Maidens of the Kaleidoscope
~Hakurei Shrine~ => Rika and Nitori's Garage Experiments => Topic started by: RuneDevros on April 21, 2009, 03:58:05 PM
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(http://i44.tinypic.com/jg2u0p.png)
Wiki (http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky)
Bitbucket Mercurial Repository (Stable) (http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/wiki/Home) - Houses source code as far back as 0.2.2 and the latest executable build. Go to the Downloads section to get the latest version.
Development Repository (Unstable) (http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project/wiki/Home) - WIP Dev repository. Source code only. Please see setup instructions here (http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Python_Setup_Instructions)
Old Threads
- (3/23/09 - 4/19/09) (http://old.shrinemaiden.org/forum/index.php?topic=1966.0)
- (5/16/08 - 3/23/09) (http://web.archive.org/web/20080521142337/http://www.shrinemaiden.org/forum/index.php?topic=973.0)
IRC:
Server: irc.psigenix.net
Channel: #lostskyproject
Builds
[All Future Builds are on Bitbucket]
v0.4.1
Windows EXE:
http://www.4shared.com/file/148238452/2f973a4f/lostsky-v041final-windows.html
Source:
http://www.4shared.com/file/148238327/15f34e82/lostsky-v041final-source.html
v0.4.0
Windows EXE
http://www.4shared.com/file/133753687/e999da12/lostsky-v040-windows.html
Source
http://www.4shared.com/file/133753402/52ae70fb/lostsky-v040-source.html
v0.3.1
Windows EXE - http://www.4shared.com/file/115802120/28a2d939/lostsky-v031-windows.html
Source - http://www.4shared.com/file/115801554/75328cd5/lostsky-v031-source.html
v0.3.0
Windows EXE - http://www.4shared.com/file/98593500/34f949fe/lostsky-v030-windows.html
Source - http://www.4shared.com/file/98592990/549d6cb6/lostsky-v030-source.html
v0.2.2
Windows EXE - http://www.4shared.com/file/95717861/8e7151e0/lostsky-v022-windows.html
Source (+Animation Tester 0.3) - http://www.4shared.com/file/95717568/ff757a17/lostsky-v022-source.html
v0.2.1
Windows EXE - http://www.4shared.com/file/90072761/728e0c50/lostsky-v021-windows.html
Source (+Animation Tester 0.3) - http://www.4shared.com/file/90139291/1a002010/lostsky-v021-source-fixed.html
v0.2.0
Windows EXE: http://www.4shared.com/file/77806655/5e30142b/lostsky-v020-windows.html
Source (+Animation Tester): http://www.4shared.com/file/77806960/e2bf45a/lostsky-v020-source.html
v0.1.4
Windows EXE: http://www.4shared.com/file/76586950/f9ff432/lostsky-v014-windows.html
Source Code (+Animation Tester): http://www.4shared.com/file/76583804/43995e6b/lostsky-v014-source.html
v0.1.3
Windows EXE: http://www.4shared.com/file/73870756/a5ff8879/lostsky-v013-windows.html
Source Code: http://www.4shared.com/file/73870381/893ccb4b/lostsky-v013-source.html
v0.1.2
Windows EXE: http://www.4shared.com/file/67365028/50d528f0/lostsky-v012-windows.html
Source Code: http://www.4shared.com/file/67365030/47159183/lostsky-v012-source.html
v0.1.1 [8-22-08]
Windows EXE: http://www.4shared.com/file/60066791/9e34bcd4/lostsky-v011-windows.html
Source Code: http://www.4shared.com/file/60066792/73ded6e/lostsky-v011-source.html
v0.1.0 [8-13-08]
Windows EXE: http://www.4shared.com/file/58941943/b272fd2a/lostsky-v010-windows.html
Source Code: http://www.4shared.com/file/58942155/5eac9708/lostsky-v010-source.html
v0.0.5 [7-27-08]
http://www.4shared.com/file/56777475/701aa7ae/lostsky005.html
v0.0.4 [6-28-08]
http://www.4shared.com/file/53109656/e3f2761/lostsky-v004-windows.html
v0.0.3 [6-6-08]
http://www.4shared.com/file/50412473/c4a3409d/lostsky-v003-windows-b.html
v0.0.2 [5-18-08]
http://www.4shared.com/file/48095096/e4304ed7/lostsky-v002-windows.html
v0.0.1 [5-16-08]
http://www.sendspace.com/file/seher4 (No longer available)
It's built in Python as a programming language using Pygame.
Copy-pasting last topic of discussion in.
Thanks to all the staff members and those who have been following and supporting us. I've been told that Another Dream is on track for a release very soon, and I am really hoping that this will be well received. This project wouldn't have made it this far without you all.
Now to answer the ever important question: Where are we going from here?
There are several important goals I'd like to work on in the coming months, so I'll break things down into design and implementation.
Design
- Map out the trait learning tree
- Map out the spell synthesis combinations
- Script writing for Ch 2, 3
Implement
- Globally set the FPS to 60. We have been running 30FPS in some places and 60 FPS in places where animation is more critical. This kind of thing will cause weird timing issues when we do things like animated water.
- Post 0.3.0 bugfixes and UI improvements. I got a boatload from Psieye that got pushed onto 0.3.0 before the release but there are some things that still need to get fixed.
- Unit deployment system. We'll soon reach a point where there will be enough characters that the player is going to have to make a choice on who to deploy in the map. This would be a menu that shows after the initial events and before the player starts. Some missions will have required characters.
- Treasure System. We bump into Rinnosuke in Ch2 which sets off the treasure hunt system. Some code is already written for it but not yet implemented
- Trait learning system. We'll need to add the ability to track Trait Points with level ups and a way to pick traits.
- Item Synthesis system. Synth crystals would be classed as treasures.
- There are some parts of the XML that I am not liking with right now. Namely, there isn't any way to do the equivalent of IF/ELSE statements. The way I've been doing the tutorial blocks is kind of a hackish way involving saving to a custom variable and then calling a new map action event.
- More character sprites for the map and on the battle screen. Also possibly look into some kind of walking animation
- Develop the various AI types that have been proposed in the wiki. The main reason that Ch1ST3 is structured differently than planned is that I had no way of telling the AI to try and reach Marisa's house.
- Unit based map triggers
If possible I'd also like to arrange another big IRC meeting in a few weeks.
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I am happy to report that we have released 0.3.0 demo with Another Dream 5B.
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Good stuff!
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With the demo's release, there isn't much to say. Only a few minor things:
- Lack of "Game Over" screen saddens me (for no real reason)
- minor grammatical error in Chen's "Since when can trees can walk?"
- after the second mission, the player is rewarded a "Bread Roll" item, but it doesn't appear anywhere
Actually, I wonder... no I forgot. Either way, there's been some nice progress. Looking forward to what comes next.
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The Mission Failed thing is the equivalent of the Game Over.
Thanks for the grammar fix :D.
Reward items are sent into your spell inventory after the battle. It should be there.
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Just a heads up, finals are upon us so don't expect many updates from me.
The 60FPS update has been committed to my local repository, so I'll need to push it onto the main internal repository.
In addition, I've added a draft version of the 0.3.1 targets on the wiki. (Link) (http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky)
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Hi. Finished with the school year.
I'd like to run an IRC planning chat thing next week sometime. When would be the best times for everyone if you are interested in coming?
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I have two more weeks until my year finishes (in terms of work, still got a degree show and graduation). But considering I just finished two major projects yesterday (worst week of my life, especially when the highlight was getting shit upon by a bird) I'll have a lot more free time.
In anycase, I can soon be making more sprites and graphics. Thanks for being so patient.
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Also added a Summer 09 Roadmap (http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Summer09_Roadmap) to the wiki. It'll be the kind of agenda for the chat.
I'm thinking this Thursday afternoon at 6PM EST for the chat. How does that sound with everyone?
Okay programming work for the summer has begun in earnest!
New updates for today.
# 5/12/09
- Added remembering where you last were to the world map when loading
- Added a World Map Location data to player data
- Removed code related to old style navigation cursor from world map
- Changed ALT+F4 to be the keyboard exit command
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Should we maybe push the chat time back to Friday since nobody's responded?
It'll be in
Server: irc.psigenix.net
Channel: #lostskyproject
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_wm_tutorial.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=wm_tutorial.jpg)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_inventory_header.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=inventory_header.jpg)
I kind of hope that we can replace those icons in the inventory header. They were kind of put together by me to be placeholders.
# 5/13/09 - Item Inventory Facelift / World Map Tutorial
- Added a world map tutorial
- Added say, choice to the world map
- Added a category header for the item inventory
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Don't think everyone needs to reply, but when are you doing it? Today or tomorrow?
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Let's run it tomorrow to give people more notice. 6PM. It'll hopefully be a little more brief than the last ones.
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Unfortunately due to nforceen circmstances I've been without my computer all week (currently using one at a public library >.<). If you want to meet tommorow unfortunately I can't make that, but if you're willing to push t ntil Saturday I will be able to attend that.
- Kyre
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I can do it both days, but I'd like to hear if anyone has a strong preference for either Friday or Saturday. I can catch everyone up on what happened in the chat since I usually go through and summarize everything.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_treasures.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=treasures.jpg)
# 5/14/09 - Treasures :D
- Added the fire crystal to CH1ST2
- Added processing of treasure rewards to map rewards
- Added a treasure catalog
- Added a treasure menu to view currently available treasures
- Added a treasure class for generic trading treasures and spell synthesis items
- Split up treasure / misc items from spell inventory
- Created new entries to main menu: Treasures, Spell Synthesis
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Since nobody has any strong objections, let's do this today at 6PM EST.
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EST? You live around here? East Coast FTW! :P
Anyway, I can't wait to see this when its done.
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@sonicbhoc Virginia to be exact.
I appended what we talked about to the bottom of the roadmap - here (http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Summer09_Roadmap#May_15_Chat_Log_Summary)
So after three long days, I finally got the deploy unit system working:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_deployunitscreen2.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=deployunitscreen2.jpg)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_deployunitscreen.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=deployunitscreen.jpg)
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Lots got discussed I see. Yeah, I assumed it'd be Saturday and fell asleep long before your IM and only read your post here a couple days later. Anyway, General and Media bullet points don't need much extra discussion so let's see about these Feature thoughts...
Status effects of various kinds are up to you to implement what you feel like. Balance can be sorted after everything is in there.
Support character system... remind me sometime to talk (either here or in IM) about SRW K's partner system. I suppose tirandirth could be contacted for that too.
Team/Friendship Attack system... again, you need to be fed information on how SRW does it. Both the Combo attack system (actually there's 2 "combo" type attacks in SRW which can be a little confusing) and the various Support Attack systems. Sailormoon Another Story's "hidden relationships" was about finding out what combinations of characters unlocked team attacks - once you had unlocked them, IIRC it was the same as Chrono Trigger's style of team attack. The Disgaea system sounds like what they implemented for Tenshi's Counter Attack.
