. I was randomly walking around Maypole, picking up catmint and other herbs, and when I circled around the area with Calibor's forge in a counter-clockwise manner, the screen stopped scrolling about a couple of blocks to the right of the fence below Calibor's forge. Then I went back a few steps and tried again, and it glitched so that the screen made a weird vertical line under the place where it stopped previously. After reaching the right edge of the area, I went up a bit and the screen stopped scrolling again, but I managed to walk off the screen a bit, and when I came back down, Smokey had turned into a "shadow" version of Briley's sprite. Luckily, the game didn't crash, but after a few seconds, everything turned to normal all of a sudden. Might be something worth taking a look at, but at least it didn't break the game. I played it on an EasyFlash3 cart.
Anyway, thanks for an amazing game, hope to see more of Briley's adventures soon!
Only Sarah can confirm, but the game is about 700KB large, so that is a minimum of 5 floppies and that would for sure be a lot of disk swapping. Perhaps an 3.5 inch diskette for 1581 might be possible, depends a bit on wether the game requires cartridge ROM to be directly adressable. If you are in need of an Easyflash cartridge, you are welcome to contact me.
Just started playing through this game recently and came across this point in the game. I'm curious is the dialogue supposed to say, we're in another world, or we're on another world?
I was finally able to finish the game (helped a lot during these first days of quarantine), which I believe is one of the finest releases of 2021. Unforgettable characters, music, atmosphere and lots of cats :) Thank you so much for developing it, I guess many people are awaiting the sequel!
Just a couple of (very small) aspects could be improved in my opinion: 1) a walking speed setting could be useful, since I would increase it a bit but other players maybe like it as it is; 2) Why do most enemies surprise you in battles? Compared to most JRPGs, the "Surprised!" label appears much more often. Maybe I should just gain more XP in order to approach battles at higher levels, since I notice you are surprised less in the same area when becoming more powerful than your enemies; 3) Some situations require being positioned in a specific tile (perfect example: the box at the end), I would make that requirement a little less strict/more player-friendly, maybe giving a hint or so when reaching the right one. But these are very little tweaks to an almost perfect game.
"Briley Witch" has a great atmosphere, the gameplay is gorgeous. I am 45 years old and I had an atari 800Xl and a commodore 64 when I was young. What memories, my 6 year old daughter loves your games. You are a great programmer !
Started playing the game a day or so ago, and I'm having a save issue. No matter how many times I save, when I go back to the game after a power cycle, all the progress is lost, and I'm back at a pervious save. Playing the game via a backbit pro cartridge and played on both a C64 and C128 (Both NTSC)
Also, would it be possible to change the button layout for the keyboard controls? I find the current layout to be awkward.
I must say Lord Dudic has a strange idea of justice: Briley gets a baseless accusation of dark witchery and must stand trial in the town hall, while the Whiteheads attempt to commit a murder and all they have to do is pay a little bit of money. No trial, just pay, all your sins are forgotten. 10 x the price of a bread delivery... damn... if buying yourself out of a murder crime was so cheap in the real world.... the world would be like the wild-west.
Just finished the game, and it was generally absolutely lovely, with gorgeous graphics and all well put together. One quite major aspect did, however, quite seriously impact my enjoyment of the game, and my kindest advice would be to try to avoid this phenomenon in the future games in the series.
Namely, the resource starvation. Playing on "normal", which I always do, have the monsters hitting you quite hard, specifically since they level up in mostly the same speed as the player. A typical hit would deplete 1/7th to 1/6th of my max HP. This is not a problem, and I enjoy the battles not being push-overs, but in some dungeons, I had to use three or even four full-health potions, of which it's only possible to create one per story day. Mostly, it didn't matter, but at some points, I was on the verge of running out of ability to heal myself. Had I not been diligent in gathering herbs at every point I could in the game (even when the story didn't really allow for detours) I would have run a serious risk of ending up with a "cursed save" - a save game which is impossible to continue from (not enough resources to proceed, and no ability to gather new ones.).
Some 10 to 15 hours in, this worry of resource starvation and the risk of cursed saves and threat of being forced to replay large portions of the story only because I'd run out of healing pots, only grew. In the end, I didn't want to explore or revisit old areas, for fear of new battles that would deplete my ever so shrinking supply of healing pots. I couldn't risk running too low, lest I would find myself in an impossible situation. This unfortunately sapped much of the fun out of the game.
