The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

This month's progress has been mostly bug fixes and filling in little details in the combat plugin. The biggest occurrence was that I happened across a peculiar bug, not in my own plugin, but in DynRPG itself, or maybe RM2K3. A certain data value indicating what type of action a battler just took was being changed if an actor used a skill that targets themself and uses up more than half of their remaining MP. It took me quite a while to narrow down what was going on, and when I did I had to update the DynBattleChoices plugin to work around this quirk.

I also added code to handle the special case of Kajir's Chakra status conditions, which can be turned on and off by the player's skill uses. Relatedly, I made a little design change to buffs and debuffs, including the aforementioned Chakra statuses. Remember how in the character spotlight for Kajir, I mentioned how Kajir's chakra statuses when piled together might be too powerful because they'd quadruple most of his stats? And that's not even considering what would happen if somebody threw a different buff on him, making a stat EIGHT TIMES what it started as! Well, recently it occurred to me that since I've entirely absorbed all combat calculations, including even ATB gauge workings, into my combat plugin, I don't have to follow RM2K3's hard-coded method of statuses that double or half stats. Instead, I switched it to adding or subtracting 50% of the base stat. That way, buffs and debuffs still cancel each other out exactly, but buffs piled onto each other, while still significantly advantageous, don't cause exponential increase of stats. It also makes a single buff significantly less valuable though, which I'll have to watch out for. Maybe I'll have to decrease the mana cost of buffs.