... I just now had this dawn on me as I was writing for SOE the other night, and I can't believe it took this long.


In the mind of SK, and in the world of Elvenia, the force of Light is represented almost exclusively by cute little teenage girls, ... and everyone who is evil is a big ugly demon.

You know, minus the 6 playable male characters vs the 4 playable female characters. I also didn't think Reith Sefedorn would be THAT ugly.

Anyways, I finished battle balancing for the second scenario card. Should be starting the third fairly soon. I've had to make some serious adjustments due to just how drastic basic stats can differ from just a difference of two. But I think I'm still making the best of it. All the bosses thus far have at least slightly varying themes to them so it should all remain as interesting as it can.

Though I have taken a bit of a break over the past few days. I've been playing a ton of Terraria. But I plan to pick things back up this weekend and sally forth.

Reith Sefedorn is a heartless and heinous woman, sir. There is no beauty within her.

I wasn't talking about within. I always pictured her to be fairly attractive... in that evil sort of dominant way.

Tonight, SK and I were in a hangout and were going over a few things about the game. We... kind of hit a bit of a snag. What we would have liked was to have about four enemies for random encounters per dungeon. Excluding the ones I've already done, there are 19 individual dungeons in the game. We already have all the bosses in the system data as well as around 30-ish enemies. Subtracting those 30 from the at least 3 enemies times 19 dungeons, we still need a good 30 enemies... and we only have 750 system data. Enemies are around 50 bits of data a pop.

So as you can see, we now have a bit of a problem. We don't have enough system data to cover all the enemies we want in the game. Not to mention that while we have all the spells needed, we could really use some more.

RPG Maker 1's limitations are insanely harsh. It's like it wasn't really designed to make full fledged game.

That sounds most unfortunate. I don't really know anything so I can't provide suggestions, but you have both my condolences on the seemingly insurmountable situation, and my belief that you'll figure something!

It's gonna be great regardless, even if you have fewer enemies than you prefer.

What if you use three per dungeon. Have one of the three be a bit smaller of an encounter rate and have it be a tougher enemy. Now, in the next dungeon, you could use it as a common enemy. Repeat the pattern as needed to fill out your dungeons.

The text for the game is DONE.

Hurray! And now for battle-balancing.

In this ten year process we have hit our biggest milestone yet. Yesterday I finished putting all of SK's text to scenes. The final battle, and all three endings... as well as the credits and all trimmings to get the player back to the main menu with all the stuff they unlocked (in game credits, game plus mode, etc).

As it stands, Arc Arath is now a complete experience and can be played from beginning to end. It is, by a sense, a complete game. It still needs battle balancing, playtesting, and grammar checks... which will definitely happen, but to be able to say it's a game now just feels so surreal.

This is a very exciting time And I'm extremely proud of SK and my own work. And now I'm going to jump back on battle balancing and freaking get this under way.

*goofy pose*

I WON!

There you go, bud.

Congrats!

Not a lot of progress these past few weeks. A lot of my spare time has gone to video editing. But I'm still making progress. As far as battle balancing goes, I'm a good ways into Scenario 5 of 18. So we're getting there. Before I got to touch battle though, I had to balance out one of the first side quests which involved a fairly complicated trading sequence. For it, you'll get some of the parts required to make the best weapons in the game... as well as some other very nice things. I'm also taking the time to update the walkthrough for the game as I'm balancing. Wish I had more to update, but that's about it. Things are looking good though.

Any progress is good progress! Go, go Lantis!

Just want to point out, views not replies. I'm very guilty of not posting my support for games being made here, but I follow every single one. Keep it up! I want to say I was among the first to play it so be sure to keep us up to date.

Somewhere five years ago in this thread I think I said that I'll definitely finish the story by the end of 2008 or something.

.....

*points at me and stifles a giggle*

So SK came by again this weekend and we did a lot of work on the game. Though we didn't actually make any forward progress. We're still in the middle of Scenario 5, but we'll get to the balancing soon enough.

What we did do, is go into every shop up to this point of the game and take inventory. I typed out where the shop was, what items it had, and what database number it was as SK read them out to me. The reason is because since we have so many sceanrio cards, we HAVE to re-create all the shops. Having a list of them all and what they have will really help in re-creating them... or more, updating them. So every scenario, every shop COULD have different inventory. 18 in total.

Now, the other thing we did is because of a huge mistake on our part. In fact, this is a cautionary tale. The way SK and I have been creating this game, we've not done any battle related stuff for 90% thus far. So items, spell, enemies... the only things we put in there were just so we could use them later when the time came. And that time is now. The problem is, we didn't take the time to SORT them in the database. For example. You would think that a main characters list of weapons he could equip would be side-by-side in the item database. You know, with database numbers like 45, 46, 47, etc. But no, it's like 8, 24, 32, 87. And at the time, neither of us saw how obvsiouly problematic this would turn out to be now. So what we did was make a document listing all the item categorized and in order. Something we should have done from the beginning in RPG Maker 1. What I would recommend to anyone else is to separate the database into categories. An example would be using the first 30 lines in the database, dedicate to just consumable items. So when you are creating shops, populating chests, and all that jazz, you can easily know were everything is. If you guys do what is necessary to earn the password to the game, you'll go in there and see just how much of a mess it really is.

Other than that, we actually did some bug testing. We found one and decided to check on a few other things and found a few things that weren't working the way we wanted. Nothing game breaking, but just a little irritating. From that, we decided when we do start test playing and bug testing, that we will be making a sort of checklist to follow on each scenario to make sure everything is working as intended. It'll take an insane number of playthroughs, but it'll be worth it.

I should be back to battle balancing soon though.

And thanks for the well-wishes, Insult. It means a lot.


EDIT:

RPG Maker 1 is still on it's never ending quest to piss me right the hell off. So, we're going to have equipment in the game that utilizes the spell casting usage. Maybe have something that decreases a stat, but gives you the option to freely cast a spell. But I really hated how the command in battle is just called "equip." Totally not what's going on. So I wanted to change it to something more appropriately. So I was thinking "Draw" or something... like drawing the spell out of the equipment or weapon. But as it turns out, it changes the name of "Equip" in the main menu when you press square as well. Which outright f*cks my plans. It's insane since the equip in the menu and the equip in battle do two TOTALLY different things.

I really REALLy am getting tired of not being able to do the things I want when there's ne excuse why I shouldn't be able to.

I know how that feeling. In the system I developed for S2, the player has to re-equip accessories whenever they change firearms. Because while characters can learn spells, they can't be removed. *glares at RPGM1* (On the other hand, they get a free heal for doing this so, yeah.)