Final Fantasy Discovery

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!