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

[RuneDevros]

What are your thoughts on the best way to deal with status effects especially with regard to bosses?

There are two extremes: On the one hand, I've found that games like Final Fantasy where most bosses are 100% immune, I tended to not use status effects at all. On the other hand, having status effects that could cripple them makes the game unbalanced and too easy.

I think a reasonable compromise would be to have bosses equip a support trait granting them higher resistance to some SE. Stun and sleep come to mind as potentially crippling. This could develop into interesting strategies like having a boss start out with 900SC and equipped with a spellcard that drains their SC. If you slap a spirit drain on them, that could give you a great advantage.

[Psieye]

In an overly complicatedly ideal system, there'd be some way to assess the probability the debuff procs and the duration of it could also be modified, as well as the severity of the effect. I'm mostly thinking of Labyrinth of Touhou having a decaying buff/debuff magnitude.

On a more practical note, you have a few options. You could make some bosses 100% immune but their mooks are still vulnerable so it's still worth using debuffs. You could instantly spawn reinforcements or something if the boss gets hit by a crippling debuff to bring in an interesting alternative. Some bosses might be selectively immune - e.g. only to the crippling ones. Some bosses might only ever suffer debuffs for 1 turn at a time, with reduced effectiveness in whatever the debuff effect is too.

[mew77]

Sorry for not posting for a long time...

I'd say bosses should just have a higher resistance to status effects. BTW hows the project coming along.
I know I haven't been on enough to help out. This is because college has started. Perhaps I could still be a part of this.

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..

The issue is that weaker attack spells will be ignored in favor of powerful ones. Status effect ones will be generally useful, but if they fail you are helpless unless the spell counter attacks. In final fantasy tactics I recall there were many many spells and skills, I liked the ability to customize my characters. Perhaps different types of spells, sort of like fire emblem with their brave swords, pole arms, throwing weapons, and other such fun stuff.

[RuneDevros]

Been a couple busy weeks preparing for a conference so i haven't had a chance to do updates.

Mainly focusing on a sequential re-balance test of the game as well as cleaning up tons of bugs along the way. Up to Ch2St3. Still have to implement a few of the remaining status effects and do the proper assignment of spell actions to everyone in game.

RFW, regarding converting to game data, especially mission data, to Python storage. I'm going to give the go-ahead on this project. Can we talk on IM at some point so we can discuss how to do this? I discussed with SleepyD and it seems that there hasn't really been much interest in mission design program. I'd like to lean towards the ease of scripting rather since we might need to do complex scripted events later on. Right now, branching events is an extremely hacked on system that Im not very happy with.

[RuneDevros]

Mokou's flying phoenix.

Spiral Emitter test

I'm in final exams mode but this is what's been worked on int he past month. We were long overdue for an update to the spell animation system. It's based of a set of scripts that control "emitters" that send out bullets at a programmer specified pattern / timing / position. Right now it's still being tested in a separate branch, but as soon as I'm done with exams, I'm going to merge it into the main branch. Integration with the actual spells is not yet completed, so that'll come first as soon as I get back to work on this.

[RuneDevros]

Hi! We finally have 0.6.0 ready to play! Downloads Page

Release Announcement for 0.6.0

In the past months, 0.6.0 has been under steady development. Much of the work has been on the game engine side, adding a lot of new features. After long delays, we've finally implemented a scripting system for bullet animations. (Video: "Marisa Animation Test":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdidIRrRLPg) The spell animations are now more like the spells used in the Touhou games. Also supported are pre-rendered animation sequences. Some other features will be transparent to players. We have switched over to using Pygame's internal sprite system for most of the work on the battle maps, which runs more smoothly because only portions of the screen are updated at a time. The second behind the scenes feature that we added is a reworking of the mission format to support more powerful scripting. Expect some of the future missions to have more complex scripting exhibited.

On the content and gameplay side, there have been some major additions. Chief among them is a system of support spells that adds variety to the game. Reimu and Ran's roles are now more aligned towards supporting their allies with buffs and debuffs rather than directly attacking. A couple of map sprites have been added (Akyu, Keine, Mokou, Aya and Asa, by Nazerine). Sound effects have also been added and are in an experimental stage right now. We will be introducing sound effects throughout the rest of the game in the next release. We also hope to have new portraits in the next release.

Please let us know your thoughts on the game and any ways that we could improve it.

Screenshots

[RuneDevros]

Added some bouncing stars (Video)

This marks the first support for variable speed bullets in our animation system.