Touhou SRPG - Story of a Lost Sky [Update 1/22/11 - Version 0.6.0] (Thread 3)

[RuneDevros]

Proof of concept video showing animated spell casting. Elcura and WnW, the system is now ready to accept idle stances as well as animated casting stances.

# First pass
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugpty5_U96Q

# Final demonstration (Mostly back to where things were). Update is in the repository
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpsvcR0kfq4

[mew77]

Looks fine...

As you can already tell, i don't have the time to continue testing this game. What we have so far looks nice.

I will continue to post here and on the wave when I can.

[Water_and_Wind]

Should the battle animations be redone in Elcura's new style?  It would be nice to hear Li's ideas for Ran, Chen, Sakuya, etc.

[RuneDevros]

I'm inclined to say no. Let's keep what we have for now and just expand on them (hit/evade/animated casting). Redoing all of those is probably not the best way to use our limited resources. We have a lot of characters that don't have animations yet.

[Water_and_Wind]

Ok, what about future animations?

[RuneDevros]

How does this sound? Let's cover as many characters as we need right now. Designs are up for Reimu and Keine from Li I think, so let's get those first. If we can get casting animations, that will go a long way to making the game look better rather than using 35x35 map sprites.

For each, I would recommend prioritizing in the following order (highest order):
- Casting Animation
- Idle Animations
- Hit/Evade

Hit and evade haven't been incorporated into the engine yet since I don't have anything to use.

As far as the style goes, let's try to stay consistent so keeping close to Elcura's style works well for future animations.

[RuneDevros]

I built a pre-alpha version since I'm going to be at an anime convention this weekend and hoping to demonstrate it.

http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/downloads

[RuneDevros]

VIdeo demonstrating a visual cue when Counterbomb-like traits have been activated. Previously, there was no indication that a counterbomb trait was in play. It looks much better in game. My capture program was just being slow so this video isn't quite as smooth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvhDH1dW-rM

[RuneDevros]

Doing a runthrough of the game. I think we've added enough stuff that we're ready for a new release. Water and Wind, are you still around? I haven't heard from you in a while. Hope everything's doing okay.

I added WnW's houses to the game.

[RuneDevros]

0.5.1 Alpha Version 2 is here. Alpha 1 had a really bad game-breaking bug, so I had to pull that release. Alpha 2 features mainly a completely redesigned CH2ST3.

http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/downloads

[RuneDevros]

0.5.1 is live!

Download it at: http://lostsky.featheredmelody.com

Screenshots


Major new changes:

• 0.5.1 is mostly a maintenance release. A ton of work has been done overhauling some major components of the game including the battle system and animation system in preparation for an update to the spell animations. It also corrects some design flaws in the code. A lot of this is transparent to the player, so you won't see much of a difference here. Many missions received minor gameplay or script tweaks.
• CH2ST3 - Redesigned - CH2ST3 has been completely redesigned. The enemy placement and levels has been tweaked a lot to make it a less frustrating level and the goal requires you to defeat Miu. This locks out the option of just running Marisa to the end. New dialog has been added to the mission to bring out the Kodama Lord personalities more.
• Treasure Collection - Kourin's shop system has been restructured to be more simple and straightforward. The points system has been dropped in favor of a system that tracks the unique treasures you return to him. At certain milestones, you get a reward.
• Map Editor (Source Only) - Mainly a development tool and still an experimental program. Useful for creating terrain maps.
• New art content - Wriggle battle sprite, some new terrain tiles, new landmark icons.

Thanks to everyone who contributed on this release. I couldn't have made it without your support and hard work. I am very happy to be working with you guys.

Any suggestions for changes and improvements are welcome.

I'll have a message about the goals for 0.5.2 up soon.

[Suikama]

Link doesn't work for me :derp:

[RuneDevros]

Which link?

Try this one:
http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/downloads

[RuneDevros]

Where did everyone go? >_< Water and Wind are you still with us? I haven't heard from you in a while.

Recent work on 0.6.0 has been an upgrade of the map sprites to use Pygame's optimized Sprites class. Map movement should look smoother, especially on slower machines.These sprites only require you to update about 30K pixels each frame rather than 300K pixels.

Next up is work on what I think is going to be the final major battle system gameplay feature. Support spells will round out the attack and healing spells already in the game. Some of the ones thought up are listed here:

http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Status_Effects

This will require that we redefine some of the roles that the characters have in the game. I put together a list of them here:

http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Character_Roles

Comments and feedback are welcome.

[Psieye]

Hmm ok, you've put Keine as pure white mage role. Somebody needed to fill those shoes and I guess Keine's a good fit. Status effects seem fine - actual playtesting will reveal whether there need to be some balance changes but there is nothing wrong in principle with the decaying random probability to persist.

[Supreme Gamesmaster]

FIRE EMBLEM TOUHOU

I APPROVE GREATLY

Alright, let's see: Chen's Erk with staves, Youmu's a myrmidon, Ran's a Jeigan, and Marisa's a pegasus knight. Apparently, Keine is now a Cleric, Mokou is a fighter, Reimu's a mage, and Alice is... something. Haven't found any of them yet since the game keeps crashing after I win levels.