I guess there's also the system done by a doujin project that I've heard of from a friend in Japan, but that'd be very complicated and doesn't quite fit with what you're building up in SoaLS. Namely, a knockback combo system, where attacks knockback the target's position on the map, and if they're dislocated to within range of an ally who has a charge gauge ready, they can then combo in and further knockback the target elsewhere, where if you've set up another ally right... etc etc
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The knockback idea I think has great potential, but would be rather hellish to animate (and possible code, but what do I know about that). The CT/SM:AS team attacks were mostly refering to the style of animation rather than implementation or how they work. CT style has unique and somewhat complex animation while SM:AS is rather simple. Disgaea style would be the hardest but probably the best to work with.
Anyway, if you could post how SRW does it when you have time, that would be good. I think I have an idea of how it works aniamtion wise but I can't remember lol.
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@Psieye: Could you please place your explanations here? I don't trust myself to remember to log the conversation, especially if I'm not at my own computer.
The knockback system looks interesting but I speaking on the implementation side, the battle engine would have to be modified significantly. I also think that we should keep the combat system as straightforward as possible while keeping it as fresh as possible, that is that we should go for quality in our features over quantity in our features.
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Well, done some graphics and in the light of sanity, I realized that Wriggle's head is too wide and flat. I'll change that tomorrow. Been a while since I last sprited, so I'm a little rusty.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/WriggleSpriteSheet.png) EDIT: (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/WriggleSpriteSheet-1.png)
Also started blocking out Reimu's idle pose for her battle animations. I think it'll be good to have idle poses for the characters that we can use to transition attack, magic, evasion and damage. We could possibly use them to liven up the status screens as well. Anyway, here's a rough block out of reimu's idle pose. Will probably block out her attack and magic tomorrow.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Idle-Test.gif)
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Blocked in a couple more animations. Magic and Attack, tomorrow I might work on the enemy sprites and get all the chapter 1 graphics out of the way.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Magic-Test.gif)
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Attack-Test.gif)
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Ok, so let's discuss SRW.
The Combo attack: 2 pre-determined units (e.g. Ran & Chen) can do an attack together when both have pre-requisite Morale (Spell power in our case) and energy (ammo for us). How it looks? I point to Examples 1 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNUmK-0bTn4), 2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oFwlTQUJqI) and 3 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpbIO9Q17lY) taken from SRW OGs. Mechanics-wise, your unit need to be within 1 square of the partner unit (diagonals count) and then you can use it. Only the activating unit's turn is used up even though both participate in the attack. Any EXP, buffs, etc only think about the activating unit - the partner unit is simply around to make the attack happen and to have energy used up.
Not to be confused with (c) attacks, which are also called "Combo" confusingly. Better to call them Chain attacks and I won't go into them here as that'd needlessly lengthen the post.
Then we have the support attack/defend structure. In the older days, anyone with the right skills could help out their neighbours (diagonals don't count). In SRW K, they did this pair system where you can only support your partner in a unit. Each pair is treated as '1 unit in the square' but they take damage separately. Only the front partner does the actual attacking and being attacked, but with support, the rear partner can step in to lend a hand either way. Also, who is at the front can be hot swapped on the fly on the player phase.
Support Attack: after the primary unit has done their attack and the enemy has counter-attacked, if there are any support attackers available (and given permission to join in) then they will get their attack in afterwards in the same fight. After the enemy's counter-attack animation, the primary unit is swapped out for the support unit who then does a normal attack animation of whatever is used to join the fight. Support attacks only do half damage unless a specific skill is learnt. The number of support attacks a unit can do per phase is also limited.
Support Defend: during enemy phase, if an eligible support defender is around (and again, they're given permission to intervene) then they jump in place of the primary unit in the animation, take the hit (while defending so they take 50% damage) and then the primary unit swaps in again to do the counter-attack (if applicable).
Ok, not sure if that explanation is waterproof. Tell me if something isn't clear.
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Elcura, with Reimu's M-type attack animation, it feels odd that the card appears from the palm of her unclenched fist. How about if she pulls it out with 2 fingers? Otherwise looks great.
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I'll try that Psieye, I might just draw the animation with the card in the hand from the get go. Anyway, that explanation sounds pretty simple, but those animations are pretty amazing. Still, things like that are a long way off. Additional animations could probably come later on, but as it stands there's still a lot of work to do.
Speaking of which, Walking Trees.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/WalkingTreeSpriteSheet.png)
Not sure we need that many frames/images. Could easily get away with the front or back sprite. A lot more of the detail will be captured in the battle sprite (including freaking face and throwing apple animation). On another note, you think monsters will need both physical and magical attack animations?
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Long post. Might add more later.
First a few things about the staff:
-Jamuko (http://jamuko.deviantart.com) is joining us as an art person. She's going to be working on new portraits for us which will replace the ones we grabbed from Walfas.org
-Kregon is joining us on mission design. He has experience with XML.
-Has anyone heard anything from Water and Wind? He didn't make the transition to the new forum and we kind of need him for map tile stuff.
Elcura, all those sprites and the Reimu animations look good.
Current work in progress
- Wrapped up the deploy system, but it's still a bit shaky and experimental. Still ironing bugs out here and there.
- Working on the trading system right now. The primary focus will be just on getting it up and running.
- Here are some ideas I've outlined regarding the system - http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Shop_System
- Some ideas for treasures: http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Treasure_List
Here is where we stand on the main already planned out things that need to be implemented to the game engine:
- Revised Spell Animation System (Kyre's stuff)
- Revised AI system (BBM29's stuff)
- Trait learning system
- Spell Synthesis system
I think we can implement those over the summer and at the same time plan out any additional features we might want.
The difficulty with implementing the ideas that Psieye presented are that the game treats each confrontation as a 1 unit against 1 unit event. Adding the types of changes to handle two unit attacks and two-units-in-a-tile to the battle engine would require a significant overhaul of the battle system.
Fire Emblem took the let two compatible units sit next to each other for a long time and you could get them to start chatting. Their relationship effects affected stat boosts to each other when they were nearby. This could reasonably be woven into the battle engine and would be the easiest one to implement. We would also need to establish how these relations are formed.
I like the idea of having offensive / defensive modes on the support system. It seems to add a lot of flexibility to the use of a summon. On the other hand, the choice of having to give permission to do the support actions seems to me to add a layer of complexity to the decisions the player has to make. Where along the road does the player make the decision? How is it handled if your unit is the one being attacked on the AI's turn?
We'd also have to introduce this concept fairly early on in the game so as not to introduce a big new part of the gameplay once the player has gotten used to playing a certain system. Mid Chapter 3 at the latest.
There would be a couple ways that we could shape the Support Character Plan
Defensive / Offensive Modes Separate and can be Switched
- User invokes a Support Spell. It's a once per battle spell (treated as a 1 use recharging spell action)
- Target is tagged with the Support Spell Status
- Support Character's presence limited by number of attacks and has an HP. If either goes to 0, support disappears. Effectively treated as a character.
- { Undecided: I don't know what would be a good way of having the player make the choice of putting the support onto offensive/defensive mode }
- Offensive mode:
-- Support Character less damage, Target takes more damage
-- Support Character does more damage on its action phase
- Defensive Mode:
-- Support Character takes more damage, target takes less damage
-- Support Character does less damage on its action phase
Pros:
- Adaptive and flexible. A support character isn't locked into a pre-defined role
Cons:
- More complexity in player choices. Player needs to actively manage their support.
Usage
I'd imagine the usage of a support would be early on into battle.
Defensive / Offensive an inherent part of the character
- User invokes a Support Spell. It's a few times per battle spell action.
- Target is tagged with the Support Spell Status
- Support Characters are classified as defensive or offensive. Defense characters have a limited HP and they soak say 50% of an ally's damage through putting up a barrier or something. They remain present until their HP drops to 0. Offensive characters have a limited amount of uses and don't soak any damage. They give an extra attack after the counterattack phase.
Pros:
- Less micromanaging required for each unit. Cast the spell and be done with it.
Cons:
- Inflexible, especially if player predicted what was going to happen to a unit wrong.
Usage
Usage would be situational. It gives you the extra bit of attack/defense in a tight situation.
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The difficulty with implementing the ideas that Psieye presented are that the game treats each confrontation as a 1 unit against 1 unit event. Adding the types of changes to handle two unit attacks and two-units-in-a-tile to the battle engine would require a significant overhaul of the battle system.
Fire Emblem took the let two compatible units sit next to each other for a long time and you could get them to start chatting. Their relationship effects affected stat boosts to each other when they were nearby. This could reasonably be woven into the battle engine and would be the easiest one to implement. We would also need to establish how these relations are formed.
I like the idea of having offensive / defensive modes on the support system. It seems to add a lot of flexibility to the use of a summon. On the other hand, the choice of having to give permission to do the support actions seems to me to add a layer of complexity to the decisions the player has to make. Where along the road does the player make the decision? How is it handled if your unit is the one being attacked on the AI's turn?
Naturally, any major feature that was thought up later to be fitted into the code would involve a major re-write. You had to do it for the phys/mgc attack/defend combinations and if you really want some Support Character action (of whatever style you decide on) you'll need to heavily rewrite the battle engine again. Your choice if you want Support Characters. Relationship Buffs are an entirely different matter of course - that became standard in FE and also SRW (though not the actual talking part).
The choice of whether to switch on the Support or not is done at the pre-battle menu, so it's not something you were building for. Each battle in SRW, you finialise what your unit will do at a pre-battle screen which displays hit chance, who is attacking who, HP, morale, any support active, whether to see the battle animation, etc etc etc. SRW lets you pick which weapon to counter attack with each time an enemy unit targets you. You have modelled your battle engine after FE and FFT, so it's a completely different path for you - you'll have to think of your own way to do Support toggling if you want it at all.
Oh and I guess I forgot to mention: Support Attack only works on player phase, Support Defend only works on enemy phase. You can't support defend for a counter attack from the enemy, it's only when the enemy is initiating the attack that support defend kicks in.
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That's a good point Psieye.
It's reasonable to expand the pre-battle panel outside the bottom right box. It gives us more room to display information about the battle and would allow us to do any kind of pre-battle selections.
Here's a brief update from the Developing the Trading System front:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_trading2.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=trading2.jpg)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_trading1.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=trading1.jpg)
Menu is kind of a hybrid of the stats menu and the map dialog panel.
- View Trades gives you access to the ordinary trades. Treasures are traded for special items. Each trade has a point value that accumulates.
- Special trades are unlocked when you go above a certain threshold of point value
- Advice is random chatting with Rinnosuke
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Latest update regarding trading system
This is the next stage of the menu allowing you to view information about treasures requested and items that are offered. Red text indicates an item that you do not have or do not have enough of.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_trading3.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=trading3.jpg)
Tomorrow will be developing the actual execution of the trade.
Tangentially related - We just passed the 1 year anniversary of this project. :D
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Tree sprite in game now.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_territorialoak.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=territorialoak.jpg)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_trading4.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=trading4.jpg)
Also added just a line of dialog that Rinnosuke greets you with when the menu opens. Also, added added performing the trade to the system and special trades unlocked at getting X amounts of bonus points.
Added status effects brainstorming page (http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Status_Effects) to the wiki.
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Next up... Trait Learning System!
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_traitlearning1.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=traitlearning1.jpg)
Currently set to have a unit gain 2 per level.