Sure, one can always play on "Easy", but that's not really my point. I'm not after easy battles and push-overs. I appreciate that battles matter, and the difficulty on Normal was well aligned and much satisfactory. But resource starvation, and specifically the threat of cursed saves, doesn't really have a place in 20 hour long games. I ended up switching to Easy, not relly enjoying the fact that now, no battle really mattered (they really didn't - everything died as I looked at it), but at least I could now explore some and afford detours and revisits without serious worry. It worked as a hotfix, but felt like a "less bad" solution.
Having completed the game, I do suspect that my switch to Easy might have been unnecessary, and that I maybe wouldn't have run out of healing pots either way. That, however, does not make my worry during the game less real. If I could wish, in future games in this series, do not limit the player's ability to recover from battles. Let us be able to visit, explore, revisit and take our time, even if we enjoy battles that matter. If players will have to grind for herbs to achieve this, then so be it. But please don't set a hard limit. The worry to run out and end up in an impossible situation shouldn't be a part of an otherwise fantastic adventure game.
I will agree partly, Normal was harder than I was expecting, and in some situations, I ran from battles as often as I could. However… that was part of the challenge heh. Also I’m not sure what gave you the impression you could only create one full health potion per story day, I was making as much as I could when possible. Admittedly near the end of the game, I was buying potions from the town shop as I was low on resources to create enough to keep myself going.
It was the scarcity of herbs. One Full Health potion required 3 pieces of 2 herbs, of which is was only possible to pick 3 per day. (It cost 2 of each to make a Hi Potion, and then another one of each to make a Full Health potion out of that)
And money was pretty scarce too, though I admit I had enough for several potions. As I said, it do think my resources would have sufficed in the end, BUT of that, I had no idea while I was playing. So the sense of confinement and fear to paint myself into a corner and end up with a cursed save was very much there, and is did tear very much at the fun of the game. I felt I didn't want to explore, and as I used 2 or 3 potions in a dungeon near the end, I was constantly worried that I'd end up standing before the final battle with too few potions, having to replay the entire game. In-game worries is one thing. But this was a game-save technical issue, similar to the worry of a crippling bug. Lifting the forced limitations of healing wouldn't have made the game worse; it would have made it much more entertaining.
I guess as soon as I discovered the herb garden, and anywhere that spawned herbs per day, I made sure to try and go there every day to stock up and get reserves. But even then I did run a bit low and used some of the spare cash I had buying full health potions from the shop in the town.
Yep. The herb garden spawned 3 each of the necessary herbs, but a Full Health potion required all 3. In some dungeons at the end, I needed way more than 1 potion to keep up. This ended up stressing me pretty much, worrying that I would run out and end up in a hopeless situation.
I made a lot of progress - well I think - since my last call for help. I'm stuck in the Forgotten glade. Ember said she will clean the clearing. I suppose using a firebomb spell, but where?
Edit: found the answer on a Youtube video. And I just finished it. It took me around 15 hours to finish on easy skill. A really cool game. Can't wait to see Briley's adventure part 2.
Hey there. I was playing this beautiful game on VICE 3.5 and I used to save to cart all the time, never quitting the emulator.
Today I had to restart Windows, I quit cleanly but, upon restart, there wasn't any save game on the cart slot.
I lost 8 hours of progress, I had just met/saved Alyssa and was going to search for her grimoire. Any chance that anybody has got a save game file I can use to get back to that point, more or less? If so, please contact me. Thanks in advance. Mick
I recently experienced something similar on a real Easyflash cartridge. The game did report that the save did fail, when trying again, the game did crash. Luckily I made a backup on floppy, but still, a few hours of gameplay are lost.
Just curious. For many hours now, a witch in Chaeton has asked me for some Wild Shroom, and I'm worrying that I've missed something, because I haven't ever found one. Many hours ago, I believe I had an other type of Shroom, but that was found (IIRC) in some treasure chest.
Just wondering if I just have to await finding the Wild Shroom, or if that can be harvested somewhere I've missed.
Hah, the one place I had left to look at. I had been in all the forests, in the plains, and I was just about to go to the forest. Thanks, but geez... sometimes I feel I should search more thoroughly before I ask. Thanks again!
