Okay, so I've got the MP meter done. Now I just need to realign the HP and MP meters. Hopefully that won't be too difficult.

Anyway, I've recently come up with some brainstorms to help make JH3D an awesome experience. I'm still tossing ideas around, but hopefully I'll be able to make a decision before I get too far in the demo. Onesuch idea was a scoring system. By defeating enemies and doing various other stuff, the game would give you points. Get points fast enough, and you'd also recieve bonus points. While I kinda liked the idea at first, though, I realized that doing this would turn the game into an action game, since lots of enemies would have to be dispersed in order to keep the points flowing, and this game is supposed to be more about exploration than action.

I've also been trying to do an evaluation between Jester's Hunt, Banjo-Kazooie, and Banjo-Tooie. Looking at JH, I can see that RPGM1 seriously hindered any potential the game could've had. Specifically, the locations in the game are very bland. Which, I know, people have already pointed out, but I've only been agreeing as far as empty places like Cloud Nine go. Frankfully though, considering there being not enough scenery items, I'm not sure I could've made the places look much more interesting. I'm at a loss how I could improve Lucky Woods for example, beyond fixing the open area near the start that consists of randomly placed trees (compared to how the rest of the forest is arranged, it looks sloppy), and the tunnel behind Earthrotter's layer resembles a bent-out-of-shape, rusted trident. Something to consider for JH3D.

While looking at B-T, though, I realized something: I have no idea why I don't like it that much. My two biggest problems with it were the two Mary Canary mini-games (ugh, rapid button-mashing mini-games should be forbidden outside of Track & Field), and that I frequently got lost, a few times spending well over a half-hour trying to figure out what I missed. The problem being that I'm not entirely sure why I got lost. Maybe the levels were too big. But there were always some sort of indication of which paths led where (from big signs pointing where you are, to a slightly different color of the underwater tunnels). Could've been too many items to collect, which was made worse when you had to backtrack all over the place once you got the quest to search for quest items such as messy mechanics or unhatched eggs (and each place had one of these). At the same time, a variety of stuff to find makes things more interesting (most of JH was collecting boring grey tokens, with the occasional trophy and "? Token" on the side). Or maybe it was how you could almost never collect every Jiggy in a level during one trip due to necessary skills needing to be learned in a later level, and thus you were stuck trying all your skills trying to get that one Jiggy until finally giving up and earning the Jiggy later. Yet I did the same thing with JH, although one didn't have to memorize a bunch of button commands to make use of the skills, plus one usually could tell if an area couldn't be reached without learning a new skill easily enough, and I haven't really heard any complaints about the backtracking. Or maybe it was when I was missing something that should've been obvious, like the tunnel that could be reached through flight, or the train switch behind the building that I could've easily seen had I turned the camera enough, or blowing up the fish's teeth. But that's something that can't be helped with this type of game.

All I know is, I'll want to try to keep JH3D's levels simple yet interesting yet challenging. I'm not sure how I'm going to do that, but hopefully that demo will give people a good enough idea of what I'm doing that they can give me some advice to avoid making a bad sequel.

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For the sake of a self-reminder...
*gives some bump ACTION*