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Wrapped up trait system today. It can be accessed both from the current swap menu as well as directly from the unit's top level options (Select Spell Actions, Traits, Stats, etc menu)
Also, we need to get the next batch of music going, so I updated the list with some songs. The highest priority would be the minor battle themes and the event themes. (since we don't have any of the latter)
http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Music_Short_List
Please comment on if you think these would be appropriate.
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How is everyone doing? I haven't heard much from anybody lately in this thread.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_ssp2.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=ssp2.jpg)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_ssp1.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=ssp1.jpg)
Here's the spirit source control maps working. Their potentiall won't be fully shown until we get the AI updated (BBM29, are you still around here somewhere?) since we need to tell the AI to chase after the Spirit Source Points (SSP). Please excuse the badly drawn magic circle things.
The idea is that you have a number of these locations scattered around the map that you need to control. If a unit ends its turn standing on one of these, that unit's team gains control of the SSP.
The victory condition that's implemented checks if you've captured X SSPs and defeat condition is if your team is wiped out. We won't be able to have the AI really contest for the SSPs until we give the AI an overhaul.
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town theme!
soundtrack file (looped, fadeout) - http://huntersmusic.com/music/srpg/soundtrack/Peaceful%20Town.mp3
in-game playback file - http://huntersmusic.com/music/srpg/in-game/peaceful%20town.mp3
let me know what you all think...
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I really like it. Will probably use it for the intro-prologue stuff as well as other peaceful scenery places. It really does a good job in capturing the peaceful old Japanese village setting.
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I am BACK. Hopefully for good this time, though I am rather busy. What is the current first priority? Landmarks?
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@ Water and Wind: Welcome back! Are you still working on that Wriggle animation? I guess we can get that finished up and then maybe expand the types of terrain tiles we have available to us. We're moving towards the mountains in Chapter 3 which will definitely need new terrain. And maybe some shallow water for things like rice paddies near the human village.
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WIP version of Chapter 2 Draft
http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Script#Chapter_2
Will definitely need to do some kind of day/night effects for some of the scenes. (Already experimented with it a while ago as just a simple color overlay to the background)
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At a suggestion on the AnotherDream IRC, I implemented an option to skip the enemy walking animations.
I experimented with a day/night overlay a while back but never got around to doing anything with it. Here it is implemented since we'll use it for some evening scenes in CH2
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_bg_overlays1.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=bg_overlays1.jpg)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_bg_overlays2.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=bg_overlays2.jpg)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_bg_overlays3.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=bg_overlays3.jpg)
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Let's see...
- A draft of the CH2 script is up. http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Script#Chapter_2
- Working on CH3.
http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Script#Chapter_3
- It's a ways away but I just realized how many new sprites CH2 and CH3 are going to require from us. In order of appearance:
-- CH2: Rinnosuke, Keine, Mokou, Asa, Fuyuhana, Giant Fuzzball
-- CH3: Nitori, Momizi, Aya, Kappa, Tengu of various flavors (Wolf, Crow, and Red-Faced), Ayaka, and Misaki.
- I'm thinking of switching Asa and Fuyuhana's last names to their Japanese translations or dropping them altogether. They're awkward being English and all. D: I asked for Asa Aurora to Asa Kyokukou (極光) for Aurora, Fuyuhana Solstice -> Fuyuhana Touji (冬至) for Winter Solstice.
-The next big task for me is going to be revising the code for the paths between two locations, so that they'll be able to open up as the story progresses. That means needing to create a separate path object and I might as well at this point do an overhaul since I feel it's really tedious setting up paths (Both ways) embedded in each object. Maybe we'll be able to support placing connected places non-orthogonally from each other.
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Wrapped up this next feature. Certain areas of the game are only accessible after having beaten a certain set of mission. For debugging, I've also included a flag that'll unlock everything This is for chapters like CH3 where it makes no sense to have the whole of Youkai Mountain unlocked.
Before CH1ST3 and after CH1ST3. Order of everything unlocking is still tentative.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_mappaths1.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=mappaths1.jpg)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_mappaths2.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=mappaths2.jpg)
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I already mentioned elswhere that I couldn't really edit the wiki, but it only just occured to me to put the suggestions here instead.
(Ch1St3)actually, would it be a better fit for the insects to be set to chase Marisa instead of going for her home? I think it would play out more naturally.
[dialogue]
Wriggle: So the little human's still causing a ruckus?
Kodama: And after we went to such trouble to get her cornered. Make sure she doesn't make it back.
Wriggle: But she's already here.
Kodama: WHAT!?
[enter party]
Marisa: Just a bit farther!
Ran: There's a large presence nearby.
Youmu: Are we prepared for it?
Marisa: Just give me a path to my house, and I'll roast whatever "boss" still lingers.
Youmu: Sounds reasonable.
Chen: Really?
Ran: It's reasonable for her.
Marisa: Let's go, then!
Kodama: W-what are waiting for?! S-stop that human!
Wriggle: I got it.
(Is this worth all the trouble?)
We're going!
[insects take position]
[after Wriggle is defeated]
Wriggle: Okay, you win.
Kodama: (Ugh, that what I get for trusting a worhthless bug!)
Pull back!
[enemies leave]
Youmu: You're not going with them?
Wriggle: The forest will have its share of bugs, but they won't always need me.
Marisa: Decided to use your head, huh?
Wriggle: What was that!?
Ran: Now's not the time for bickering.
Youmu: Is there anything you can tell us that might help us find our masters?
Wriggle: Your masters? Well, there were a lot of ghosts this morning...
Youmu: Did you encounter Milady Yuyuko?
Wriggle: The only thing I found aside from all those flittering spirits would be this.
Youmu: Ah, the Lanturn of Souls!
Chen: Finally, a clue!
Marisa: Which part of the forest did you find it?
Wriggle: Around here...
Chen: Then, we're on the right track, right?
Marisa: Actually, they coulda gone any-which-way from here.
Ran: Then, which way should we head to from here?
Wriggle: Neither.
Youmu: Care to explain?
Marisa: This area is easily surrounded by the forest. Don't think we're ready for everything just yet.
Wriggle: Right. The least safe place to be, here and the Human Village.
Marisa: What's that mean?
Wriggle: I don't know the detatils. Something about a returning guardian and vengence on the human. I really didn't care for it at all.
Youmu: That was vague enough to be unhelpful.
Ran: It's our only other lead since continuing through the forest is unadvisable.
Marisa: Kinda need supplies, first.
Youmu: If we must.
<I think I'm missing something, but can't be sure.>
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Managed to update the CH1ST2 dialog with what you sent me in the PM earlier, Zer0. I decided to leave in a lot of the background information like what Kodama are. Will do CH1ST3 tomorrow.
Until the AI gets updated, there's not a way to tell the computer to chase after a specific person. BBM29, where are you? Are you going to be working on the AI over the summer?
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@Zer0Axiom: I don't quite get what's going on in the last few lines of the CH1ST3 text.
CH1ST3 revisions are for the most part streamlined into the script now.
I am targeting a release for 0.3.1 in the next two weeks. Feature freeze will go into effect for 0.3.1 at the end of this week. Mainly been working on bugfixes on my side. Finally patched up the centering on units not working when they were sitting at the bottom edge of the screen... I think...
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(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_chapter_titles.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=chapter_titles.jpg)
Chapter titles! Last feature from me before 0.3.1. Hopefully will be able to get some animation stuff from Kyre by the time we push 0.3.1 out to the public repo.
In CH1ST2 I also added a treasure that's located along the alternate path around near the trees (Hit the Kodama Lord from the back path) to give the player more incentive to take that path. It's a synth crystal so you don't miss out on too much if you don't go that way.
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Beta 1 of 0.3.1 went out to testers and we got a big batch of bug fixes in. Special thanks to Gekko in the Another Dream channel for providing us with a boatload of bug reports.
I'll be releasing Beta 2 for testing tomorrow night hopefully with a final release of 0.3.1 by the end of the week.
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0.3.1 has finally been released!
v0.3.1
Windows EXE - http://www.4shared.com/file/115802120/28a2d939/lostsky-v031-windows.html
Source - http://www.4shared.com/file/115801554/75328cd5/lostsky-v031-source.html
From the Q&A, the major changes:
- The keyboard command to exit has changed from ESC to ALT+F4
- There is now an option to skip through dialogue. Hold down the C key to do so.
- The world map is now unlocked as the story progresses, so the player is no longer able to visit everywhere in the world at the onset
- Rather than starting off with a fixed set of traits, characters will now be able to learn traits
- Rinnosuke makes his first appearance in the Trading System. This is still highly experimental and there isn't much in there at the moment.
- The Sandbox mission demonstrates an experimental version of a new gameplay mechanic called Spirit Source Point Capture. The goal is to take control of a number of magic seals on the map.
- For missions beyond CH1 where a larger cast comes in, we have developed a deploy unit system. Like most new features this is still experimental.
# 7/3/09 - v0.3.1 Final
- [Bugfix] Add Item sub action's quantity attribute not being converted to an integer
- Selectively hiding and showing the cursor on the prologue map
- Fixed the mission count on the save screen. Completing the prologue no longer counts as a mission finished.
- Restored CH0ST2 (Alice test mission) to appear only after beating Chapter 1
- Changed Trade #1 and Trade #2 wanted items
# 7/1/09 - v0.3.1 Beta 2
- Updated readme
- Removed the Lorem Ipsum from the news story
- Set the debug flags back to public release settings
# 6/30/09 - A boatload of bugfixes
- [Bugfix][Issue #4] Fixed a crash when the enemy is wiped out but the objective is not fulfilled.
- [Bugfix][Issue #4] Fixed a crash when attempting to view enemy stats when none are present
- [Bugfix][Issue #4] Fixed a crash when attempting to auto-center on an enemy unit when none are present
- [Bugfix][Issue #3] Fixed a crash when failing CH1ST2 due to information not being cleared out properly
- [Bugfix][Issue #2] Fixed remants of chat option in trading system causing menu options to be out of place
- [Bugfix][Issue #9] Fixed a crash in Alice mission due to incorrectly named traits
- [Issue #5] Changed "Save" to "Save Settings" to clear up confusion in that menu
- Added a reset to added units EXP and Level
- Added tracking of a unit's starting level to the unit class
- Grayed out spell synthesis since it's not ready yet
- Changed CH1ST2's "walk into trap"/"avoid trap" events to focus back on your units after the Kodama Lord Talks
# 6/29/09 - v0.3.1 Beta
- [Bugfix] Crash on viewing traits panel in stats screen in a battle map
- Added support for level restriction to trait learning
- Added a minimum level for Tier 2 stat boosters and Flight
- Decreased amount of items required for trade 1 to work
# 6/28/09
- [Bugfix] Crash when a required post-mission unit is killed off during the course of the battle.
- Changed Wriggles stats to make her stronger at elemental spells
- Moved some enemies around in CH1ST3
# 6/27/09
- Added a tutorial image for the spell symbols
- Added more to the tutorial about the spell symbols to CH1ST1
# 6/25/09
- Placed the world map tutorial choice at the start
- Placed an extra item in the CH1ST2 map to give more incentive to go that route.
- Added chapter titles image
- Added chapter titles display
- Added a display chapter 1 to CH1ST1
# 6/23/09
- [Bugfix] Centering units on edges fixed again
- [Bugfix] Centering briefly on units with regenerating HP traits when those traits didn't need to be used.