Oh, yeah. I should probably warn the developers that the program seems to crash after a level is finished. Happened several times and annoyed the crap out of me. >.>

[Psieye]

Technically this isn't quite FE Touhou. I had a few discussions during the brainstorm phase and it avoids some key FE features. Still, it's an SRPG Touhou, always awesome.

As for the crash, I can't answer that - all I can say is that it doesn't crash for me. Best you provide more information like what platform/system you run on.

[RuneDevros]

Edit:

New status effect icons are in place. Credit goes to Team Pockethouse for giving me the base templates to build from. Left to right: Poison, Illusion Veil, Spirit Drain, Stun.

I guess the main issue that I have with restricting Keine not to have attacking spells is that there'd be no way to defend herself. I was having a discussion with Lego last night and she pointed out the no-win scenario of having Keine be the only unit left. I guess we'll do playtesting and see how it goes. The other idea that we talked about last night was to let everyone equip the basic magic/physical attack spells, but have restrictions apply to higher tier spells. Either way as per Gekko's issue report #59, Keine's healing abilities need a nerf.

FIRE EMBLEM TOUHOU

I APPROVE GREATLY

Alright, let's see: Chen's Erk with staves, Youmu's a myrmidon, Ran's a Jeigan, and Marisa's a pegasus knight. Apparently, Keine is now a Cleric, Mokou is a fighter, Reimu's a mage, and Alice is... something. Haven't found any of them yet since the game keeps crashing after I win levels.

Oh, yeah. I should probably warn the developers that the program seems to crash after a level is finished. Happened several times and annoyed the crap out of me. >.>

FE inspired certainly. There are a quite a few things that we try to do differently.

What version are you using? There should be an srpg.exe.log file in your directory if you are using the executable version. It should contain a bunch of code like text including the word  "TRACEBACK". Please upload the contents to me and I'll look into it. It should help me find the source of your problems. It basically traces down to the line of code where things failed.

[rfw]

Oh wow, this project looks pretty impressive - 291 repository commits is no small number, but you've still got a lot more to go!

Sidenote: I have to wonder why you're using XML files for mission scripting rather than Python -- if it's implemented in Python, why use an intermediate markup language rather than Python packages and modules? Seems sort of redundant to me, but you probably have some valid reason for it.

[RuneDevros]

The repository commits is probably ~30-50 higher than that since we jumped from SVN to Mercurial about a year ago.

Re: Mission Scripting. Can you explain how to do mission scripting in a package system? It might still be feasable at this point to switch over if we can shortcut a lot of the intermediate processing steps. Python is much less verbose than declaring everything in XML. I completely admit to learning a lot of this as I go along so if there is a much better way to do it, I'd love to hear about it.

At some point, we decided to move all our game data to XML so it wasn't hard coded into the game. Part of the reason was for ease of modification. We had our test missions coded as basically a giant dictionary in our startup file (srpg.py) which didn't really work too well. We wanted to eventually be able to build a mission editor. Sleepydoodler is working on it now. I'm certain that Python can output XML data, but I'm not sure if it can output Python code. O-o

[rfw]

The repository commits is probably ~30-50 higher than that since we jumped from SVN to Mercurial about a year ago.

Re: Mission Scripting. Can you explain how to do mission scripting in a package system? It might still be feasable at this point to switch over if we can shortcut a lot of the intermediate processing steps. Python is much less verbose than declaring everything in XML.

At some point, we decided to move all our game data to XML so it wasn't hard coded into the game. Part of the reason was for ease of modification. We had our test missions coded as basically a giant dictionary in our startup file (srpg.py) which didn't really work too well. We wanted to eventually be able to build a mission editor. Sleepydoodler is working on it now. I'm certain that Python can output XML data, but I'm not sure if it can output Python code. O-o

Having game data in Python isn't necessarily hard-coded if you separate it clearly enough, i.e. throw them all in a module called scripts or something. What you can do is have various base classes, such as Mission, Enemy, etc. and extend them:

class WriggleNightbug(Enemy):
    """ various attributes here """

class Chapter1(Mission):
    def __init__(self):
        self.enemies = [ WriggleNightbug() ]

As for the generation of Python code, that might be a little trickier. I'm not entirely sure myself, but what you could do is:

• In your level editor, replace the classes and any method calls with substitutes that provide the editor with information and work from there.
• Attach a trace to a method and track executioon.
• Write a Python lexer (lol). Pygments has a lexer you might be able to use.

[RuneDevros]

This sounds promising and I'll look into it. If we make the change it'll either be in this version or the next before we get to the point where it is no longer practical to change over. We currently have ~9 mission scripts.

Suppose I have a bunch of CHYSTX.py files in the package mission_scripts. What would be the best way to load all the missions at startup? The current way we have our missions stored is a dictionary like

Code: [Select]

    missions = {'CH1ST1':CH1ST1_mission_object
                           'CH1ST2':CH1ST2_mission_object
                           'CH1ST3':CH1ST3_mission_object
                           ...
                           }


Having another Python programmer on the forums is really helpful. Thank you for your advice.

