Halloween Flop

I meant to make this post a week or two back, but that's how life goes I suppose. We had a lot of fun, influenced by the release day, creating a very late '80s early '90s style promotion for it. It wasn't much of a traditional April Fools' joke, but it certainly was the perfect day for this release.

Things I learned from this project:
-Don't be so stubborn about using community scripts when the game is small and for a contest and a script exists that will do almost EXACTLY what you want with only a little tweaking. The game could have been released for the contest if I had only realised this then. After ignoring this for months, the vast majority of the work was finished in under a week!
-Man, action patterns suck and don't work sometimes. Why is my rating 2 skill being used almost every turn when there's a nice handy rating 6 one? Also, enemy targeting, wth? Why must you heal that frog every single turn, Ashley? It's not even hurt.
-On the flip side, battle events are fun for making the computer have some form of intelligence, aka, don't heal the fully healed you dolts. I could see it being a pain on a large scale though.
-Auto-life is easier to event that I would have expected, huh. Easier than coding it, at least on a small-scale level.
-Balancing battles is actually fun when you make them interesting. Who knew, right?

---

As to the actual announcement part of this blog, I've updated the game with a few minor fixes. Nothing game changing, but just a few things I noticed from the feedback we've received that bugged me enough to want to fix them. What can I say, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. And since we were re-uploading it anyways, I went ahead and changed some really inconsequential stuff like screen transitions.
-Cleaned up the display of the enemy's HP/MP/BP
-Corrected an error that left the enemies with low starting BP; also gave Delila a minimum amount to start with if you finished the previous battle low
-Fixed a logical error in healing AI that made enemies that can heal particularly annoying after losing one ally
-Some slight adjustments to skill balances
-Tried to make the final battle a little harder since it's kind of annoying that due to lack of group synergy, it is not the hardest fight. Curse you lack of synergy for character reasons *shakes fist*
-Various minor typos
-Probably a few minor things that I've forgotten or aren't worth mentioning but they bugged me, so I fixed them

We'll give it another couple weeks and then we'll list off the numerous references in this game, most of which are probably too trivial and specific to be caught.

I also attempted to css, but hahaha... I have no sense of website color design and very little knowledge of css. The former is the larger problem.

So creating even an extremely short RPG in a month is not something I am capable of. Or maybe the lesson is I am not capable of crafting a custom battle system in a month. Haha. Either way, I have a feeling the next contest entry we do won't be an RPG.

But just because we didn't make the deadline doesn't mean this is dropped. We'll finish this up over the next few weeks and post it once it is finished.

To make this post more than just "oh hey we failed the deadline," I'm going to talk a bit about the game. List format because I'm having difficulty forming it into a coherent paragraph format.

-Battles revolve around the classic rock-paper-scissors, only it's astral-undead-magical. Astrals cannot be hit by physical attacks, but are weak to magic. Undead have no means to damage astral beings, but are effective against the living. Magical, which are living, are weak to the powers of the undead, but deal significant damage to astrals. I'm not sure why I felt the need to write out that basic triangle.

-Your party consists of one of each type: Agatha the witch, Delila the vampire, and Bobby the ghost. Each member has six skills, although one is not available at first.

-There are no levels. There is no equipment. There are no items. There are only these skills. Everyone and everything has 100 HP and maybe 100 of their other points if applicable. The idea was to keep it simple for the deadline, but we'll see how balancing goes.

-Each type has a different cost for skills. Magical has a limited MP pool. Undead gains BP points over time. Astral must use their own HP.

-Every battle is a three vs three format, and each one is unique (or at least, the characters are). There is a total of 8 encounters. We were originally going to have some mook battles, but then we designed the "bosses" and they called for companions and well, I don't want to say much more than we had fun. Sidenote: You are healed after every fight. (probably)

-The plan was to have you pick the order your team executes their actions in. I've been flip-flopping on how I want this to work though. The original plan was the order you enter them was the order they executed (you could switch whose action you were selecting somehow). The second plan was to have a window after you had select all the skills where you'd just select the order by clicking them in order (if that makes sense). Also, allies and enemies would take turns. So you'd have all the ally moves and then all the enemy moves.

-On the graphical side of things, to go with the simple approach, we wanted to try our hand at a gameboy-esque color palette. Instead of green, however, we went with orange for a more fitting tone. We also designed everything at 320x240 with 16x16 tiles and doubled it. But that's more Maki's domain, so I don't have much to add except I had fun making the title screen.

I think that's about it for now. I hope that at least somewhat made sense. This probably won't be the best thing Maki and I have put out, with so much focus on a weak area of ours, but I hope it will have charm. The gameplay part is still very much in development (I never even finished coding the battle system T.T), so I will gladly take comments and suggestions.

Unrelated P.S. Wreck-It Ralph is amazing, and you should all go see it.