More 10.1 Progress (Patreon)

Greetings! I’m still working on 10.1, but wanted to share with you where things are. The TL;DR is that I’m wrapping up boss fights and hope to begin writing the scenes (the final part) in the next few days. For more detail, read on!

10.1 Progress

I spent the first 4-5 days since my last report finishing up the icon stuff, but now it’s thankfully done. The little icons weren’t so bad, but making the big icons for the item screen ended up being a lot of work. The asset pack I bought had big images for a lot of things, but for the items it didn’t, I had to upscale and then clean them up by hand so they didn’t have weird pixellated artifacts. Most of the ones I did by hand don’t look that great (especially compared to the ones that came with the asset pack) but they look a lot better than simply scaling up the little icon (which is what would have happened if I hadn’t made the big images.)

Most of the rest of the time was spent working on boss battles. I expect to have that part finished in a few days, then I can move on to the writing and then get this release out!

I spent far more time than I should have on the final boss of the arena, and I’m still not entirely happy with it. More time probably wouldn’t help, though, so I’m just going to call it good. It’s a shaman that summons elementals to help him in the fight. Most of the elementals don’t do anything directly, but they give him additional abilities, so it’s in your interest to destroy them. It’s thus an “add fight,” which I discovered doesn’t work all that well when you have a party of 3 in which only 2 people deal appreciable damage. Still, I think it’ll be fun (or at least not too bad.)

Features

A combat “fast forward” - that skips/speeds up the animations, movement and such in battle - was on my list of things to implement, but unfortunately I’m going to have to leave it for a future release. None of the plugins I’ve found work properly with this game - they occasionally cause crashes, and when they don’t, they produce effects that are wildly (sometimes hilariously) inaccurate. For instance, when I was testing one in the Dranax fight, he ended up healing Ana for 3k+ instead of damaging her for several hundred!

Not really sure what the problem is, but I think it’s related to all the code snippets I use in states/abilities/etc. I know the combat seems pretty simplistic, but there’s actually a lot going on under the hood most of the time, and these “fast forward” plugins seem to be made for bog-standard RPGM combat. I’ll probably end up modifying one of the existing plugins, but that involves 3 steps:

1. Figuring out how the existing plugin does what it does
2. Figuring out why that doesn’t work in this game
3. Figuring out how to make it work

I can already tell this is going to be a bit of a project, and I don’t want to delay the release to do it, so I’ve decided to do it in a future release. I do plan on implementing it eventually, though!

I did, however, implement a screen that lets you find out about states while in battle. It only tells you about your states, not the boss', but this is intentional. The description will also tell you if a state is curable (with Alex’s Cure spell), since I’ve gotten the impression some folks don’t realize some states are. You access it via the status command, which is on the same page as “fight/escape”, meaning you’ll have to press esc/cancel to access it. It’s kinda out of the way, but as it’s something you probably won’t use often, I didn’t want it to have too prominent a place in the UI.

I tried going the tooltip route instead of making a separate screen, but found the tooltips pretty distracting. I also design this game to be played with a keyboard, and putting in a feature that required mouse input seemed kinda counterintuitive.

Conclusion

That’s where I am right now. I still think I’ll have it out before the end of the month. Once the boss battles are wrapped up, I’ll have a few small scenes to write, and that’s it. I’ll keep you posted - thank you for your support!