- [Bugfix] Centering on units was called every frame during the unit select part of the deploy screen
- Updated version numbers displays to 0.3.1
- Revisions to CH1St3, Prologue, WM Tutorial
# 6/16/09
- [Bugfix] Oh god. I left a Lv. 99 walking tree in the Chapter 1 Stage 3 map.
- Added an add item Map Action Sub Action.
- Added selection of equipped spell actions to scripted battles
- Added Marisa vs. walking tree battle to CH1ST2
- Added some new dialog to CH1ST3
# 6/15/09 - CH1ST2 Revisions
- [Bugfix] Crash on exit in mission manager
- [Bugfix] Regen abilities still triggering when HP is maxed out.
- Implemented revisions from Zer0 in CH1ST2
- Deleted a duplicate line of dialog in CH1ST1
# 6/14/09 - World Map Path Overhaul
- Implemented path unlocking as missions are completed
- Implemented new path object setup and migrated entire world map data into new setup
- Added debug flag to unlock world map
# 6/13/09
- [Bugfix] Options menu not saving properly
- [Bugfix] Unit stats screen crashing due to change on # 5/17/09 - Deploy Screen Work 3
- [Bugfix] Unit stats screen crashing on SSP capture maps.
- [Bugfix] Missions failed to load if there were no pre_mission MAEs present.
- Moved checking if a list of missions is completed to its own function in Engine.py
- Added connecting path object
# 6/11/09
- Added ability to switch cursor on and off
# 6/10/09 - BG overlays
- Added map bg overlays for sunset and night
- Added option to skip the display of enemy walking animations
- Removed options.dat from Revision Tracking (Really isn't necessary to track it)
# 6/7/09
- Bugfix in prologue map
- Added Music for prologue sequence
- Added in some edited dialog for CH1ST1 from Zer0Axiom
# 6/6/09
- SSP objectives working
- Created a generic "look to see if someone is here" function in map
# 6/5/09
- Added Magic Source Point object (Inherited from Landmark)
- Added Spirit Sources to the mission xml data
- Added capture spirit sources
# 6/3/09 - Implementation of Trait Learning System
- Moved TLS to be accessible from the character level menu
- Added support for multi-line descriptions in traits
- Completed implementation of TLS
# 6/2/09
- Moved get selected trait data to main engine
- Simplified the trait data generation code for the unit stats screen
- Added Trait learning main menu
- Added Trait check restrictions method
- Added Trait Points to save data
# 6/1/09
- Added trait learning system object
- Removed advice option from trading top level menu
# 5/31/09
- Added trait restrictions dictionary to trait object
- Added trait learning cost / restriction data to traits xml
- Added more traits to traits xml
- Changed the initialization to have only 1 trait / unit
- Standardized conventions regarding trait property levels: lv. -> Lv.
# 5/30/09
- Added special trade menu
- Changed get trade text data to handle both special and ordinary trades
- Added special trades unlocked by getting a certain amount of points to catalog
- Split catalog up into ordinary / special trades
# 5/29/09
- [Bugfix] Missions with treasures display rewards properly
- Added executing trade
- Added display of points to trading top trading menu
- Added skippable dialog text with C key
- Added direct jump to stats from party menu with C key
- Added display of missing treasures to trade select menu
- Added introductory sequence to trading menu
# 5/28/09
- Added ability to examine the items wanted and offered in an individual trade
- Added verification that a trade can be performed
# 5/27/09
- Fixed the trading.xml file's tags not being carried over to the new terminology from 5/25
- Added a trade select menu with ability to view trade data
# 5/25/09
- [Bugfix] More crash fixes to end of missions with deploy screen enabled
- Added trading main menu
- Changed traded/received to wanted/offered in trading data
# 5/24/09
- [Bugfix] Fixed the test missions that crashed due to the new deploy system
- [Bugfix] Fixed the error messages when a unit was already dead. The kill sub action looks at the map's total list of units.
- Added updated Wriggle sprite
# 5/22/09 - Groundwork for trading system
- Added a Rinnosuke and Shop Background to images
- Added trading system defining xml and reading capability
- Added trading data to save data
- Added association with trading system
# 5/19/09
- Started Working on Trading System
# 5/18/09 - Deploy Screen Wrapup
- [Bugfix] - Crash when target does not have a spell action equipped
- Fixed end mission map actions with regard to required units converting over to the updated Map.all_units_by_name system
- Placed unit names into unit select screen.
# 5/17/09 - Deploy Screen Work 3
- Added preset unit positions to mission xml
- Added ability to place and remove non-preset units
- Removed any non-preset units before deployment
- The use of the Map.all_units dict is deprecated in favor of Map.all_units_by_name
- All instances of references to units by a numerical ID have been changed to the above
- Map.cursor_key_search now returns the units name instead of their id
# 5/16/09 - Deploy Screen Work 2
- Added deploy select unit screen
- Pre mission node now takes a list of specified starting units that appear before the deploy screen
# 5/15/09 - Deploy Screen Work 1
- [Bugfix] Fixed left/right keys not working right in treasure menu
- [Bugfix] Crash when Defeat and Arrive objective failed
- Added intermediate deployment menu
- Added deployment locations to mission xml
- Added access to party menu from deployment menu
- Added ability to view map on the deployment menu
- Added the fire crystal to CH1ST2
# 5/14/09
- Added processing of treasure rewards to map rewards
- Added a treasure catalog
- Added a treasure menu to view currently available treasures
- Added a treasure class for generic trading treasures and spell synthesis items
- Split up treasure / misc items from spell inventory
- Created new entries to main menu: Treasures, Spell Synthesis
# 5/13/09
- Added a world map tutorial
- Added say, choice to the world map
- Added a category header for the item inventory
# 5/12/09
- Added remembering where you last were to the world map when loading
- Added a World Map Location data to player data
- Removed code related to old style navigation cursor from world map
- Changed ALT+F4 to be the keyboard exit command
# 4/28/09 - Upped FPS to 60 globally
- Increased FPS to 60 globally
- Changed pause function to count 60 frames per second
- Changed world map walking framecount
Regarding the script, Zer0, I implemented most of your revisions. One of the things I'd like to do in the future is to have a script that parses a mission XML file and dumps the result to wiki format so that there's an easy way to keep our wiki up to date with the latest script.
Thanks to everyone who has participated in our project so far. Couldn't have done this without you all. :D
Will come up with a list of things to do for 0.3.2 soon. Will be out of town (Trip to in North Carolina) from Monday through Thursday, so I don't know how much contact I'll have in the coming week.
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aaah it looks like I missed your update ever so slightly.
battle 1 theme is done.. I'm not entirely happy with it because it isn't so "whimsical" as you wanted but it was about as good as I could do with the provided source music. I dunno... open to suggestions on this...
http://huntersmusic.com/music/srpg/soundtrack/Battle%201.mp3 - soundtrack (looped w/ fade)
http://huntersmusic.com/music/srpg/in-game/battle%201.mp3 - in-game music file
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Awesome!
Damian, I rolled your newest music into the CH1ST1 battle.
I also created an updated list of the targets for 0.3.2
http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/index.php?title=Story_of_a_Lost_Sky&stable=0#Short_Term_Goal_-_Version_0.3.2
With this, we knock out most of the original envisioned gameplay features, which means we are ever closer to being able to put a lot of time into advancing the plot.
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Spell Synthesis has reached a proof of concept stage. There's a lot of cleanup / bug fixing to do but it works in a really basic way at the moment.
Top Level Menu:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_spell_synth1.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=spell_synth1.jpg)
- Free Create mode is where you are free to throw any combination of two crystals together
- Recipes is to view known combinations
- Treasures lets you view what you have in stock
Free Create mode:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_spell_synth2.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=spell_synth2.jpg)
- You basically select what two items you want and hit create
- 2 ingredient synthesis will be unlocked at the start of Chapter 3. That's not in the system yet.
- If there is no result (i.e. that combination is not in the game [yet]), you get your items back
- I'll put in a results screen displaying what you have used
Result:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_spell_synth3.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=spell_synth3.jpg)
- Here we see that we've created a healing spell from a water type crystal.
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Spell Synth is pretty much fully working. Spells can either be created from free-create mode or from recipes.
Next up is the Status Effects. I got three basic ones up and running: Poison, Stun, and Spirit Drain. Their effects are described in the wiki.
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Well....
Status effects can now be inflicted by spell actions. Still going to be playing with the XML specification for declaring it, so I'm not updating the wiki until things there are a bit more finalized.
I also made it so that landmarks can now be set to be impassable:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_impassablelandmarks.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=impassablelandmarks.jpg)
In the above picture the Torii gate and the middle statue thing is not passable.
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Here are some updates:
New Youmu portrait from Jamuko:
(http://imgur.com/LLor3.png)
- Anyone working with the internal repository, please do a pull ASAP. I reorganized all the code into packages at Sleepyd's recommendation.
- Status effects can now be cured by items
- Did CH1ST4 with meeting Reimu and Rinnosuke
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Wow, this game has made a lot of progress since I last played it.
The game works perfectly on Debian Linux (lenny) besides one insignificant bug (which is a bug with pygame not the game). I also noticed the awesome music only plays once (no looping). :(
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Thanks, Anok!
Regarding music, I don't have a Linux system to test on so I really don't know how to fix that. Music has been looping fine for me (XP Pro SP3). Is it a bug in Pygame? This is the first time I've heard of it.
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Actually the music stopped looping when I was playing on Windows XP. If I can reproduce it, I'll let you know.
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Hmm.... I know there are certain parts of missions where we call a "Stop Playing Music" command if there's a change in theme to a song that's not present yet. I don't know if that's where it happens.
And now for a little bit of a story. Jamuko submitted a revised tilemap mainly to improve the trees, and I got to integrate it into the game. Here's what it looks like.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_tilesetv2.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=tilesetv2.jpg)
When I went to make this change, it seems like I had been doing the loading of the tilemap incorrectly the whole time ( Using convert() instead of convert_alpha() which according to the docs (http://www.pygame.org/docs/ref/surface.html#Surface.convert_alpha) optimizes display of images with alpha transparency. ) . I asked for an FPS test from several people and they reported that the map was running at roughly 60FPS instead of 45FPS that the tests showed that it ran at before this change. Long story short, this gives us a 33% boost in speed on the battle map and all we need to do is adjust a few timings with things like movement speed.
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Rolling right along...
I'm thinking of just going straight to 0.4.0 as our summer wrapup release.
Rolling right along...
- Upgraded to Pygame 1.9.0 that was released this past week. No noticable changes on our part
- Added portraits to conversations:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/portraits.jpg
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Pushing on into CH2ST1
- It's a pretty big battle in terms of having a lot of enemies on the map. Keine's healing spells really help out here.
- This battle shows off some of the status effect stuff. The Fireflies have a spell called Poison Dust.
- There's a hidden artifact up in a little shrine thing in the top right corner of the map. It's pretty obvious that it's there.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_CH2ST1_000.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=CH2ST1_000.jpg)
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Moving on into CH2ST2 which is the concluding mission of this release:
Meeting up at Akyu's home (Right side of the river could use some decorating) and then...