I saw around half a year ago 180 days ago you got a barbarian pixel art from Sven Idle, I was hoping to use it but I have no money can I get a copy from you?
I saw around half a year ago 180 days ago you got a barbarian pixel art from Sven Idle, I was hoping to use it but I have no money can I get a copy from you?
I must admitt I need a little bit of assistance got a stuck, ALyssa wants to test her fire resu spell, and Smokey remindes Branwen says somewhere it at a place that are filles with stones, tryied a lof of stoney places I can find includeing sothpern plains but none of them seems proper. I see there are some stonehedge thing on the transport map but dosent have acces to that yet.
I got fooled by this as well: I had tried those stones, somehow it didn't work, then I spent several hours searching elsewhere and finally did resort to a Youtube video to see that it really were those stones near Branwen's house. Tried them again, and yes!
I did use a lot of magic while finding the place to hide. I had a charged amulet and did wear an air shield. The Veritas were no match against the many "iceball" and "windstorm" spell I was firing at them.
Oh oh I think I'm in trouble Sarah :( I split the two grimoires before going to Nineve's barrow for the second time - I wanted to make some more health potions... in splitting them, Briley's only got the 1st in her inventory. So in the barrow I've got the 1st and 3rd... am I meant to have all three to escape?? If so... I'm a bit stuck :( :( (loving the game btw :) :)
Well, I found the bangle one hour right after asking... Search and you will find. Thanks anyway for your answer. I'm trying to make your game last. I don't want to finish it too soon... I'm playing as easy skill - this is my first Japanese RPG - to enjoy it.
My final word? When you will release part 2, you can count on me to play it.
Congratulations for being mentioned in the C64 article in La Repubblica. It doesn't happen daily that the C64 games are noted by mainstream newspapers.
What other hardware could this run from? ie. UII+, EasyFlash, etc? Is it possible to build my own cartridge? For example, OpenCart or other open project out there?
If you still need them, I have the Easyflash 1.4.1 Gerbers.
A Versacart is waayyyy too basic for this game, notably it lacks the required storage capacity, has no bank switching and mp ability to save games on cart.
A really great game. I was not a great Zelda-like game, but this game changed my mind. I'm stuck searching the Mage clearing. Smokey left me in order to get some infos. I hope it will be back soon.
Looks like anytime soon some hint book will be published :)
Love the game! Thank you for your great work, already looking forward to the sequel <3
If you still plan further updates, I spotted one little typo: when Roana is about to pick her familiar and Smokey talks about picking his human, he say "in the sheler"... just one t short :)
Bought the game today. Really enjoy it so far on original hardware with EasyFlash. Like a few other people who posted here; I also got a 10 year old daughter, and she was put under as spell watching me play, begging me to keep going. Must have been the cats lol. Fantastic work Sarah. Hope we will see more from you for the c64 in the future :)
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Thank you for this quite cool game.
Just a side note: the manuals' toc is out of sync with realitiy. Can this be fixed at some point? And to have this pdf used for printing a 'real' manual, it's always better to have an even amount of pages, I think.
Hello. On 1.0.9 I noticed that when I walk the upper corner at Calibor's shop, while Calibor is hammering, I see a blue flicker on the top of the screen, both on C64C (with UII+) and on VICE, and on real hardware I can notice the audio slowing just a teensy bit. Is that an issue of mine?
My the way, it's a beautiful game giving me lots of fun
I really would like an option to swap the two buttons. I cannot seem to get used to pressing the "back" button for the main action and vice versa. I am playing in VICE 3.6.1, and the emulator doesn't have an option for this either. If anyone know how this can be achived please reply.
I saved to a KFF. I don't know if I got a save failed error. But now I can't move down in the game. Can move joystick down in menus but not on map. Is there any way to extract save file ?
I've been playing the game for about 9 hours and so far it's fantastic, however during my gameplay two of the save slots seem to have become corrupted (If I try to save to one of those slots I get a "Save failed" Message). Is this a known issue? I'm using a Kung Fu cart.
Seems there is a problem in the cart save code so I will be fixing that.
If you have a SD2IEC device, I'd recommend using that to save games.
I've released v1.0.9 which fixes the save to cart problem. Best to use and SD2IEC device (or a real disk) to save the save games before updating to v1.0.9, otherwise progress will be lost as the save games are saved as part of the crt file.