[Supreme Gamesmaster]

Well, obviously FE doesn't have those gigantic maps or Disgaea-type enemy strategies, but it's the same concept.

Also it seems I have the wrong version hahaha. :derp:

[RuneDevros]

I've been talking with Savory about some ideas for enemy units, since admittedly we don't have a lot of enemies right now.

Info reference links are mine:

Mandragora
Treant
Jinmenju, a tree with human faced fruit
Jubokko, a vampire tree
Kijimunaa a tree sprite (Not really able to find more info on this)
Hōkō - a dog-like tree spirit
Jorōgumo -  a spider woman.

There are a lot of nice ones in here, some of which might make some menacing enemies. The vampire tree is basically what I based Ayaka's special trees off of. I'm not sure if the other tree youkai would work for the walking trees we have now. They're more mindless servants of the Kodama Lords rather than something intelligent.

I've actually got another issue that I'd like to discuss. In our discussions, Savory and I didn't agree on how to proceed: I'm not really sure how to go about dealing with all the exotic Japanese youkai names. Savory pointed out that the Fuzzballs are referred to as Kedama. I'd like for the players to be able to infer a general idea of the enemy unit without having to consult any kind of encyclopedia or something. That's why I chose to go with English equivalents like Wind Weasel for Kamaitachi. At the same time it might be awkward to have these names like that in Gensokyo. This is something that I'm really split on so I'd appreciate any input on it.

[Psieye]

That's what your in-game unit encyclopedia is for. Maybe even have the unit's encyclopedia entry pop up if you press a button on the (enemy unit's) stats screen. You're using Japanese names for the characters, may as well stick with Japanese names for the mooks too. Be sure to translate them with an easy pop-up so people can still get a general idea of what this exotic mook is.

[RuneDevros]

@Psieye - That sounds like a very good compromise. It can probably go in the Newspaper section of the world map menu since we can have Aya write articles about the various enemies.

@rfw - Reviewing the changes. Everything looks good and I'll merge it with my main branch. Tested out py2exe and successfully packaged an executable version so we're good there. The tools launcher is very nice. Thank you for doing all the standardization. Have a few remarks though:

- I'd prefer not to track options.dat since I may be changing my settings to whatever's easiest to work with (sometimes I develop with music off so I'm not hearing the same 5 seconds over and over again) and flipping those options on and off isn't something that needs to be carried over.
- I see a ".txt" file in the maps folder. Seems to just be an empty file. What's it for?

Going back to Eclipse Pydev as my IDE. Pycharm is chewing up 90-98% CPU continuously making it nigh unusable. Everything is okay now.

Edit: Nevermind. Ran into some trouble. Basically nuked my pydev data and started from scratch.

[RuneDevros]

Spent some time mapping out the new spell actions. Very much a work in progress, so there's still a lot of flexibility. A few comments:

• Things marked in light blue are not yet implemented
• I decided on a unified STR/MAG+ support spell, but separate DEF/MDEF support spell. The reasoning is that there are many cases where you want to either boost a unit's DEF or MDEF against attack, but very few cases where you would want to boost the (STR,MAG) if the unit is strong in (MAG,STR) since most units carry exclusively STR or MAG spells depending on what ttheir character favors.
• I'm heavily leaning towards slimming down the list of attack spells to just 8, four basic and four upgraded for the second half of the game. We have now introduced status effect and support spells, so the player will likely be managing many more spells and find some of them not that useful. Something that I'd like to avoid is inundating the player with a lot of spells and having them be cast aside in favor of a few useful ones and lots of not so useful ones. This has been my experience with a lot of RPGs..
• If anyone knows a way to program Python to export to an excel spreadsheet that would be great. Keeping this document in sync with latest testing results and tweaking is not going to be easy.

Things to do:

• Generate negative status effect spells
• CH3 onward characters haven't been figured out yet.
• Need to update the spell synth recipe list. Some of the attack spellcards recipes will be converted to support / status recipes.
• Effect and Shield need to be made floats instead of integers. The difference between a shield of 2 and a shield of 1 is astounding. This was a problem with Keine as making her equip a healing spell with shield of 2 made her all but invincible.

Link: Spell Database on Google Docs.

[mew77]

It's been a while since I followed this project.

What's happened since then?

[RuneDevros]

Let's see...

In the past month, I've mainly worked on more under the hood fixes like upgrading the engine to use Pygame sprites for map movement. Should work faster now on slower computers. Currently, I've been working on refining the spell action system by adding support spells and expanding on the status effect spells. It will give the characters a lot more variety as far as how they are played.

[RuneDevros]

Along with a fairly intensive refactor of the spell stats display to reduce some redundancy in the code, I added a display of the status effects to the stats display. I noticed during first pass that there wasn't a way for the player to tell what status effects would be given or cured by a spell.

Left to right: Attack, Healing, Support


Edit: TODO - Fix the text wrap issue in the first screenshot :/