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_CH2ST2_000.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=CH2ST2_000.jpg)
... Aya shows up the next morning to deliver the newspaper.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_CH2ST2_001.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=CH2ST2_001.jpg)
So I'm thinking I'd like to push out 0.4.0 in about a week. Maybe Friday or Monday depending on how scheduling goes with me going back to school.
Kyre reports that he hasn't had a chance to work on the spell animations.
How is everyone else doing?
One of the things that we will need is a design for Asa and Fuyuhana, since we're pushing up to that mission where they are introduced. I don't know if I want to dance around the Asa mission in the meeting with Akyu and co. I could give it a shot, but my art is uh... pretty sub par... and it'd be pretty difficult to create a concept together using Create.swf alone.
Another point of consideration is whether we want to be in Another Dream 6B which has a due date in October. We got about 500+ hits from the 0.3.0 release, but I don't know if we'll have a significant improvement by then. That and I'll probably be drowning in school work. >_<
There are a few more polishing points that I'd like to apply this week, as well as doing some more playthroughs. I notice that if you play Youmu like I do, where you have Youmu be the Tank character to soak the hits, she ends up running out of spell energy in her Dagger Throw by the end of CH2ST1.
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There's a very good chance of my laptop dying very very soon. The laptop's backlight is showing signs of dying.
I'm doing an emergency backup of everything right now, and I don't know if I'm going to try and push ahead with more work on this computer. 0.4.0 is postponed until I can figure out what to do about this. >____<
I'm so sorry about this guys.
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Back on track after that last crisis.
Content wise, a few more lines have been added to the end of CH2ST2. When writing for this demo, I cut it off before the part where it alluded to Asa's disappearance since that mission isn't in here yet.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_CH2ST2_002.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=CH2ST2_002.jpg)
0.4.0 is currently in beta stage. Betas are here:
Downloads: (Source) http://bit.ly/pN4IY ; (Windows Executable) http://bit.ly/zhaKE
There's a bug regarding spirit charge that will be fixed in 0.4.1 since it requires a deep fix in the battle system. Details are posted in this Issue Report (http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/issue/16/floating-point-bug-in-spirit-charge-system)
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(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Youmu-Battle-Sprites-3.gif)
Redoing Youmu right now, trying to get back into things. Gonna change the last frame probably. The first 3 frames are going to be the intro to all the other ones. Damn this is harder than I remember.
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That's a nice improvement over the current Youmu animation! Good job so far!
I've updated the bitbucket wiki in anticipation of a final release of 0.4.0 in the next couple days.
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0.4.0 is here!
Bitbucket Page:
http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/wiki/Home
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_portraits.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=portraits.jpg)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_CH2ST2_001.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=CH2ST2_001.jpg)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_spell_synth5.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=spell_synth5.jpg)
From the bitbucket page:
What are the major changes in the latest version?
Upgraded to Pygame 1.9.1
New Story Scenes: CH1ST4 (Onward to the Village) and CH2ST2 (The Two Historians)
New Mission: CH2ST1 (A Barrier of History)
Status Effects: These are displayed in CH2ST1. Incorporated at the moment are Poison, Stun, and Spirit Drain
Spell Synthesis: Still a little experimental and barebones. Only two crystal combination that works is Water+Water which gives a powerful healing spell
Health Meters for when battle animations are turned off.
Character Portraits are now displayed when someone is speaking
Changelog since last time:
# 8/18/09 - v0.4.0 Final
- [Bugfix] Crash when all traits have been learned
- [Bugfix] On unit deployment unit selection screen, stats were being plotted twice on top of itself
- [Bugfix] On unit deployment unit placement screen, unit sprites were drawn on top of cursor instead of under
- [Bugfix][Issue #22] Added in maps for CH2ST1, CH2ST2 which weren't in the repository causing a file not found error
- [Bugfix][Issue #19] Crash when attempting to load Unit Stats page with player character having no spell equipped
# 8/16/09
- Typo fix on CH2ST1 / Resized Reimu's portrait to proper size
- Updated the portraits to latest Create.swf images for: Reimu, Marisa, Alice, Chen, Ran
- Added new portraits for locations: Bamboo Forest, Hakugyoukurou, Hakurei Shrine
- [Bugfix] Fixed the places where Z works but Enter does not
# 8/15/09 - v0.4.0 Beta
- Updated the readme
- Added C-key skipping to worldmap tutorial dialog and future Say calls on the world map
- Finished up through the end of Aya's scene in CH2ST2
- [Issue #10] Tweaked position and size of text in save confirm menu as per suggestions in
- [Issue #11] Battle map no longer centers on first unit in the list of enemies at the start of the enemy turn
- [Bugfix][Issue #12] Trait details not refreshing when a trait is bought from trait learning system
- [Bugfix][Issue #14] Crash when attempting to examine non existent spell recipe
- [Bugfix][Issue #15] Crash when canceling from Spell Synth system with an item selected
# 8/14/09 - v0.4.0 Alpha
- Changed version numbers to 0.4.0 and saved it as a variable in engine
- Removed AD5B's splash image from splash screen
- Fixed Akyu's name to Akyu instead of Akyuu in the hints page
- Added some more hints to the hint page
- Changed CH1ST2 treasure to a Wooden Statue for trading
- Added Broken Lantern to rewards of CH1ST3
- Poison Dust now counterattacks
- [Bugfix] Fixed cursor keys frame reset to 6 triggering every 9 frames instead of every 9 frames if an arrow key was being held down
- [Bugfix] Fixed treasure descriptions flowing over edge of screen
- [Bugfix] Wrong treasure ID in CH1ST3
- [Bugfix] Crash when executing the last trade in a list of trades
# 8/11/09
- Moved duplicated code in battle system / battle system no anim into functions
- Added HP meters to no animation events.
- Portrait images for locations and regions. Reorganized how the text is displayed
# 8/10/09
- Added Aya sprite and portrait
- Fixed Keine and Mokou's battle image
- [Bugfix] NPCs circle color corrected when they are moving
# 8/8/09
- Created CH2ST2 Map and mission data
# 8/7/09
- More work on CH2ST1 (rough draft version of this mission done)
- Added Clear All Enemies sub action that clears out all enemies except required units.
- Extended startle jump to 15 frames
- Added two treasures to CH1ST3 as mission rewards
- [Bugfix] - Crash when entering a mission prologue when required unit is not already deployed
- [Bugfix] - Crash when attempting to call a MAE sub action to move a unit to its current position
# 8/6/09
- Added a poison dust spell. Removed test spell
- Added enemies to CH2ST1
# 8/5/09
- Added Rinnosuke, Akyu, Keine portraits
- Added Rinnosuke portraits to CH1ST4
- Added start of CH2ST1
# 8/4/09
- Added portraits to conversations in Prologue -> CH1ST4
- Human village region unlocked after CH1ST4
# 8/3/09
- Added portrait display support to battle map conversations
- Changed the colors on terrain tileset to Jamuko's fixes
- Upgraded to Pygame 1.9.0
# 7/30/09
- Load in of terrain is a convert alpha
- New Terrain tiles
# 7/28/09
- [Bugfix] Spirit Drain status effect updates unit's high / low spirit status
- Added display of current status effects
- Added map "heartbeat" counter for animations that ticks over 120 frames.
- Added status effect icon image
# 7/27/09
- New portrait image for Youmu
- Added CH1ST4 map (Reimu joins you)
- New character type - npc has been added. Rinnosuke is one in CH1St4.
- Added Exorcism Tag and Medicinal Drop to cure Spirit Drain / Poison
- Added status_effects property to healing spells/items
- Added cure status effects code to above spells
- Enabled using healing spell on full HP unit if the item has cure status effect properties
# 7/25/09
- Added processing of prohibited landmark locations when landmark is added to a map
- Added passable tag to landmarks XML
# 7/23/09
- Added status effects info to XML and spell code
- Added inflicting of status effects to battles
- [Cleanup] Proper Docstrings for remainder of code
# 7/22/09
- Added Akyu, Keine, Mokou, Rinnosuke sprites
- [Cleanup] Old style function comments -> Proper Docstrings: Objectives.py
# 7/21/09
- Started groundwork on status effects
- Created Poison, Stun, Status Effects
- Added basic execution of status effects to map checking for recovery and doing the action
- Added a dictionary to track status effects (Reset at the end of each mission)
- CH0ST1 - status effect testing
- [Testing Only] Changed the Death icon display if a unit has a status effect -> TODO: Separate status effect icons for each type
- [Cleanup] Cleaned up the imports to not use from X import * in engine
# 7/16/09
- Recipes finally working
- Changed execute creation to check creation
- Split up get recipe data to "get recipe data" which fetches one and "get all recipe data" which fetches all available ones
- Recipe no longer stores its ingredients key (Synth water, synth water). It's never used anywhere and is redundant to the dict
- Recipe data display shows how much of the required ingredient is required and available.
# 7/15/09
- Moved draw spell data for a spell not already created from trading engine to engine object
- Known recipes list is auto-sorted each time a new recipe is added
- Added a recipes menu to display known recipes
# 7/14/09
- [Bugfix] Crash upon loading save data saved immediately before any map was loaded. (UnitData not initialized with trait points info)
- [Save Data Change!] Added a list of known spell synth recipes to save-data
- Added a second dict to the engine to access spell recipes by name
# 7/13/09
- [Bugfix] Treasure was duplicating in spell synth ingredient select screen.
- Added spell result screen
# 7/12/09
- Spell Synthesis System proof of concept
# 7/11/09
- Created Spell Synthesis class
- Added spell recipes xml data
- Changed Air element to Wood element to remain consistent with the elemental system
- Split off Healing Light into Healing Drop (lv.1) and Healing Light (lv.2)
- Reduced all basic spells to only have 30 uses.
# 7/9/09
- Added Minor Battle Theme to the music list
- Changed CH1ST1 Battle to Minor Battle Theme
- [Issue #7] Worldmap now knows what direction you came from to drop you to the appropriate location when you enter a region
- There is no longer a distinction in the XML between entrances and exits
Thanks to all the Feathered Melody Staff as well as everyone who helped out with testing and advising.
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(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Youmu-Physical.gif)
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Youmu-Magic.gif)
EDIT:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Youmu-Guard.gif)
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Youmu-Damaged.gif)
Fixed the Physical attack frames
Added Magic attack frames
Working on Damaged frames
Might consider doing block/guard frames, since evading an attack or guarding against it can be the same animation.
After that, I'll colour them in and consider Youmu finished.
EDIT: Since the blocking out part is done, any thoughts on the animations so far? I have to refine them still, but while things are still rough, more frames for certain animations? Less frames? Uhh, different looks?
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All the animations are really well done! I definitely like the slicing motion of Physical Attack Youmu. A few comments on how they could be improved: Could you make it so the damage image get transitioned into from a neutral stance like the other three? The block/evade seems a little unnatural however. I think it's because the sword is held too perpendicular to the ground and maybe it could be placed slightly slanted back towards her.
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Seconded on everything Fawkes said. Excellent animations :>. However, a few more detailed thoughts on each.
I really like both the physical and magic attacks. Both of them look natural and have enough frames to make them look fluid without having the animations drawn out.