But if a new crt file is saved out via the Kung Fu Flash menu (thus including the save games), I can fix it if saving to disk first is not an option .
Great, thanks! :) - on my emulator I can't seem to save to disk. Is it possible to convert the emulator's save-state from an early version so that it works on 1.0.9?
I'm very glad to have found this. What I like most is how you are taking your own fiction into the game. I once wrote that I thought that Below the Root (Zilpha Keatley Snyder) for the C64 and a few other computers at the time was a rare (the only?) example of expanding on canon world fiction for previously published novels within a game - approved and directed by the author - and has been rarely replicated since. Of course you are breaking another barrier which is actually being the one to program the game! So I must ask -- without having read your books and only having just found the game, does this game expand upon your canon world lore in any way - or is it more of a "based on the books" approach? Thank you, - Robinson Mason
The game largely follows the books, using the same world lore. In fact, most of the dialogue text came from my novels. The game tells the same story as the novels, with the same characters and locations, but I did change some parts to make it work better as a game, adding some parts to allow for some extra side quests. I used the first 4 Briley witch novels to make the game, and will be using books 5-7 to make Briley 2, and books 8-10 to make Briley 3. After that, I'll need to stop and write more novels. ;)
Thank you for the quick reply! Appreciate that detail and will certainly check the game and books out. Book .... #10! Wow and great news to hear a "2" will be coming. Since you are the author of the game(s), I think it would be fair to say technically the added side-quests would then be "canon", too? Well, unless the main character died in-game during a side-quest, that wouldn't work ... haha.
I am confused. The games say EasyFlash. Do you need to buy a cartridge maker to play the game? Can these be run off a sd2idc?
An SD2IEC cannot emulate cartridges and is therefore unsuitable for Briley Witch Chronicles. You either need a device that can emulate EasyFlash cartridge or a real EasyFlash cartridge. Solutions for cartridge emulation are 1541 Ultimate II+, Backbit or Kung Fu Flash. If you want a dedicated EasyFlash cartridge for the game, that you can plug into your C64 and go, you are welcome to contact me.
Hi Sarah.
I'm Italian, sorry for my bad English.
I love your game: Zeta Wings, Soul Force. But I would play Brailey Witch Chronicles, but JRPG is not my type of favorite game. What do you think, i try or not?
This looks like a great game. Very good graphics on a C64.. Wish you had done this 35 years ago ;-)
What's the best emulator to play this on? I don't have a C64 :-(
and are one of those new mini C64 consoles any good? I might buy one of those.
I use VICE: https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io/
Thanks for the response, will check it out! Game looks great, just read about it in the new Retro Gamer magazine
Vice is the best choice if you want to run C64 on the desktop of your PC. If you want a more authentic experience (with low latency input & output), try BMC64 on a Raspberry Pi.
ok, thanks for the info!
Denise emulator also is very good and when it comes to gaming, not only i would say, it's number-one of all C64-emulators, cause Denise has a RunAhead function for minimizing the input-lag (so it feels like playing on a real C64) and also keyboard-keys can be mapped to buttons on the controller, which also is a big improvement in the playability of alot C64-games, also here in "Briley Witch Chronicles".
where is the woodsman and what shall i do in the deep forest? All i mest is the ghost st the end which kills me.
Woodman is near Chandler's home.
And for this ghost, read well every single line of dialog :)
thx for the ghost tip. as for woodsman the door is closed, but perhaps i must deal with the ghost first.
Don't worry, you'll get access to the woodman later in the game. But I won't tell you when and how. You're around 15-20% of the game now. You'll get some strange quest... But I'll let you discover everything :)
thx for your kind answer and i really love this game. I hope a sequel is planned...
I've already started work on the sequel. In fact, there will be a Briley 2 and 3.
Briley's adventure part 2 will be an instant buy as soon as it is made available. Can't, wait to see Smokey complaining about tuna :)
And you'll see Smokey get an hard life in the game :D
Completed on normal played with real hardware utilizing an Ultimate 1541-II on a NTSC 64c with no issues (played a bit on my PAL machine as well, the dithering likely looks better in PAL, but I like things vibrant). This is my favorite C64 game now. Thank you so very much for the experience. BWC2 will be a day 0 purchase from me.
