The sweet intoxication of the rose

Last week's goals were just to make tiles, maps, content up to the end of the game. I am pleased to report that we are CLOSE. How close? Why, let the screenshots tell you!



New desert tiles--pretty close to final, I think



The first of the game's level-up trainers--I think this is funny



A new map, looks like the old maps except for the night retrace effect. Check out them stats



Maybe we can all agree with this! Also from the new map



Trouble brews in a story sequence! Also features a new incomplete sprite



The final new map of the game. It's obviously incomplete but it's totally laid out. Still needs to have the zones hook up with one another and all.

All of the story is also written, except for the very very last sequence (maybe like--three textboxes long, but I want to save it for last.) Most of it is in game as well, although I still need to make the entities run around and act emotional and stuff. Once the last map is hooked up and all of the story text is in, I can send the game off to the music man and that's that for that.

Other things done: most crucially, the Knack command works!



That doesn't really look so hot in the screenshot, but it's cool in game, take my word. Knacks are mouse driven and detect hit locations on the enemy, forcing the battles to slow down a bit so that you can target. Right now they're only really useful against one or two enemies but by the end of the first chapter I want to have Knacks be like--the basic command you go for in the first round of every fight. That's mostly going to be a weird balancing issue but we're way closer to having it work than we were last week.

I also threw out my old status condition system and coded a shiny new one. So far two status conditions are in the game and seem to be working, though for some reason the AI handling doesn't react to one of them as it should. I'm probably going to just leave it for now until I've got more of the basic work done.

Plus I added a chance to dodge to the game so that your EVA stat actually does some good. And boy, does it do good! It does so much good that it's essentially impossible for enemies to land a blow on you ever even if you're wearing no armor and have never raised your defense stat past 3. This is obviously a problem but I'd rather just leave it like that until I have all of the maps/story stuff hooked up, since it makes it way easier to test and I need to rebalance everything anyway.

Plus I fixed all of the remaining extant game-killing bugs in the battle system and debugged the equipment system. The only irritating thing left is the weird in-battle item menu behavior, but it's not going to be that hard to fix, comes the time.

So we can bump the version number up to 3.9, just shy of that critical .4 where all of the battle functions work. I still have to finish building Cass's Pray command--some of the basic variable-manipulation functions are in, but I haven't quite decided on exactly how to track the crucial variables. And I still need to throw in a few more status conditions.

After that: .5 is finishing up the system code, which at this point basically means the save/load functions and some debugging on the items/equipment side of things. Saving and loading is almost done--it could be done right now if I was confident that I wasn't going to have to add anything else to the party variable structures, but I'm not confident of that. .6 involves all maps/story/sprites being totally ironed out, tiled, in the bag. (Even though you can almost walk the game from start to finish there's still a crazy amount of work to be done on tiles and sprites.) .65 puts the little mini-game stuff in (grue's new totally awesome collision trigger should make one of those like--ridiculously easier than I thought it would be), and I think after that it's all just testing and balancing until release.

It's so horrible how these projects seem so simple when you start them and then you realize how much work they actually entail. I think it's still moving at a reasonable rate, though, and that barring disaster we can pull off testing by October.

As for that other project--I've only done a tiny amount of work on it since last week. It comes in three parts; the first is done, the second is half-done. I'll probably just release parts one and two once they're done and then save the third. I toyed with the idea of just releasing part one, fuck it, but it's actually kind of terrible and useless at present. Oh whatever I'm uploading it; look for it in a couple of hours.