The parry animation looks rather... forced? I see that the sword would have to change hands from neutral stance if the spirte parries while staying facing the same way so there's no way around that, but it also looks a little unnatural in that she holds the sword completely perpendicular to the ground from the start. The animation seems a little drawn out as well, as in too many frames getting the sword to the front... maybe cut back on the number? Just seems that someone who's parrying an incoming attack should be a little quicker on getting the sword out in front. Maybe try something where she reaches back with the front arm, grabs the hilt and brings the sword right to the front, at an angle, with the rear hand on the back of the sword that she angles back after getting the sword in front. Might be asking a little much to do that while cutting the frames down
No idea if this kind of parry would make much sense but it's just an idea to toy with. None the less, great job!
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Alright, taking the lack of enthusiam about the guard animation, I redid it. I might change the transition frame to something less "flashy", but overall I like it a lot more than the previous one. Last but not least is the damaged animation.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Youmu-Guard-2.gif)
Fawkes: I don't think going into the whole transition for the damaged frame is a good idea, it would look like she's preparing to get hit rather than suddenly taking a blow. On the bright side, only the first frame (initial pose) is used. Regardless, I might do the animation over.
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Oh, I definitely like the new block animation. It really shows off the Youmu quickness that's a trademark of her character. Looking forward to seeing the completed version.
As to the point about the damage animation, if that is the case, then the damage animation should be fine.
==
0.4.1 Updates -
Goals listing - http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Main_Page#Short_Term_Goal_-_Version_0.4.1
Please give any feedback you might have on the goals of this next version. I might have to revise parts I'm working on depending on how badly my schoolwork this semester goes.
Due to a problem floating point numbers and the weird way their arithmetic works, the way spirit charge will be handled got changed to using whole numbers running from 0 -> 900 instead of 0 -> 9.00.
A number of other features have been added including the option to quit in the middle of a mission and return to the world map and something for the testers which is the ability to record all the print output to a text file. (Call "python srpg.py -p" to do it)
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I'll take a break from Youmu sprites for a bit and work on the original character designs some (I'll do both as I fancy, a little ADD never hurt here). I also haven't had time to read the script yet, but I'll probably do that later on.
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First Asa concept. Go nuts (and by that I mean, changes, likes, dislikes, crits etc).
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/ConceptChar2copy.jpg)
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I really like the design for Asa!
- She seems like she would fit right in to the Touhou world
- What are those pink things in her hair?
- I really like the Sun / Eyes theme for her. The Eyes kind of give an ancient Egyptian feel actually.
- Maybe make the hair a slightly darker shade of blue.
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Thanks, those pink things are like a sash that tie around the back of the head. I wanted to draw an eye on the back of it (like she can see behind her) but I dunno how far that would be going lol. You can kinda see it going around her in the 3/4 head view.
Anyway, I'm refining the sprites and resizing them a little more. Then I got to think of a strategy to colour these bastards in.
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Our animation blocks are 200x200 pixels. Will your animations be able to be compacted to that size or do you need more room?
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Oh, I figured 200x200 was too big (and it is) for characters. I was going to resize them to be 100x??? size instead. Since the larger sizes could be reserved for enemies and the last boss in uber cool background wing thing mode. Besides that, I drew Youmu at around 200x200 px anyway.
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Ah gotcha. In that case we won't need any changes in the code since we can just place the smaller images into the larger frame.
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As usual, standard disclaimer that what I write below is my opinion, it's ultimately Elcura and Fawkes' call on what to heed and what to dismiss as too technical.
Hmm... Youmu animations... I note that for both attack animations and the guard animation, Youmu starts with one hand holding the sword somewhat diagonally outwards, then transitioning to one where she holds the sword upright with both hands, before doing the rest of her motion. That feels unnatural - a serious warrior wouldn't be relaxed on the battlefield, especially an Eastern sword martial artist of Youmu's level. I'd say have her initial pose be that "sword upright in both hands" stance. I'm sure those better versed at the sword arts could have a long argument on which of the possible neutral stances is best suited to Youmu but this one looks correct and feels right. In fact, given you've drawn that stance with her rear leg bent and her forward leg straight, it gives the impression of Youmu favouring defence over offense with such a neutral stance but I'm getting too technical now, it's fine as it is.
For the physical attack animation, is there a reason why Youmu lets go of one hand after she slashes? Or rather, it's natural if she has to move her sword that far back after the attack, but why should she swing that far back after the attack? The rest of the animation from "sword upright" to "swing sword" look fine so it's just the final frame that can be edited so the sword isn't too far away - it's unnecessary movement (doubly so as she has to bring the sword back that far to attack again in a real fight) and meaningless movement is frowned on in martial arts.
Both the magical and physical attack animations could do with a little extra speed in the actual attack. Currently it feels like Youmu is practising a new move in a dojo, not fighting in actual combat.
Guard animation... I've discussed with Fawkes on where this animation will be used. It'd be on the "no damage is taken from the enemy attack" event of combat. There is no difference between "Dodged to avoid damage" and "Parried to avoid damage". In which case, wouldn't it be more natural to graze in Touhou than to parry? Having said that, there's nothing to say some characters can't block instead of dodging.
If you choose to replace the Guard animation with a Dodge animation, then not much movement is needed - Youmu just needs to move/lean slightly backwards (either into the paper or backwards in the 2D plane we see her in) to dodge, optionally with a half-step. Again, minimal necessary movements of martial arts.
If you choose to keep the Guard animation... you'll need to discuss with Fawkes on what sorts of attacks he has in mind for the battle animations. What you have there (if you drop the initial pose and go straight from "sword upright" to "block") is a motion and pose for Youmu to block a long, continuous attack or struggle - e.g. a beam or a long stream of bullets. It's inappropriate for a single, focussed and instantaneous attack because she's directly opposing the force of the enemy attack as opposed to the more efficient method of slightly re-directing the force. Japanese swords were shaped the way they are because there wasn't much good steel around - they're forged with emphasis on efficient technique, not on brute strength as European swords were made.
So if Fawkes had the "instantaneous attacks" predominantly in mind for combat animations, then it's best to have a Parry animation instead of a Guard animation, where a single swing of the sword (probably diagonally downwards from her point of view) is more appropriate.
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Now, Asa concept... It's good, I like it. I was pondering where she got such elaborate fashion from, but Touhou has never ever explained where characters get their sometimes unconventionally designed clothes so nothing wrong with that. Heck, her origin is the human village and outside people do arrive there every so often, so there's plenty of opportunity.
Is there any special meaning to the three curves we can see on her left sleeve? It's a nice extra detail to avoid having her upper garment (away from the centre where she has buttons and the brooch) be devoid of features in contrast to her exquisite skirt.
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Thanks for the crits Psi, very helpful. I'm always hesitant to redraw entire animations, but I suppose it'll be good since the first set of stuff I do is bad and the last set of stuff I do is good. I'd like to change that from good > great lol. I don't mind redrawing the animation (I say that half-hearted - cause it isn't easy), surprisingly enough coming up for concepts with movement is pretty hard when giving each character a personality through movement, but I certainly can agree that Youmu is a serious type, so the lax pose she enters from may not be appropriate.
Most of the reasons I can give for most of the questions you asked is either it looked cool or was easier to draw. I'm all up for accuracy and realism (which is partly why I'm going to redo the animations - the other part being that I wasn't happy with my technique). Most of the frames just feel right when drawing them, but it's good to have other eyes, a few hours on the same picture can make anything look good.
As for guard vs graze, I think for the most part some could guard and others could graze. Character's like Kaguya or Eirin don't look like they would dodge/graze out of the way, while character's like Chen would. I put Youmu in the former category, but I think she can do both. If the guard animation was kept as is though, you shouldn't think of it as blocking attacks just with a sword (which to be fair, isn't made out of the stuff normal swords are) but I always imagined something like a shield - like IaMP has for character blocks.
For now, it'd probably be best to stick to graze/block, I can see parry being a useful motion if a counter attack was involved.
Anyway, for now I'll redo them with emphasis on technique and position as well as speed. I hate throwing away art, but what can you do?
As for Asa - acquiring an outfit isn't really much of a concern. It'd be better to have something fancy than a boring human character. There's nothing special about the curves on her sleeve as yet, but I was looking for places to spice up the outfit after drawing her skirt. But I added too many wrinkles, and it's kinda what I'm studying at the moment so I just left them lol.
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Thanks for the crits Psi, very helpful. I'm always hesitant to redraw entire animations, but I suppose it'll be good since the first set of stuff I do is bad and the last set of stuff I do is good. I'd like to change that from good > great lol. I don't mind redrawing the animation (I say that half-hearted - cause it isn't easy), surprisingly enough coming up for concepts with movement is pretty hard when giving each character a personality through movement, but I certainly can agree that Youmu is a serious type, so the lax pose she enters from may not be appropriate.
I was at a writing workshop yesterday where the handout material had an extract from some book on writing. It was a list of "traits of an elite writer" where oddly enough, one item was "you find yourself throwing away good stuff you drafted when you do editing". That must be what's meant by good -> great on first/last versions, lol.
Yeah, I'd have difficulty as well coming up with movements to fully express the individual personalities of every character, but Youmu's was easy for me due to some experience with both Eastern and Western sword arts. That and Fire Emblem plus various anime had a lot of dialogues where one character was commenting on the fighting movements of another.
But in general, fighting styles can be divided up into two forms: emphasis on efficiency vs emphasis on overwhelming raw ability. An example of the latter camp would be Chen - she relies on having sheer abundance of speed/strength that normal humans would never attain and she doesn't mind wasting some energy to get the job done. The two camps nicely split up into "serious and mature, possibly weaker in a direct confrontation" vs "immature and childish, overwhelmingly good strength/speed/etc" personalities. The characters can be roughly split up into these two camps and that should be good enough even if we cannot express the subtle differences between say, Youmu and Sakuya, in the way they make a single swipe.
Mind, there's a 3rd camp: the "lol I know I'll pwn you even if I'm being lazy" style. Yukari and Yuyuko would fit this camp and here the emphasis is more on lulz and detachment. Think of Suika... slowly extending her arm and the enemy sent FLYING SKY HIGH as if struck by a solid-lead train.
Most of the reasons I can give for most of the questions you asked is either it looked cool or was easier to draw. I'm all up for accuracy and realism (which is partly why I'm going to redo the animations - the other part being that I wasn't happy with my technique). Most of the frames just feel right when drawing them, but it's good to have other eyes, a few hours on the same picture can make anything look good.
Ah yes, Rule of Cool and Ease of Drawing are certainly worthy considerations when making these animations. If it is cool enough, it can take priority over realism. Ease of drawing is the main reason why I'm not thinking of whether Youmu is right or left handed. And yeah, I can sympathise with "it was good when I finished drafting this" - many a time I've written or thought of something which others suggest improvements on that make me think "why didn't I see this in the first place?"
As for guard vs graze, I think for the most part some could guard and others could graze. Character's like Kaguya or Eirin don't look like they would dodge/graze out of the way, while character's like Chen would. I put Youmu in the former category, but I think she can do both. If the guard animation was kept as is though, you shouldn't think of it as blocking attacks just with a sword (which to be fair, isn't made out of the stuff normal swords are) but I always imagined something like a shield - like IaMP has for character blocks.