Wow! What an awesome and meticulously detailed game! The love for what you do shines through your work. I almost feel like the very early beginnings of my own Zelda/Druid type game are nothing. No idea whether life will give me the time to see it through to a final product, but at least there are so many awesome cross-development tools and tutorials for machine coding. I have some unique gameplay elements planned that i've never seen in any C64 game, and i've been playing them on and off since the late 1980's :)). Only 2 hours into this game. Only 1 glitch i've seen which another player commented on previously. It's a temporary graphical glitch which you can see here. It only seemed to occur the first time i entered this area as i aproached the left side of that fence. I glitched first on the fence then when i moved south and until the fence was offscreen it corrected and the graphics further down as seen in this screenshot resulted. Otherwise, flawless so far. Great gameplay. Having spent many hours playing Final Fantasy 7, 8, 10, 12 many years ago, the combat style was second nature and very intuitive. 10/10 from me!
A simple technical question. I'm looking for a Kung Fu Flash cartdrige. Does anyone get the game to run on it?
Thanks for your answer.
I use Kung Fu Flash on my real C64 for testing my games. Briley runs fine, and save to cart works too!
Well, thanks. Now the hard part: founding one that is not horribly expensive. Wish me luck ;)
I have played a little over 12 hours so far and all four save game slots are full. (I`m using Kung Fu Flash). is there any way to delete a couple save slots so I can keep saving as I go? I love this game and want to finish it!!
Dan
You can just save over an existing slot.
Once a slot gets full, it won`t let you save to it anymore. There seems to be a certain number of times a slot can be saved to before it won`t work anymore. Unless I`m doing something wrong.
If you can email me the crt file from the SD card in the Kung Fu Flash, I can fix it for you.
If you can kindly give me your email address , I`ll send it to you, thanks!
Dan
Has anyone got saves to .d81 working on Retroarch? I have a save file from my Mister that I'd like to transfer.
Yay, BWC normal mode completed after about a month of on/off playing! Two foxes missed, but no biggie. Easily the most addicting C64 game for me since Last Ninja 2, and I didn't even like these sorts of JRPG styled games prior to this.
Oh, but I encountered a weird bug (the most recent update), which happened sometime after starting the final part of the game - I think this happened a little bit after Briley's dream sequence. I was randomly walking around Maypole, picking up catmint and other herbs, and when I circled around the area with Calibor's forge in a counter-clockwise manner, the screen stopped scrolling about a couple of blocks to the right of the fence below Calibor's forge. Then I went back a few steps and tried again, and it glitched so that the screen made a weird vertical line under the place where it stopped previously. After reaching the right edge of the area, I went up a bit and the screen stopped scrolling again, but I managed to walk off the screen a bit, and when I came back down, Smokey had turned into a "shadow" version of Briley's sprite. Luckily, the game didn't crash, but after a few seconds, everything turned to normal all of a sudden. Might be something worth taking a look at, but at least it didn't break the game. I played it on an EasyFlash3 cart.
Anyway, thanks for an amazing game, hope to see more of Briley's adventures soon!
I made my own custom EasyFlash cart for this and I've been playing v1.0.7 for a bit. If I flash the newest version will I lose my saves?
Yes. In order to prevent losing your game, you have to save your game to floppy before flashing.
Thanks for the quick reply. To disk we go!
BUG REPORT:
Henricus refuses to accept any Northern Cod if you have more than 5 in your possession.
Is this possible as a disk version ?
Only Sarah can confirm, but the game is about 700KB large, so that is a minimum of 5 floppies and that would for sure be a lot of disk swapping. Perhaps an 3.5 inch diskette for 1581 might be possible, depends a bit on wether the game requires cartridge ROM to be directly adressable. If you are in need of an Easyflash cartridge, you are welcome to contact me.
Just started playing through this game recently and came across this point in the game. I'm curious is the dialogue supposed to say, we're in another world, or we're on another world?
I was finally able to finish the game (helped a lot during these first days of quarantine), which I believe is one of the finest releases of 2021. Unforgettable characters, music, atmosphere and lots of cats :) Thank you so much for developing it, I guess many people are awaiting the sequel!
Just a couple of (very small) aspects could be improved in my opinion: 1) a walking speed setting could be useful, since I would increase it a bit but other players maybe like it as it is; 2) Why do most enemies surprise you in battles? Compared to most JRPGs, the "Surprised!" label appears much more often. Maybe I should just gain more XP in order to approach battles at higher levels, since I notice you are surprised less in the same area when becoming more powerful than your enemies; 3) Some situations require being positioned in a specific tile (perfect example: the box at the end), I would make that requirement a little less strict/more player-friendly, maybe giving a hint or so when reaching the right one. But these are very little tweaks to an almost perfect game.
