Breath of Fire 0

It occured to me the other day that I was up all night looking up characteristics of various edible fish as well as a long list of French interjections. And why would anybody ever do that, if not to make a Breath of Fire game?

It's been about a month since I announced the comeback of this project. I was hoping I'd have a new, improved demo out by the end of July, but some things take a longer time than expected. I have not been outrageously lazy. Here's some of what I've been working on:

* Readjusting enemy stats - Mostly defense was too high across the board, the difficulty jump from area to area was too high, and I increased gold drops because equipment is expensive.
* Readjusting EXP curves - in the demo you level up much too quickly, even if you just fight the random encounters without seeking to grind.
* Readjusting encounter rates - it may be oldschool, it may be a BoF game, but the RNG has not smiled on us. A noticeable decrease in random encounters makes battles more welcome, I find.
* Fixing up some NPC sprites even if they were just one pixel off.
* Fixing critical hit rates because I had the wrong idea on how that stuff works.

And that's all just tinkering with the already existing material. There's more that's totally new.

* Finalized two cities immediately after the end of the demo.
* Finalized the volcano dungeon - chests, monsters, the boss, everything.
* Started and completed a really long cave tunnel with some optional block pushing puzzles.
* Made new monster graphics - some have been posted here.
* Cutscenes! One event is a particularly big plot device.

Right now I'm working on the last town of the starting continent, and this is where the fishing system is introduced! I won't boast about it, however I'm confident that it will be slightly more interactive than the fishing in BoF1. Here's how it works right now:
There are three tiers of rods. Each tier lets you catch three types of fish, plus the three from the previous tier at a higher capture rate. You can attempt to catch any fish with any one of three types of bait, however each fish will have a different rate of capture depending on the bait. The highest tier of fish will require higher quality, more expensive bait. Variables will keep track of how many of each fish you catch and also how many in total.

I may go totally crazy and add another one or two tiers of rods and maybe one more tier of bait, but that's for much later. I still need to build cities, dungeons and more first. And with 9 types of fish, that's more than BoF2 had.

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Edit: The improved demo is out. It's far from the full game, but it is essentially the whole first act of three, and hopefully it has fixed most if not all issues the previous demo had.
A special shoutout to Anthony D. for making a midi of the Breath of Fire 2 fishing music!