Agreed, some could guard, some could graze and some can do both so we're free to choose. Ahhhhhhhhhh, and Youmu's Guard animation is intended as a shield effect like IaMP. That intent didn't come through as is. I guess you'd have to talk with Fawkes on whether he'd overlay the "force field effect" or if you drew it into the animation.
It'd be better to have something fancy than a boring human character. There's nothing special about the curves on her sleeve as yet, but I was looking for places to spice up the outfit after drawing her skirt. But I added too many wrinkles, and it's kinda what I'm studying at the moment so I just left them lol.
Very true, better to have an eye-catching design than a boring anybody look unless there was a specific plot reason for it (and Asa doesn't have such a plot).
Hmm, I didn't notice the wrinkles before, which means they look natural and it's not overdone. Make sure Fawkes puts in a (simple) CG cut-in or something when Asa first appears so people get to appreciate her skirt in high resolution!
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Mind, there's a 3rd camp: the "lol I know I'll pwn you even if I'm being lazy" style. Yukari and Yuyuko would fit this camp and here the emphasis is more on lulz and detachment. Think of Suika... slowly extending her arm and the enemy sent FLYING SKY HIGH as if struck by a solid-lead train.
Ah, I never considered that type. Probably the hardest one to do, giving the illusion of ease but the displaying the power or skill behind the attack. That's going to suck...
I guess you'd have to talk with Fawkes on whether he'd overlay the "force field effect" or if you drew it into the animation.
Yeah, that's certainly something worth considering. Most of the animations I do I hope would have an additional graphic overlayed to add some finesse. Though how they do it in IaMP/SWR still boggles me, that type of animation is scary hard to do without knowledge of the engine and testing it out. Still, further down the road.
Make sure Fawkes puts in a (simple) CG cut-in or something when Asa first appears so people get to appreciate her skirt in high resolution!
Haha, for sure! I just have to make sure I draw a half decent picture of her first lol
Anyway, one more consideration I've been having. You may have seen the Reimu animation tests I did earlier. I was playing around with the idea of an idle pose. Something I was keen on until I started doing them, then I was looking for excuses not to have them, but from a presentation standpoint, they are nice. Also a good point to start on I suppose for the rest of the animation. My feelings on them are - hard to do, but worth it. I just wonder how much time would pass on average on the battle screen, I suppose I shouldn't be putting too much time into them, since you can just turn the effects off (my heart bleeds). But would something like that be good to jazz up status screens? Or would portraits/pictures do just as well?
I'm on the fence about them right now, but I guess I'm thinking too much.
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Whoa a lot of information here. Thanks for the help, Psieye.
Re: Animations
- Since we have the block animation, let's do the forcefield/deflect thing.
- I think picture/portraits should be fine for statuses. At most, we can have add a walking sprite to the stats screen. Anything more I think would detract from the goal of presenting the player with useful information about the unit.
- Total time on each battle is about 7 seconds in my completely unscientific timing of the demo battle in the tutorial. I'd say 5-10 seconds isn't enough to put work into an idle animation there unless we have more time and manpower. If you weren't our only spriter, I'd be inclined to support more complex animation work.
- If you can patch up the animations and tweak the sword motions to look more natural like Psieye suggested, that'd be great.
That intent didn't come through as is. I guess you'd have to talk with Fawkes on whether he'd overlay the "force field effect" or if you drew it into the animation.
If it's limited to Youmu, it'd be easiest to just overlay it on the animation. We support alpha-channel .png stuff so semi-transparent parts of images would be completely okay. Even with many characters that potentially use the barrier field, wouldn't it be easy to create a generic forcefield and then just drop it as a new layer in Photoshop on top of your sprite animation?
Re: Asa
Asa cut in can be done since posting up images in the middle of a battle is already supported via the same things used to display the tutorial images.
Elcura, how finalized is the Asa general design? I'd like to ask KirbyM to create a low detail placeholder create.swf image for use as an in-game sprite (like what I've done with some of the characters in 0.4.0) so that we can move ahead with mission design. CH2ST3 is Asa's first appeareance and it's next on the list of missions that need to be made.
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Mind, there's a 3rd camp: the "lol I know I'll pwn you even if I'm being lazy" style. Yukari and Yuyuko would fit this camp and here the emphasis is more on lulz and detachment. Think of Suika... slowly extending her arm and the enemy sent FLYING SKY HIGH as if struck by a solid-lead train.
Ah, I never considered that type. Probably the hardest one to do, giving the illusion of ease but the displaying the power or skill behind the attack. That's going to suck...
Hmm actually, it'd more be expressed through facial expressions than the actual movements. We can brainstorm together in words first before you make a first attempt at their animations when it's finally time to do them.
Anyway, one more consideration I've been having. You may have seen the Reimu animation tests I did earlier. I was playing around with the idea of an idle pose. Something I was keen on until I started doing them, then I was looking for excuses not to have them, but from a presentation standpoint, they are nice. Also a good point to start on I suppose for the rest of the animation. My feelings on them are - hard to do, but worth it. I just wonder how much time would pass on average on the battle screen, I suppose I shouldn't be putting too much time into them, since you can just turn the effects off (my heart bleeds). But would something like that be good to jazz up status screens? Or would portraits/pictures do just as well?
I'm on the fence about them right now, but I guess I'm thinking too much.
Ah, I see - an idle pose that's animated. Battle times are far too short for players to really notice an idle pose but I guess there might be a small fraction who notice little details. I would argue for Simple Is Best. The purpose of combat animations is to get across the point of "an attack was made, the result was X" (which players will switch off when they're trying to get through the meat of a mid-late game army as they've seen it 50,000 times by then). Idle pose animations go under 'bells & whistles' - a nice but non-essential luxury. There are a lot of characters to be animated. A static idle pose to start the other animations is probably the more prudent thing to do. Even professionals in SRPGs choose to shy away from the challenge of an animated idle pose.
The one place I can think of for an animated idle pose would be a near-cinematic long-sequence (i.e. 30 seconds or more in total length, not seen in regular combat) that's done in sprite animation. I don't know if Fawkes has any intent to use such a story device.
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No plans to do battle sprite cutscenes. I think our battle-map based storytelling is adequate.
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Cut ins can provide enough information in terms of emotions.
If it's limited to Youmu, it'd be easiest to just overlay it on the animation. We support alpha-channel .png stuff so semi-transparent parts of images would be completely okay. Even with many characters that potentially use the barrier field, wouldn't it be easy to create a generic forcefield and then just drop it as a new layer in Photoshop on top of your sprite animation?
Sure, I was just thinking that timing would be easier if it was done by the engine rather than on the animation. Not to say I couldn't make a seperate image for you to overlay when the time is right.
Elcura, how finalized is the Asa general design? I'd like to ask KirbyM to create a low detail placeholder create.swf image for use as an in-game sprite (like what I've done with some of the characters in 0.4.0) so that we can move ahead with mission design. CH2ST3 is Asa's first appeareance and it's next on the list of missions that need to be made.
I'll finalize the design today so you can move on.
Ok, worked on the attack a little more. After playing with more attacks, I find that the first thing I had was the best - taking into account Psieye's suggestions. I hope I hit it right, in anycase.
[1]
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Youmu-Physical-2.gif)
[2]
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Youmu-Physical-3.gif)
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Ohhhh that definitely looks like Youmu movements. Given in the actual battle sequence, this animation will only be played once (instead of on loop as currently is), the speed at [1] seems better so that players don't miss it, even though [2] might be the more realistic speed. Can you reposition some of the frames so that she's moving forwards slightly as she turns her feet from facing us to facing the right? Right now it looks like she's twisting them on the ground for no reason. Then again, this is something Fawkes can code too, so you two will have to decide whether the animation or the code will have Youmu move forwards slightly as she makes the attack.
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I like #2 as well.
Our battle animation system is set up to do that kind of thing so moving the image forward is no problem.
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Everything's moving along quite well, let's add a meager comment.
About the Asa concept: my opinion might be a bit different since I like asymmetrical designs, but I wonder if the skirt is a little too ornate. A pattern with fewer eyes for a simpler bottom. As for theme setting for her shirt, I wonder how much of this will make sense. Let the mark on the left be the shielding clouds that hide the radiant light. This signifies that even when overcome with clouds (difficulty), the sun (positivity) still shines. If you add half of a (sun)burst on the right sleeve (or both), it could mean how most things can only be seem partially at any given moment.
A thought in passing, how would it seem if the open eye was placed on a belt buckle that hides a little under her shirt instead of lining the skirt? Or would the closed eye be a better fit? Maybe I'm thinking too much again.
The sprites seem like their organized well enough so I'll move along.
An error of sorts, when swapping spell actions, if an item is "replaced" by the last object in the reserve list, there was an error. Slotting the item into an empty space is fine though.
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@Zer0
Welcome back! I haven't seen you around in a while.
For Asa, I think she's fine as she is. I'm not sure if the additional symbols would add to her design what is probably better communicated through action and dialog.
Thanks for the bug report. Just patched it. I'm surprised this hasn't been discovered before since the affected code hasn't been modified in a long time. Will be in the next release and will commit to the internal repo tonight.
As a future reference, we do have an issue tracker here (http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/issues/) for both suggestions and bug reports. It's easier for me to keep track of what's been fixed and what needs to be fixed if you use that.
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Encountered an error in Marisa's Arrival.
Ran was at 6 HP, Chen was at 27 HP, Marisa and Youmu were KO'd, and the Kodama Lord, three fairies, and a tree was left; also, the trap was triggered and I obtained the Treasure Item using Chen. I pressed A on accident and it tossed me this error.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "srpg.py", line 87, in <module>
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1435, in title_screen
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1475, in launch_wm
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 448, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 400, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1100, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1057, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1271, in menu_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1509, in execute
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1284, in turn_loop
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 601, in user_input
IndexError: list index out of range
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Thanks for the report. Just fixed it in our internal repository.
The cause was due to not having the indexing checked before centering. It could end up with you centering on a nonexistent unit in the unit list and crashing.
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Slightly bad news, seems that my C: is corrupted beyond repair... trying to salvage as much work as I can (again, fucking PC) and reformat. Might take a day or two (again... =( ).
If I used facebook, my status would be DEPRESSED.
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D: D:
Hope you get your computer back and running soon. Good luck!
Another new feature finished:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_auto_save2.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=auto_save2.jpg)
It is an autosave function that has a queue of two autosave slots (Gekko's suggestion). An autosave is created at the start and conclusion of every mission and when an autosave happens, slot 1 replaces slot 2 and new data is saved into slot 1. Also added a comment to each save telling you when it was made.
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Major tweaking of the unit deployment screen last night:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_deployunitscreen3.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=deployunitscreen3.jpg)
This addresses some suggestions that Gekko brought up:
# 8/29/09 - Deploy screen big tweaks
- [Issue #24] Placing a unit in deploy mode returns you to the character select level
- Added a max number of units allowed to deploy
- Updated the XML data to reflect max units by adding another required element in the deployment info.