"Briley Witch" has a great atmosphere, the gameplay is gorgeous. I am 45 years old and I had an atari 800Xl and a commodore 64 when I was young. What memories, my 6 year old daughter loves your games. You are a great programmer !
Started playing the game a day or so ago, and I'm having a save issue. No matter how many times I save, when I go back to the game after a power cycle, all the progress is lost, and I'm back at a pervious save. Playing the game via a backbit pro cartridge and played on both a C64 and C128 (Both NTSC)
Also, would it be possible to change the button layout for the keyboard controls? I find the current layout to be awkward.
The Backbit cartridge only has a partial Easyflash implementation, so I don't think that is a surpise. Just save on floppy.
I must say Lord Dudic has a strange idea of justice: Briley gets a baseless accusation of dark witchery and must stand trial in the town hall, while the Whiteheads attempt to commit a murder and all they have to do is pay a little bit of money. No trial, just pay, all your sins are forgotten. 10 x the price of a bread delivery... damn... if buying yourself out of a murder crime was so cheap in the real world.... the world would be like the wild-west.
Playing the game once again, in order to find all foxes :)
I noticed a typo in version 1.0.7. When Roana is getting a cat, Smokey talked about being adopted byBriley. From "the sheler" instead of the shelter.
See attached screenshot.
Thanks for that! Just updated v1.0.7 to fix the typo.
You're welcome :)
If I find another typo, I'll tell you.
Just finished the game, and it was generally absolutely lovely, with gorgeous graphics and all well put together. One quite major aspect did, however, quite seriously impact my enjoyment of the game, and my kindest advice would be to try to avoid this phenomenon in the future games in the series.
Namely, the resource starvation. Playing on "normal", which I always do, have the monsters hitting you quite hard, specifically since they level up in mostly the same speed as the player. A typical hit would deplete 1/7th to 1/6th of my max HP. This is not a problem, and I enjoy the battles not being push-overs, but in some dungeons, I had to use three or even four full-health potions, of which it's only possible to create one per story day. Mostly, it didn't matter, but at some points, I was on the verge of running out of ability to heal myself. Had I not been diligent in gathering herbs at every point I could in the game (even when the story didn't really allow for detours) I would have run a serious risk of ending up with a "cursed save" - a save game which is impossible to continue from (not enough resources to proceed, and no ability to gather new ones.).
Some 10 to 15 hours in, this worry of resource starvation and the risk of cursed saves and threat of being forced to replay large portions of the story only because I'd run out of healing pots, only grew. In the end, I didn't want to explore or revisit old areas, for fear of new battles that would deplete my ever so shrinking supply of healing pots. I couldn't risk running too low, lest I would find myself in an impossible situation. This unfortunately sapped much of the fun out of the game.
Sure, one can always play on "Easy", but that's not really my point. I'm not after easy battles and push-overs. I appreciate that battles matter, and the difficulty on Normal was well aligned and much satisfactory. But resource starvation, and specifically the threat of cursed saves, doesn't really have a place in 20 hour long games. I ended up switching to Easy, not relly enjoying the fact that now, no battle really mattered (they really didn't - everything died as I looked at it), but at least I could now explore some and afford detours and revisits without serious worry. It worked as a hotfix, but felt like a "less bad" solution.
Having completed the game, I do suspect that my switch to Easy might have been unnecessary, and that I maybe wouldn't have run out of healing pots either way. That, however, does not make my worry during the game less real. If I could wish, in future games in this series, do not limit the player's ability to recover from battles. Let us be able to visit, explore, revisit and take our time, even if we enjoy battles that matter. If players will have to grind for herbs to achieve this, then so be it. But please don't set a hard limit. The worry to run out and end up in an impossible situation shouldn't be a part of an otherwise fantastic adventure game.
I will agree partly, Normal was harder than I was expecting, and in some situations, I ran from battles as often as I could. However… that was part of the challenge heh. Also I’m not sure what gave you the impression you could only create one full health potion per story day, I was making as much as I could when possible. Admittedly near the end of the game, I was buying potions from the town shop as I was low on resources to create enough to keep myself going.
