The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

The gist of the response I got from the guy in charge of DynRPG is that he won't be looking into the bugs I reported anytime soon due to being busy with other projects. That's certainly understandable, nobody has a right to demand work be done on something that was provided for free in the first place. In the meantime, I've had to back-burner the monster map movement aspect of Forgotten Gates and work on other systems.

The first thing I got done was adding a "Look" skill to all heroes. Using Look on a monster causes most of their stats to be displayed in a series of message windows, including their susceptibility to the game's weapon and elemental types and status conditions. This turned out more difficult than anticipated because a limitation in my DynParams plugin I'd forgotten about: when it was used on a Message command, it could only overwrite the first line of the message, due to a peculiarity in how Message commands are handled internally. :/a This prompted me to look into the matter more seriously than I had back when I wrote the plugin, and I eventually was able to work out how to get around it. I ended up implementing the improved message-overwriting in my special FG_Battle plugin so that I could write the data directly from there instead of somehow putting it into RM2K3 scripting (about the only way to do that is the awkward method of renaming heroes that aren't actually used and then referencing those names). I did take the time to update DynParams itself as well, though.

Next I created a system for having defeated enemies drop resource-restoring power-ups (hearts and magic jars). I mentioned in a design blog post about mana restoration a while ago that I intended to give this a try. At first I tried to implement the drops as extra battle effects that happen immediately after the battle animation and damage is applied to the monster, but this proved ticklish because it was hard to determine whether an action was going to KO a monster, especially when multiple effects (i.e. separate damage from dual-wielded weapons) is involved. In the end I went for the much simpler method of recording which monsters are present before each action, then doing a special check after the action is entirely played out to see which monsters were defeated and subsequently deciding which power-up to drop. It's hard to say how effective the drops are at the intended goal of allowing a skilled player to stay more or less afloat against the indefinitely-long ravages of various dungeons, but it sure feels good to see them pop up and cause some restoration numbers on your heroes. :)

Finally, I reworked the system that sets up monster groups to have variations within a group instead of rigidly defining each monster in the group. I intend to go into more detail about that in a design post following this progress report post.

...And then, while I was working on putting together a new release of the demo, I discovered a bug in DynWardrobe. X) See, I noticed that I had two identical BattleCharSet image files, Shield.png and Shields.png, and I figured that was something to tighten up. So I went into my Animation2s in the editor and set all the references to Shield.png to Shields.png...but when I did that, the game started crashing with an error message about memory read access in DynWardrobe. Well that's mighty weird, right? o.O A bug caused by a one-character difference in the file names? Well, after much headscratching, I finally figured out that it wasn't the name per se, it was the fact that the names were now consistent after my fix. Turns out DynWardrobe had a subtle bug wherein if the file name used for the last animation in an Animation2 set is the same as for the first animation in the next Animation2 set used, it will skip loading the image and the crash occurs. So I fixed that, updated DynWardrobe, and still managed to release a new version of the Forgotten Gates demo a few days before the end of the month. Phew!