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Announcement

v1.02 Bug Fixes

Soma Spirits v1.02 is now available for download. This update addresses the following bugs:

- You can now properly re-enter the ice palace if you left in the World of Sorrow.
- You can now properly re-enter the haunted house if you left in the World of Sorrow.
- You can now leave the Mysterious Forest if, for whatever reason, you decided to re-enter it after clearing it.
- Passability issue with some wall tiles in Box World.
- Passability issue in Freezing Fjord.
- Minor text errors
- Additional lines of dialogue if you approach the ice palace boss under certain circumstances to make those circumstances less misleading.
- Killing an enemy and then running away will no longer make that enemy re-appear briefly as you escape. (Special thanks to Red_Nova for helping to solve this!)
- You can now cancel out of the mine elevator menu.

Version 1.0 and 1.01 save files should transfer over just fine.

Announcement

Version 1.01 Bug Fixes

Soma Spirits has been updated to version 1.01, which fixes a few minor (and one major) bug. The patch notes are as follows:

Major

- The final boss of Ending 2 should now trigger correctly.

Minor

- Venom Ring's description should now be correct.
- Duo Blade was granting +5 Force when it was never meant to.
- Fixed some stray autoshadows.
- Some dialogue in Phantasmal Chasm that was misleading has been fixed.
- Two monster sprites in Freezing Fjord (Heart side) and Box World (Heart side) didn't adhere to their patrol routes and wandered anywhere.

1.0 saves should work just fine. Copy them into the new folder to continue using them.

Announcement

IT'S HERE! Soma Spirits is released!

A download approaches!

So I'll be completely upfront with everyone. Soma Spirits is a game that is hard to describe at face value. I could, in theory, make a list of features and gameplay mechanics that I would try to sell you on. But I’m not a believer that Soma Spirits is the type of game that can be understood as a commodity, as much as it is an experience.

I think it’s the type of game that takes a lot of inspiration from the types of scenarios that I faced growing up. Making video games is one of the ways I want to tell stories: stories that come from the heart and the soul. I guess I just want to be understood, and out of everything I do in life, making video games is what I want to be remembered for.

Soma Spirits is something of a reflection of how I see the world. How there are two different people in each and every one of us. How there are two sides to every story. How nothing is truly binary, or as black and white as people tend to make them. How every single one of us has a horrible side that you can either fight to overcome, or embrace in its terror by letting others exploit it. It’s a game about never taking anything at face value and thinking about the moral implications about the decisions you make.

But most importantly, Soma Spirits is about two brothers who have the ability to forge their own fates. And you’re the one who will guide them, much like you guide yourselves.

I cannot count how many hours I’ve poured into this project… Hundreds at the very least. Hundreds of hours meticulously crafting this game over the past year into the best that it can be. It’s not perfect but if you enjoy story-driven RPGs, please consider giving this a go. And no matter which of the game’s five endings you find yourselves in, I hope you’ll enjoy what there is to see over the game’s 3-5 hour run time.

There is a True Ending of course. And it shouldn’t be hard to find if you pay attention to the game’s themes.

None of this would have been possible without the support of my friends. And I want to give an especially huge thanks to SpecialAgentApe, who’s music has truly brought this project to life. Without him, Soma Spirits would have never happened.

Thank you, everyone. I wish you all the best in your journey through Soma.


Progress Report

We're in Beta!

Today marks a momentous occasion for the development of Soma Spirits. As of last night, the game and all five of its paths and endings are playable from start to finish. We are now (very safely and probably very far) in the beta phase of development!

It has been almost a year since I started the development of Soma Spirits and I feel a great amount of relief having reached this huge milestone. But I'll spare the emotion for the time being because I'm sure the question on your mind is: What is there left to do before release? Let's see...

- Change all the treasure chests' self switches to regular switches so that they reset upon starting a New Game+.
- Make sure New Game+ completely works and that there's no self switches left over from early development.
- Playtest THOROUGHLY.
- Bug test, dialogue check, make sure nothing is broken and typos/grammatical errors are at a minimum.
- Tie up some loose odds and ends, add a bit of polish to certain areas.
- Address any combat balance issues. Which at the moment, there are very few.
- Send the game off to playtesters. Have them rip the game apart send feedback.
- Agent Ape will make music/sound adjustments as needed. (Please give him a round of applause. Seriously.)

Things are getting very close to completion. Hang tight a little bit longer! :D

Miscellaneous

The Power of Live Demos - What's Good and What's Changing

I've learned recently that putting a demo out on the internet is only going to get your so far. I was fortunate enough to bring a demo of the second area of Soma Spirits to the very fun Camp Fangamer in Tucson, Arizona and found that seeing people play the game in person puts things into such a different perspective.