It was the scarcity of herbs. One Full Health potion required 3 pieces of 2 herbs, of which is was only possible to pick 3 per day. (It cost 2 of each to make a Hi Potion, and then another one of each to make a Full Health potion out of that)
And money was pretty scarce too, though I admit I had enough for several potions. As I said, it do think my resources would have sufficed in the end, BUT of that, I had no idea while I was playing. So the sense of confinement and fear to paint myself into a corner and end up with a cursed save was very much there, and is did tear very much at the fun of the game. I felt I didn't want to explore, and as I used 2 or 3 potions in a dungeon near the end, I was constantly worried that I'd end up standing before the final battle with too few potions, having to replay the entire game.
In-game worries is one thing. But this was a game-save technical issue, similar to the worry of a crippling bug. Lifting the forced limitations of healing wouldn't have made the game worse; it would have made it much more entertaining.
I guess as soon as I discovered the herb garden, and anywhere that spawned herbs per day, I made sure to try and go there every day to stock up and get reserves. But even then I did run a bit low and used some of the spare cash I had buying full health potions from the shop in the town.
Yep. The herb garden spawned 3 each of the necessary herbs, but a Full Health potion required all 3. In some dungeons at the end, I needed way more than 1 potion to keep up. This ended up stressing me pretty much, worrying that I would run out and end up in a hopeless situation.
Hello.
I made a lot of progress - well I think - since my last call for help. I'm stuck in the Forgotten glade. Ember said she will clean the clearing. I suppose using a firebomb spell, but where?
Edit: found the answer on a Youtube video. And I just finished it. It took me around 15 hours to finish on easy skill. A really cool game. Can't wait to see Briley's adventure part 2.
What did you do? Besides to find the youtube video?
I just followed it. Nothing less, nothing more.
Hey there. I was playing this beautiful game on VICE 3.5 and I used to save to cart all the time, never quitting the emulator.
Today I had to restart Windows, I quit cleanly but, upon restart, there wasn't any save game on the cart slot.
I lost 8 hours of progress, I had just met/saved Alyssa and was going to search for her grimoire. Any chance that anybody has got a save game file I can use to get back to that point, more or less? If so, please contact me. Thanks in advance. Mick
I recently experienced something similar on a real Easyflash cartridge. The game did report that the save did fail, when trying again, the game did crash. Luckily I made a backup on floppy, but still, a few hours of gameplay are lost.
Haven't you possibly got a save game to share? I don't even know in which format.
I have uploaded my savegame here: http://www.freepascal.org/~daniel/brileysave.zip
Brilliant! I don't know how to thank you. You better choose the material for the statue I''ll build in your honour :P
By the way, you should upgrade to Vice 3.6 which was released on xmas 2021.
https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io/
And release notes: https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io/NEWS
I played and finish the game on Vice 3.6. It could help for cartridge management.
Noted, and done. Thank you very much. The snapshot function seems to work better now as well.
It is working better indeed. Just look at all the features added or made better during 3.6 development time. You'll be surprised :D
Congratulations to the VICE team then :)
Just curious. For many hours now, a witch in Chaeton has asked me for some Wild Shroom, and I'm worrying that I've missed something, because I haven't ever found one. Many hours ago, I believe I had an other type of Shroom, but that was found (IIRC) in some treasure chest.
Just wondering if I just have to await finding the Wild Shroom, or if that can be harvested somewhere I've missed.
Have you visited the Forest Cottage? You'll find them around there.
Hah, the one place I had left to look at. I had been in all the forests, in the plains, and I was just about to go to the forest.
Thanks, but geez... sometimes I feel I should search more thoroughly before I ask. Thanks again!
Thanks! I was looking for it too. Now I have to make my way into Forest caverns... Looks like I'll get my bottom kicked there.
How are the face portraits so detailed?? I didn't know the C64 could do that resolution...
hey
I saw around half a year ago 180 days ago you got a barbarian pixel art from Sven Idle, I was hoping to use it but I have no money can I get a copy from you?
hey
I saw around half a year ago 180 days ago you got a barbarian pixel art from Sven Idle, I was hoping to use it but I have no money can I get a copy from you?
They have put several one-colour sprites onto each other. It's an old trick you can use if you have sprites to spare.
