Final Fantasy Discovery

FFD has officially hit the ONE MILLION views mark here at RMN recently! Really humbled by that! I always knew we were making a kick-ass game, but fan-games usually don't hold that distinction, and I'm happy you guys have stuck around for so long!

There's tons of work to be done on FFD (like, actually tons), but it's so close to being at the point where we can quickly build a lot of the game world. Back to work for me. Thank you again!

Noctis Arrives
As I've gone over many times, certain characters from mainstream FF games can be permanently unlocked for use in FFD. They have no effect on the story, but can be used at any time once they are unlocked (unless the story prevents changes to the player party). We have decided that three characters from each Final Fantasy game are to be included. Noctis arrives as the first of three FFXV characters to be unlocked via the Arrowny Gallery.

Noctis' Paradigm, Power of Kings, allows him to freely change his Limit Break to any Shared Limit Break the player has. Normally, unlockable guest characters can only use their one unique Limit Break, unlike main party members, who can use different unique Limit Breaks, and Shared Limit Breaks.

Game Balance
How to handle stat increases in this project is something that has always driven me sort of mad. But, in the end, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So we're going to dial it back a bit, putting off-hand, head, and body armor back into the game. We're also reviving Materia, which were once a part of the game, and allowing up to four per character to be equipped. They can simply increase stats, award usable abilities, or a combination of both. Paradigms sort of work the same way, except they are unique to each character and can only be used one at a time.

Additionally, all percentage-based increases in stats have been changed to be additive, rather than multiplicative and will only affect the base value of the stat.

Characters can now equip up to two Relics, rather than three, to compensate for Materia being introduced once more.

Stat limits have been increased from the former limit of 255 to 9999. Nobody will ever get that high, of course, but you can definitely break 1000 on some characters in some stats. Damage calculations for all attacks, spells, etc. have been adjusted to reflect the changes made here. Maximum level per character has been reduced, to level 100, instead of 255. We probably could have left that alone, but 255 seemed way too high, given the other changes.

Other Notes
Having more equippable gear allows us to have a much larger pool of rewards for quests, mark hunts, mini-games, and the battle arena. The status screen you see above has also been remade from scratch to contain all of the information it needs to (note: Noctis' artwork looking vastly different than other characters is intentional as of this posting; we will update it with artwork more in line with everyone else's when we can).

Up until now, we have only ever referred to our summons in Final Fantasy Discovery as Aeons. A while back, however, we decided to expand upon the number of summons the player was able to obtain... by a LOT. Over the past few days, while writing more storytelling and quest details, we decided to kind of give them different tiers, as well as make use of more of the titles used for summons in other FF games. That is always the goal, after all; to pay tribute everywhere we can!

So, what we have now, instead of just Aeons, is Esperkind as a whole. Esperkind refers to all summons in the game, obtainable by players or not. Aeons would be the lowest ranking tier of Esperkind; still incredibly powerful beings to the normal races of Gaia, but seen as the runts of their own kind in the Feymarch. More powerful than the Aeons are the Eidolons, which act as the nobility, for lack of a better term, in Esperkind society. When players are able to visit the Feymarch, this will be readily apparent.

The rulers of the Feymarch are the Primals, the third and most powerful tier of Esperkind. They are rarely seen even in the Feymarch. Some of Esperkind that fit into these tiers are as follows:

Espers classified as Aeons

• Ifrit
  
• Shiva
  
• Ramuh
  
• Titan
  
• Sylph
  

Espers classified as Eidolons

• Diabolos
  
• Garuda
  
• Alexander
  
• Valefor
  
• Odin
  

Espers classified as Primals

• Bahamut
  
• Leviathan
  
• Asura
  
• Phoenix
  

Undoubtedly, some Esperkind will be encountered that the player cannot obtain, and will act only as adversaries. Since our last blog post covering summons was a while back, we want to remind you that the number of Aeons, Eidolons and Primals the players CAN obtain is currently at a staggering 56.

We are hoping to put together a video of our introductory sequence and dungeon soon, which is wildly different from what has been publicly seen thus far. Much of the dialogue between Cid and Mid regarding Bahamut will reflect these changes.

In addition, we want to take a moment to let everyone know that Paul is doing OK. We realize we may have caused some worry in our last few postings. Thankfully, he assured us he is doing OK now. However, he is unable to return to continue to develop FFD. He is now, and will always be, an important member of this team, no matter what.

With that said, we are now looking to expand our team. We are not specifically looking only for a new artist at the moment, although we would definitely welcome one under the same terms that Paul and Avee agreed to (which are pretty simple terms, our artists get paid ^_^).

Anyone who has an interest in helping to develop this project full time is welcome to speak to me, or Avee. Whatever your skill set is, more hands are always better than just ours, so drop us a line to help get FFD released faster! Plus, you know, you get to play the game while it gets made, which is pretty cool, no?

PAUL'S ABSENCE
This is something I fought with myself about mentioning for a long while now. Paul hasn't been in contact with Avee or I for almost half a year now. However, I want people following this project to understand that he didn't just vanish one day out of the blue. Technically. There was a reason for it, and it had nothing to do with the project. It was a personal reason, and it's not something I will divulge as it is not my place to do so. I simply mention it so people do not read this and say "what a jerk" or "hey, what happened to the artist?" As far as I know, nothing happened. I continue to hope nothing happened.