About ten people played the game and response was overall very positive, which was a huge relief for me and instilled a newfound confidence in this project. The feedback for the game's music and art style was very positive and Agent Ape and I are both glad that the sense of charm that I'm going for really hit home with players.

Seeing players of different skills levels go through Box World, the game's second area, gave a lot of insight into what kinds of things I need to change.

Encounter Frequency - Several players felt that combat was too frequent, and I'm inclined to agree. Especially since the demo took place in a dungeon where there were a lot of "choke points"where players were unable to dodge the on-screen encounters, I may have to look at reducing the number of encounter events or change it so that encounters only respawn when you change maps, and not when you shift between the two worlds. Even I felt bogged down seeing players get forced into encounters as much as they did. Regardless of what I decide to do, encounters need to be less frequent.

Targeting enemies
A minor thing I had been meaning to change for a while now. The Enemy Target window was fashioned as 1-column vertical window, whereas the enemies onscreen were arranged horizontally. One player commented that he instinctively was pressing left and right, looking at the monsters rather than the UI. So the target window has been changed to be horizontal with 3 columns:



Clarity
Some clarity issues really popped up in the demo, particularly at the end of the demo when you make that chapter's major choice. A couple of people weren't sure that they had made the decision until they crossed the point of no return. After all, it's not a simple Yes/No answer that branches the story, so I should probably look at places where things are too vague.

All in all, seeing people play the game live was a fun experience. I hope you'll all enjoy the game when it comes out, too!

Miscellaneous

Mid-Month Update - The Great Debuff Problem of 2016

Today, I bring you a different sort of blog! We're going to look at a rather finicky problem affecting some of the later areas of Soma Spirits that may be a good lesson for aspiring devs, perhaps. maybe. We'll see!

Soma Spirits handles buffs a little differently than what RPG Maker's default wants to enforce. By default, VXA applies buffs seperately from stats, stacking twice, first at +/- 25% and then +/- 50%. For the damage formulas that I established for the game rather early in development, a 50% increase ended up being far too much and was the different between monsters doing 1 damage or 40. Probably not a good variance in a game where you're probably going to have about 180-200 HP by the game's end.

Soma Spirits applies buffs as an unstackable state/status effect. So you get a one-time buff or debuff of 20% and this works well for the majority of the game. But now that I am working on the last two dungeons, I'm noticing that even 20% is still fluctuating wildly as monster stats are being more heavily affected by them.

Soma Spirit's default attack formula is a.atk * 1 - b.def *0.5 (Variance 10%), basically a downscaled version of the default atk4 - def2.

The first monster in the game, Oozie. has 16 ATK. So a 20% debuff will put them at about 13. At that point, that's no big deal at all. However, late game monsters have upwards of 50 ATK, and a 20% debuff will put them at 40. And with the formula roughly equating to 1 ATK = 1 DMG, that can be the difference between them doing 10 damage or 20.

Basically, any move used against monsters that lowers their ATK stat is very overpowered right now. Dearie me.

I think what we have going on here is that the intended exchange of numbers isn't really compatible with that damage formula. At Level 1, you have about 60 HP, and at Level 15 you have about 140. Monsters are intended to hit you for about 20 damage by that time, and if they're only doing half of their intended damage, that's a bit of a problem.

So I'm looking at solutions. And here's some ideas I've had. And maybe you folks could add suggestions as well:

1. Increase the player's HP, lower defense and increase intended damage intake. For example, if the player had 250 HP at that point of the game and is intended to take about 30 damage per hit, the difference between 20 and 30 would be far less debilitating to the game's difficulty and balance.

2. Have late-game enemies rely less on regular attacks and more on skills with unique formulas. For example, there is no Magic Defense stat in the game (MDF governs healing)

I'll figure this out, hopefully.

Progress Report

July Update - Nondescript Subtitle

Well, things are certainly moving right along, though I will be upfront and say that it has been fairly slow.

June and July are the busiest months of the year where I work, so a lot of my free time has been dedicated to life matters. But that doesn't mean that there hasn't been progress on Soma Spirits! As it stands now, dungeon 4 is largely finished, and dungeon 5 has quite a bit of work done on it, as well.

There are some aspects of the game that are completely done. The OST is complete, and 99% of the game's graphics are finished as well, with the exception of some late-game spell animations and other miscellaneous things.

Let's take a look at our old friend, the excel chart!



That's a lot done! I wanna say "we're getting close" but I also don't want to make any promises, and I certainly don't want to set a release date considering my sporadic dev schedule. Still, I'm definitely on schedule with my original timeframe, and beta testing can't be too far off. During which, I'll be sprucing up some of the areas that are a little bare (the hub map could use a few more NPCs to make it more interesting).