I use 6 hires sprites stacked on top of each other. I have a custom sprite editor that can edit this way.
That is so cool. Thanks guys, I wasn't aware of this technique! The portraits have really good artwork as well as detail.
Hi
I must admitt I need a little bit of assistance got a stuck, ALyssa wants to test her fire resu spell, and Smokey remindes Branwen says somewhere it at a place that are filles with stones, tryied a lof of stoney places I can find includeing sothpern plains but none of them seems proper. I see there are some stonehedge thing on the transport map but dosent have acces to that yet.
thanks in advance.
Try looking above Branwen's home...
I got fooled by this as well: I had tried those stones, somehow it didn't work, then I spent several hours searching elsewhere and finally did resort to a Youtube video to see that it really were those stones near Branwen's house. Tried them again, and yes!
Wow that was fast answered thx alot.
Hello.
I'm stuck in Chaeton, getting killed by Veritas guards, while trying to find a place to hide.
Any tip? Thanks!
I did use a lot of magic while finding the place to hide. I had a charged amulet and did wear an air shield. The Veritas were no match against the many "iceball" and "windstorm" spell I was firing at them.
Thanks. It's really helpful. I forgot to charge my amulet... Well, I have older saved games that can help here!
Thanks. I'm now getting arrested by Lindara in Chaeton. I wonder how I can get out of here...
Carefully explore every part of the house...
Well. Looks like I was blind here... :D
Thanks for the tip. I finished the stone quest and I find it slightly simpler than the one in Chaeton...
Oh oh I think I'm in trouble Sarah :( I split the two grimoires before going to Nineve's barrow for the second time - I wanted to make some more health potions... in splitting them, Briley's only got the 1st in her inventory. So in the barrow I've got the 1st and 3rd... am I meant to have all three to escape?? If so... I'm a bit stuck :( :( (loving the game btw :) :)
You don't need the 2nd or 3rd grimoire to escape...
thanks !!! 😁
Hello.
I'm looking for some help. I'm stuck while searching for Ayleth's bangle. I nearly look everywhere and did not see it.
Any hint? Thanks!
Have you searched near the river?
Well, I found the bangle one hour right after asking... Search and you will find. Thanks anyway for your answer. I'm trying to make your game last. I don't want to finish it too soon... I'm playing as easy skill - this is my first Japanese RPG - to enjoy it.
My final word? When you will release part 2, you can count on me to play it.
very good
Congratulations for being mentioned in the C64 article in La Repubblica. It doesn't happen daily that the C64 games are noted by mainstream newspapers.
What other hardware could this run from? ie. UII+, EasyFlash, etc? Is it possible to build my own cartridge? For example, OpenCart or other open project out there?
Kung Fu Flash and Sidekick are two more options to run the game. You can definitely build your own Easyflash cartridge, I did so.
Hmm....that sidekick looks interesting.... Haven't heard of that project. What's easier to build, EasyFlash or Sidekick64? SK64 looks more versatile.
Easyflash is way easier to build because it doesn't need SMD components.
Can you point to the gerbers or BOM? I can only find the EF3. I guess the Versa64Cart is not an option?
If you still need them, I have the Easyflash 1.4.1 Gerbers.
A Versacart is waayyyy too basic for this game, notably it lacks the required storage capacity, has no bank switching and mp ability to save games on cart.
I managed to create gerbers from an Eagle file
A really great game. I was not a great Zelda-like game, but this game changed my mind. I'm stuck searching the Mage clearing. Smokey left me in order to get some infos. I hope it will be back soon.
Looks like anytime soon some hint book will be published :)
Love the game! Thank you for your great work, already looking forward to the sequel <3
If you still plan further updates, I spotted one little typo: when Roana is about to pick her familiar and Smokey talks about picking his human, he say "in the sheler"... just one t short :)
Hi! Thanx for an awsome game Sarah. I’m stuck and don’t Knowles how to kill the dark spirit in the Woods?
You don't. Consider a different solution to the problem...
Thx for the answer. Btw, i’ve legalt bought the game. Well worth The money.
Bought the game today. Really enjoy it so far on original hardware with EasyFlash. Like a few other people who posted here; I also got a 10 year old daughter, and she was put under as spell watching me play, begging me to keep going. Must have been the cats lol. Fantastic work Sarah. Hope we will see more from you for the c64 in the future :)