I am fully open to Paul's return, whenever that can happen, and I really hope it does. But, for now, in the best interests of completing this project, we will have to move on without him for the time being. Luckily for us, Paul is an extremely thorough kind of guy (seriously, work ethic is his mutant power), and he left us with tons of notes to work with. With that said, I'd like to talk about the latest batch of major development changes!

STAT PROGRESSION
Stat progression is something I've struggled with during development so much. What's the best way to make your party members stronger? Leveling up? Buying stat points? Earning stat points? FFVI's supplemental stat growth via Espers? FFX's Sphere Grid?!

How it currently works is that characters equip a Focus, and that focus awards growth to a stat or stats at each level up. Leveling up without a Focus doesn't raise anything except the amount of damage the character deals (as character level is factored into most damage formulae). It works. However, players may forget to swap Focus items regularly or find constantly equipping Focus items tedious.

So I'm getting rid of those. While it was kind of cool to be equipping the soul of a famous FF character in order to better your party's stats, it suffered from being annoying to manage for players and outliving it's usefulness once a character reached the level cap.

I think I've found a viable replacement. A talented fellow who simply goes by the name "V" created a script for stat progression back in 2013, that replaces traditional level-ups with an ability point system. However, this system also allows players to place emphasis on certain stats, per character. For example, spending a point on Max HP growth for Cid might increase his Max HP by 100, but doing the same for Beclem would increase his Max HP by 300.

In this way, it's possible to build your characters up the way you want. There are some tweaks neccessary to have this script work in tandem with other systems in place in the game, not the least of which is addressing the level cap. Only allowing characters to level to 99 is no longer an option. When I have completed updating the script, I will gladly show it in action.

So, to recap, Focus items are gone, players can freely modify their stats upon leveling up without the issue of navigating a giant grid (FFX, I'm looking at you), and we'll have something to show for it real soon.

LIMIT BREAKS
In my continuing quest throughout development of FFD to include features and functions from nearly all released FF games, I have decided to change how Limit Breaks function. While there's nothing wrong with how they functioned in FF7, later FF game releases have updated the old ways, for the better, in my opinion.

That's why I've gone ahead and adopted the Final Fantasy Record Keeper method. In that game (which you should all try, it's kinda good), Limit Breaks are instead called "Soul Breaks" and allow a character to freely equip which ability they'd like to take into battle. Each one uses up one to three bars of their gauge, with the more powerful Soul Breaks using up a larger charge.

In FFRK, the method to obtaining new Soul Breaks falls victim to the "please spend money on this game for a super low chance to get cool stuff" business strategy, by paying in-game currency (bought with real world currency) to randomly draw one piece of equipment, which MIGHT contain a Soul Break. We're obviously not going to do that because that's ridiculous.

Instead, you'll find your new Limit Breaks the way you find everything else in FFD: by completing side-quests, the Coliseum, Battle Arena, laying around in someone's dresser in their house, etc.

To better help this new system of Limit Breaks, each are categorized in one of two ways: Unique to a specific party member, or Shared, meaning anyone can equip and use it. This allows more versatility in characters' ability sets. Each character will also have five unique Limit Breaks. The number of shared Limit Breaks, at current time, is undecided. But, of course, here's a preview of some of them, using Cid as an example. The number in parenthesis denotes the number of Limit Break charges required to use it.

Unique Limit Breaks (Cid)
(1) Slice & Dice: Deals six hits of physical damage to a single target.
(1) Magitek Bomb: Deals three hits of magick damage to all targets.
(1) Machina Breakdown: Instantly destroys a mechanical target.
(2) ???
(3) ???

Shared Limit Breaks
(1) Renewing Cure: Restores a moderate amount of HP to all allies and applies Regen.
(2) Sheltron: Avoid the next incoming physical attack, and counterattack it.
(1) Swiftcast: For a brief time, charge times for magick spells are reduced by 50%.
(1) Esunaga: Cures all negative status conditions affecting the entire party.



Just to note, special guest characters unlocked via the Arrowny Gallery will not be able to change their Limit Breaks.

But wait, there's more! Unique Limit Breaks can be permanently learned! With this, players will be able to leave their Limit Break slot open for a Shared Limit Break, once they've dedicated themselves enough to permanently learning all of their Unique Limit Breaks. Progress on learning a Unique Limit Break will be saved when swapping out Limit Breaks, so you don't need to keep the Limit Break equipped until it's learned. Feel free to swap them out!

Just a quick note that I will be traveling to London tonight and will be gone until Oct. 9th. As far as development, Aver is super close to finishing up the third series of original character sets for the game bringing the total number of unique sprites to somewhere in the neighborhood of 150!

Carwen's maps have all been completed and coded, with the exception of any additions Paul wishes to make when he returns. Two dungeons are next on my list, which should be pretty cool with a few puzzles to figure out. I'm talking about Matoya's Mansion and the Mist Cave, both located in Burmecia.

Come to think of it, once these two dungeons are completed, the initial visit to Burmecia will be almost finished, bringing us a lot closer to our next release. There's still a ton of work to do, however. Mideel, Lodestone Cavern, and Corel all still need to be finished before we can move on to the area which I, and many people watching this project are probably most excited about; The Gold Saucer.

Soon!