SVEN'S PROFILE

At the moment, it looks like a classic case of my favorite tagline, "Be sure to add 3 years to any Target Completion Date you see". Real life managed to mess up my plans quite profoundly, plus I'm beginning to think that the custom battle system I envisioned was a bit...ambitious. I may need to resort to recruiting a good spriter for the battle animations, but I'm generally the kind of guy who feels it's important to do everything in the game on his own, even if the results suck :P

It will take a while, and it will very probably be released when Battledome 5 is only a dim memory from the distant past, but it will be finished.

Wow, thanks a lot for the feedback, both of you. It makes me all giddy inside to read how much you've enjoyed the game :P

Fetch quests and backtracking, yes. There are indeed a number of plain old fetch quests...blame it on my lack of imagination and creativity. I tried to come up with unique non-fetchy quests for everywhere, but I have to admit that the sheer scale of the project pushed my creativity to its limits so I chose the easy way out a couple of times. You can avoid most of the walking and backtracking by using ships and teleports, though...it's only the Indian jungle and the European forests you have to cross twice, and if you just walk through them without getting involved in a lot of fighting, both can be crossed in a matter of minutes.

The final boss battle involves a bit of luck. He's pretty resistant to being poisoned or confused (off the top of my head, I think you have a 5% chance for each), but if you do manage to poison him on the first turn, the battle does get pretty easy. The first boss should be very easy to enrage (which lowers attack to 80% and armor to 60%), that should make the battle a lot easier. But the difficulty of the first boss battle mainly depends on how long you wandered through the caves and how far you've leveled up on the way...as long as you found the pistol, the battle shouldn't be too hard on level 9 or 10. Without the pistol, it's a pretty tough challenge.

If you want to play through Europe a second time with Martine instead of Dave but don't have a useful savegame from Siberia any more, you can use the save I'm just about to upload...check the downloads section in a couple minutes.

Oh, and zenla, don't be too hard on yourself...I didn't just choose you as a beta tester because the others sucked :P You provided some very useful feedback and caught one or two rather embarrassing bugs. Thanks for that!

Oh. Yes. The good old F12 problem. Strictly speaking, that's not a bug with the mouse script but an issue with RPGMaker's stupid F12 reset function...pressing F12 will perform a partial reset of the game session but will keep a number of scripts running in the background. The way the mouse system is set up, this will inevitably lead to a recursion error...sorry about that, I guess I could have coded a fix for that into the mouse system, but the only way to reliably get rid of that problem would have been to completely disable RPGMaker's F12 handling. The easy solution is either not to use the F12 reset function at all, or to close out of the game and restart it once the error message appears.

As a side note, you don't have to press F12 to load the game...I added a "load" function to the game's menu (both the main menu and the quick access menu on top) so you can load a previous game at any time without going back to the title screen.

By all means yes - I'm definitely looking forward to that.

Definitely, yes...you won't even need to have the RTP installed.