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Blog 6: Happy New Year!

  • jedahxii
  • 01/03/2014 12:28 PM
  • 537 views
Hey y'all. I haven't done one of these for a while so I thought I'd go ahead and talk briefly about some things that are going on, and a few small (I think neat) changes to the game which I thought were neat and add a teensy bit of depth.

Anyways, I'd like to wish y'all a happy new year and I hope you had a lovely holiday. Great news, my liver made it through.

With that aside now I'll talk about some thing that are being implemented or changed! First big change is that I re-mapped the world map. By re-map I sort of mean tree-map (note: that was a pun.) Basically while initially I tacked the trees on the thing and was like "Yeah that works" I recently came out of my delusional state of believing giant-ass world trees to be all right. With that being said, I took the opportunity to remove a ton of events off the world map and improve lag immensely while traversing it. I know, most of you may not have noticed the performance as I'm sure you're all running super computers, but it was a tad laggy for some machines and there was good reason for that. You see, in my infinite wisdom when I initially mapped it I pretty much lazily used the wrong sort of tileset and ended up with like 500 events running on it, not to mention the parallel processes for variable checking and things of that nature. You're probably thinking to yourself that I'm an idiot, and if so I'm going to let it slide this time. Was hella' dumb. So, yeah, went from like 500 to 13. That's a 97% decrease. It's astounding how dumb you have to be if you can reduce the size of something by 97% and have the same effect. It'd be like if the original iPod was the size of a car and then they came out with the Nano right after. Ok, I'm done talking about that now ha ha.

Second thing I'd like to chat about briefly are some things regarding the battle system and gameplay. The change to the battle system is the implementation of "GUTS." For those of you unfamiliar with said system, it was an intangible number in Breath of Fire which could be randomly activated when a character's HP dropped to zero, ultimately reviving them with a small amount of health and reducing the GUTS number by a certain amount whenever activated. Think of it like an auto life without having to cast auto life. Which is also in the game to a small extent, but that's besides the point as like one person has an ability that applies it and it's not readily available. The reason for this is that I like to give second chances. Nah I'm kidding, I think it just adds to the drama a small bit. Like you think you're going to get mopped up and then *ZING* you've got a chance! I know what you're thinking, "But what if the enemy is faster than you and they just kill you again?" Excellent question, two part answer. Firstly, whenever GUTS activates I'm putting a one turn buff onto a character that will allow them to act first. Secondly, any time a recovery item is used the system prioritizes that anyway. Basically gets like a huge CT bonus. So unless you're just mashing the enter button like a stooge the general idea of strategy comes into play here. If you see the enemy has like one hit left and you want to go balls-to-the-wall you can totally do so. Or you can play it safe and heal. Is it new? Not especially. Have I seen it that often in RPGs? Nah.

Onto the other change to general gameplay, will be a challenge system of sorts. I was mulling over the idea of achievements initially, unsure of whether I wanted to implement them. I may still do it as the script is all ready wired in and it would just be a matter of implementation, but with that in mind I started to think about Tales of Vesperia. The 'Battle Trophies' in that game gave me an idea. Why not put those in? While I strive to give my boss fights unique mechanics that make them more difficult, why not make it a challenge to out-smart or out-muscle me? Ha ha basically I'll give you an example. The first boss, for instance. Oh, you know, I should put this in spoilers just in case.

The boss of Liet Forest, The Alpha, has two wolves with it when the battle initially begins. With the use of the 'Bait' item you can distract the boss's minions normally. However, if the boss is not distracted he will use a self buff and then summon another wolf! This can happen once for each wolf, with him summoning a replacement and applying a buff to himself. A 'Battle Trophy' would be earned by defeating all of the wolves and never using the 'Bait' item. It adds a small amount more challenge to the battle, much like it did in Vesperia (I'd clearly like to state that I am not attempting to make a game nearly as excellent as that, unless Namco wants to give me large amount of cash and a Japanese staff.)


So, yeah. That's the plan at the moment. I'm always looking for input/comments/suggestions so feel free to drop me a message if you are feeling chatty. And as a final note which I will probably (eventually) create a second blog post for is that I'm looking for more beta testers.

TL;DR - Re-mapped world map, GUTS, Battle Trophies (Challenges).

Hope y'all collectively have a lovely weekend!

~JedahXII