We're getting there!

Progress Report

June Update - Bugs Squashed, New Hub Area

I suppose it's a bit soon to be doing a progress report considering I just made the halfway-done announcement. So this one might end up being a bit on the short side.

With half of the game done and complete, I sent the build out to a couple of playtesters who helped me find (more than a few) bugs and provide feedback on the game's direction. All in all, it was relatively painless, with the majority of bugs found being very easy to fix and mainly consisted of typos in the dialogue. I'd say the only major thing that was found was a minor contradiction in the story if you had taken a particular path.

About the paths: they're quite the little buggers to program, with more important cutscenes having up to four different variations depending on the decisions you have made throughout the story. However, unlike many games with paths that get "locked" early on, you're given multiple opportunities to put yourself on another story path and the earliest you can lock yourself into one isn't until past the halfway point. Think of how in Undertale, you can put yourself on Neutral if you're doing a Pacifist run and decide to kill something. It's a little bit like that, but not quite as flexible as just going to kill a random doofus.

Anyways, I have to account for a number of different combinations of what the players decide to do. keeping track of all of that isn't easy, especially now that I'm starting work on the fourth dungeon where the branching storylines become more apparent and complex.

The playtest also proved fruitful for game balance, which was a bit odd in some places. One dungeon had players in combat too frequently, so that was toned down a bit. I've also balanced things a little better to suit different play styles: everything should be in better tune for both players who want to grind a bit, and for those who just beeline to the end of a dungeon.

After the playtest, a major decision was made to change up one of the game's areas to be more of a hub world where you teleport to different "stages". Soma Spirits' storytelling has always been episodic in nature, where you complete an area and make a key decision at the end of it. However, the setup I had before was very anti-climatic and consisted of just a big, mostly featureless map that used the same tileset as the forest and connected to all of the game's dungeons.

So I spent the better part of my weekend revamping it, making it a hub world with teleporters, with its own tileset and unique music. Take a look:



So what's next? Finish up the rest of dungeon 4 and just keep on truckin' along!

Progress Report

Ohhhh, we're half way there!

I've hit a pretty big milestone yesterday in development, and I'm sure everyoen here will be glad to hear this one: The entire first half of the game is complete and fully playable! That's at least one and a half to two hours' worth of content for those keeping track!

So does that mean we're at the halfway mark? Well, I'm actually quite a bit farther than that! I have many of the materials that I need to continue building the game; all of the non-boss monster sprites are finished, two of the three remaining tilesets are complete, as is quite a bit of the database, spell animations, and other "guts" work.

A lot of the reason that the content takes a while to assemble is factoring in all of the branching storyline paths. Depending on how you handle each of the game's major decisions, some of the key cutscenes have major variations of how they play out. While less noticeable earlier in the game, a number of the game's major cutscenes have upwards of four completely different ways of playing out. It's a lot of work, but I'm excited to hear different reactions to the different cutscenes people will see.

If I had to put a number on it, I want to say that Soma Spirits is about 70% complete as it stands now. Many of the building blocks are there; it's mostly just a matter of putting those blocks together to build the final product.

Thank you for continuing to follow this project! Here’s another awful MS Paint thing I did:

Progress Report

May Update - New Battle UI with animations!

I think I’m going to start doing these at the start of the month, rather than halfway through. So anyways…

Quite a bit of work has been done on the game these last few weeks! A lot, considering that I work twice as many hours at my actual job than I did before. So I’ve mostly relegated doing gamedev to something of a weekend hobby, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on it!

As of now, all of the non-boss monster sprites are completed, and all of the battle backgrounds as well! Tilesets for Dungeons 1-5 (out of 6) are done, maps for Dungeons 1-4 are done, monster encounters for dungeons 1-3 are done.

I think it might be better to just show you all a visual.



That’s quite a bit done, it seems! And there’s still plenty of work to do, believe you me. But we’re roarin’ right along.

Agent Ape is also nearly finished with the game’s OST, so look forward to even more stellar tracks when the game is completed.

In addition, I have redesigned the Battle UI to be a bit cleaner and more informative. the Battle UI was one of the first things I did when I started the project, and it was definitely showing its age. Here is what it looks like now:



Looks a bit more JRPG-y to me! And it has the Max HP/MP numbers so you won’t be guessing whether or not you’re topped off.
Battle animations will also now play on the HUD, instead of nothing at all like in the demo:



Note that the animations have since been centered a little better since I took this gif.

So that’s what we’ve got for May! My goal for this month is to get some more animations done, more character sprites, and get the third and fourth dungeons completely finished. See you next time!
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