Trail of the Interloper

Futch-and-Bright. I forgot to add more detail tiles and torches into Killer's Pit. ;_;

*Edit: Download updated. Sorry about that!

In the process of playtesting, I found some curious things. One is that the spell Hurricane was set to be a single-target spell, as opposed to targeting all opponents. That's easy to fix. The one that has my head scratching is that battle BGMs are not necessarily what they are supposed to be.

So, I've a parallel process on each map that sets the battle BGM to be the same as the map's regualr BGM, then flips a switch to start the encounter cancel processing. When I perform a map transition activated on player touch, part of that processing deactivates the switch, and the BGM changes as it should. However, if the map transfer occurs because the player has gotten to an area's edge on the overworld map, the switch is still deactivated, but, the battle BGM is retained from the previous area. The check for being at the area's edge is also a parallel process, so it might be possible that the process that sets the battle BGM is still referring to the old map, rather than the new map.

My mind turns to how A Half-n-Half Affair might have handled this, but, I might also want to refer to Heaven's Gate to see what it did.

*Edit: Well, from what I can tell, the maps in Heaven's Gate that had map-edge checks generally called the same music anyway. A Half-n-Half Afair did it through a parallel process that erased itself.

While I could go the same route as A Half-n-Half Affair, I came up with a different solution. I might need to test it a bit more, but, the general premise is that the parallel process that deals with cancelling encounters will reset if the battle BGM is not the same as map's BGM.

There are also actions players can take to get a "free" encounter cancel. Opening chests already had that functionality, as did some area transitions. However, I noticed that fighting a boss did not reset the encounter timer, and ended up fighting a regular encounter pretty much right after the boss. Which doesn't sound right at all!

The latest round of playtesting have more or less concluded. I've still about ten or so areas to map before the next release. I don't really have a schedule for when that would be, but, given that mapping is my least favorite tasks of gammak, it might be a while yet.

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Quick update on what's left to map:
-Silvershire Hold
-Haunt of the Sleeping Dragon
-D4
-Mythril Tunnels
-A4
-Valenrish Palace

This might not sound like much, but, it's something of a battle to sit myself down for a mapping session. Which makes me kinda relieved I'm not participating in Mapdaptation! For what it's worth, I've been feeling a particular amount of pressure to get things done when there technically isn't any? I suppose some of that is because my birthday favorite release period (May 20th) is next week, and the likelihood of me having a release then is not looking good. Unless I rush/crunch it, of course.

Okay, I've pretty much got the mapping done. I'll want to do a bit of playtesting on my end to see how the game flows before go time. In previous playtesting sessions, I've kinda felt that leveling up is too slow. Equipment and item availability in stores are certainly going to be modified, as currently, everything is available from the start. I also want to figure out at what point players should/could obtain the ability to fast travel because it wouldn't be a "Marrend game" without yea goode olde Teleport Orb, or like function.