- Added a display for number of units deployed / max units
- Added directions to deploy menus
- First time the max unit cap is hit, the player is automatically returned to the front menu
- Tweaked handling of unit placement:
--- Units may now replace already deployed units
--- C key deletes the unit underneath it if one has been already deployed
--- Units can now be moved directly without needing to delete it
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Next up is the AI upgrade. Since BBM29 disappeared, I'm taking over development of the AI. The approach I have is to use Finite State Machines (Link goes to a powerpoint file) (http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~teoh/teaching/previous/cs134_sp07/lectures/Lecture08_FSM.ppt). I have so far reimplemented the current AI and will work from there. We'll hopefully get Range Limited Attack, Healing AI, and Spirit Source Capture AI.
I've been playing with the survey functions on Google docs. Here's the draft of a survey that I'd like to include with the public release.
Survey (http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dDZLWXRzLVl0MzF3WC0wQXFENWdUdnc6MA..)
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One alternative to google docs for surveys is this site (http://www.surveymonkey.com/). Otherwise, the survey looks fine since not all the large textbox questions are mandatory to answer.
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KirbyM made us a create.swf version of Asa based on the concept art.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_asa_firstlook.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=asa_firstlook.jpg)
The AI is slowly making progress. Improved targetting selection has been implemented. It uses a weighted average of various stats and is described in detail here (http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/AI). An experimental version of the AI is in the internal repository.
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Script for CH4 is up on the wiki.
Will be working at the AI this weekend.
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I just had a quick idea I'm going to work on. When reading the script, I noticed some things like elipses and times where some emotes would be nice. Personally I think it's silly when I character says "..." when they don't actually say anything, so instead I quickly made this to put over the character's head.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Speech-Bubble-Effects.gif)
Some things still need to be worked on, like whether the bubble fades in or just cuts in, whether we use the bubble as a base and the effect animations are overlayed on top or if we treat each animation seperately.
I guess they can be used along with speech as well. Anyway, I'd like to know if that's possible and if this size is too big or too small (doubtful). Other icons can be:
Sweat drop
Angry
Blush (Alice much?)
Panic (not in a speech bubble)
Come to think of it, anything from RO that I can emulate lol.
Since my computer is dead, gonna use a friends and work on field sprites.
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This is a really good idea! It'll add some flavor to the conversations. Another one I would like to suggest would be a (!) emote when someone is surprised.
The ... bubble is a little too big considering that our map sprites are 35x35. Maybe a size around 32x32 would work well. As for image format, pygame can't (?) read in animated gifs, so you will need to make it frame-by-frame on one image like with the battle animations.
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I'm not the best at English, but I figure another perspective would be helpful when it comes to the script. Feel free to ignore me or refute me. I'm basing this off the scripts on the wiki, not in-game stuff.
Scene 1 - "Many hundreds of years ago"
Akyu: Our world's name is Gensokyo. Long ago, we were separated from the rest of the world by a great magical barrier which has allowed our realm to remain untouched by influences of the outside. Our world is home to both humans and youkai, those beings that people would also call playful fairies, energetic spirits, and whimsical ghosts, and other things. Those things that the outside world refers to as fantasy and myth are well alive here.
I think it's weird to open with "Our world's name is Gensokyo," is there nothing more natural to open with? Considering we're in Akyu's study, maybe she should open the map earlier and introduce the world from there?
I think you could rearrange this a bit, "remain untouched by influences of the outside." To something like, "remain untouched by the influences of the outside world/realm/land/whatever"
"Our world is home to both humans and youkai, those beings that people would also call playful fairies, energetic spirits, and whimsical ghosts, and other things." Something about this doesn't flow right, "Our world is home to both humans and youkai - beings that people in the (real?/outside?) world would call fairies, ghosts and demons." I think having spirits and ghosts together just says the same thing twice.
"Those things that the outside world refers to as fantasy and myth are well alive here." I would rework this to be, "The things that the outside world thinks are merely myths and fantasy are all too real here." Maybe add in something that suggests that normal humans are afraid if that hasn't been portrayed. Since I'm a fan of show and don't tell (for the most part), maybe we could have the screen sweep by places and characters that are relevant?
Akyu: Our world is vast and diverse. A Shinto shrine stands at the border with the outside world, the old Hakurei Shrine.
For the "Our world is vast and diverse", maybe add a few things to stretch the sentence out? Like "Our world is truly vast and diverse"? I don't care, I just have an image of a scrolling/paranoramic background shown while this is said, perhaps even showing the Hakurei Shrine. I'm not much of an enviroment artist, but an image like that I would love to give a try.
Akyu: To the western edge, the Forest of Magic is an ancient woodland filled with dangerous beasts and magical creatures. Did you know that among the beings in our land of Gensokyo, that the trees and their protector spirits are those who have been witness to our entire history?
"To the western edge, the Forest of Magic is an ancient woodland filled with dangerous beasts and magical creatures." can simply be "To the west is the Forest of Magic. An ancient woodland filled with dangerous beasts and magical creatures."
"Did you know that among the beings in our land of Gensokyo, that the trees and their protector spirits are those who have been witness to our entire history?" This needs changing, since it sounds pretty awkward to me. "Did you know that among(st?) all the beings in Gensokyo(,?) that the trees and their protectors have been witness to our entire history?"
Akyu: Within Gensokyo, there exist distinct worlds for the living and the dead. The spirits of the Netherworld are managed by the master of Hakugyokurou, the ghostly princess Yuyuko Saigyouji. The ghosts and spirits at Hakugyokurou idle their time with revelry in the majestic garden, which is tended to by the dutiful Saigyouji retainer, a half-ghost by the name of Youmu Konpaku. Talented in the arts of swordplay, this Saigyouji retainer is also the vigilant protector of the realm. It is from this world of the dead that our story begins.
"Within Gensokyo, there exist distinct worlds for the living and the dead." Maybe change this into more of a question, like "Did you know that within Gensokyo there exists distinct worlds (or realms) for the living and the dead?"
"which is tended to by the dutiful Saigyouji retainer, a half-ghost by the name of Youmu Konpaku." Could be changed to, "which is tended to by Saigyouji's servant. A half-ghost who goes by the name (of?) Youmu Konpaku."
this Saigyouji retainer is also the vigilant protector of the realm." Can be, "Youmu (Konpaku?) is also the vigilant protector of the realm."
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Will edit this and do more as time allows. Actually, I'll just post again.
This is a really good idea! It'll add some flavor to the conversations. Another one I would like to suggest would be a (!) emote when someone is surprised.
The ... bubble is a little too big considering that our map sprites are 35x35. Maybe a size around 32x32 would work well. As for image format, pygame can't (?) read in animated gifs, so you will need to make it frame-by-frame on one image like with the battle animations.
I forgot about that lol. And yeah, I can do an exclamation point as well as seperate out the images. I wonder about the tweening...but I'll just do that manually.
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About the opening... I don't know if our opening shot should be that of Youmu in the garden. I had wanted to do a flashback to Fuyuhana/Ayaka at the very start but we don't have their designs done yet. I'll sit down sometime in the coming weeks and see if I can work in some of your suggestions to the prologue.
AI update!
Good progress made today. We have a working Finite State Machine setup with state switching implemented. See the example battle below.
Initial conditions: Asa is at 1HP, Wriggle is at full HP and moved up to the front. A Firefly is in charge of healing.
1. Firefly starts in Healer Standby mode and heals Asa. Healer Standby state uses an equal average of both nearness and weakness to prioritize its target (Rather than a weighted average like the attacker AI).
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_ai_update01.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=ai_update01.jpg)
2. Youmu makes her second attack on Wriggle. This brings her below 40% HP.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_ai_update02.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=ai_update02.jpg)
3. HP below 40% kicks the attack AI into retreat mode. It sends and SOS signal to the nearest healer and moves towards it. A retreating AI will not actively attack anybody on its retreat except in a counterattack.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_ai_update03.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=ai_update03.jpg)
4. Firefly receives an SOS signal and changes state to respond. In SOS response mode, it has a longer pursuit range (30) rather than 10 for the standby mode. It moves towards the first unit in the SOS queue.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_ai_update04.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=ai_update04.jpg)
5. Once Wriggle is healed above 80%*, she drops back into standard attack mode and goes back to fighting Youmu. The Firefly without anybody in its SOS queue returns to standby mode and heals nearby units again.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_ai_update05.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=ai_update05.jpg)
* I'm thinking of tweaking this to something like 60%
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About the opening... I don't know if our opening shot should be that of Youmu in the garden. I had wanted to do a flashback to Fuyuhana/Ayaka at the very start but we don't have their designs done yet. I'll sit down sometime in the coming weeks and see if I can work in some of your suggestions to the prologue.
Hmm? I don't remember mentioning anything of Youmu in the garden for the opening shot... My suggestions occur after Ayaka and Fuyuhana have their conversation - where Akyu starts talking about Gensokyo.
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Ah I was referring to the current builds and how the prologue is presented there. When I was making those, I didn't have Akyu or anyone else, so the opening shot is in the garden. I guess with a placeholder for Akyu now we can build that part of the story as it was meant to be.
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The first post of this thread hasn't been updated with 0.4.0's explicit download location. I just checked some statistics while renewing my online file storage contract and found that people are still downloading 0.3.1 to this day. Yes I know you provide a link to bitbucket where they can eventually find it, but there's nothing under the "Builds" list which is where people actually look to find download links.
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Ah yeah. I had some trouble with my internet connection here at the apartment trying to upload to 4shared. I'll upload it this weekend when I go home to a better internet connection.
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Releases uploaded to 4shared. I'll upload them as soon as possible next time and try to be around a decent internet connection. My apartment runs at sub-DSL speeds.
So here's a little sprite I worked on last night for the Wind Weasel enemy:
(http://imgur.com/Jg9dv.png)
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Revised AI algorithms page for targetting / movement selection. New movement selection only works for standard attack AI right now.
http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/AI#How_does_the_AI_work.3F
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Good luck with this! I tried the demo, and it was fun!
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@Universalperson Thanks for the support. We really appreciate it! If you have any suggestions for improvements, we'd love to hear from you.
Last weekend, I updated the media list with what I think is 90% of what's needed to make a complete game. (Mainline story only) - Updated Media List (http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Media) The list of sprites and art is huge, so I think we need to find more people on the art front.
This weekend, I may not have a lot of time, but I will try and get AI working that will seek after spirit source points.
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more art support would definitely be great. Mostly a decent spriter because while I can do it, it's not my main field. I'm much better at things like portraits, GUI/etc, and in some ways map sprites.
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Are there any spriters here who would be interested in joining us? We already lost Water and Wind and I think others are occupied with their own projects.
Progress on programming front:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_rearranged_unit_display.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=rearranged_unit_display.jpg)
Rearranged the way that stats were displayed on the battle screen. There has been a problem where equipping two traits with long names is too long to fit on one line.
I also was able to get SSP seeking AI working for the attack AI. It's demonstrated in CH2ST1.
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(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/YuyukoSpriteSheet.png)
A Yuyuko appears! And fuck, I really need to redo that fuzzball sprite. Jesus what was I smoking when I drew that...
Yukari next.
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Yuyuko sprite is very nice! Good job!
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_yuyuko.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=yuyuko.jpg)
Added her in game and committed to internal repository. It looks like bitbucket was having some problems (http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/10/04/on-our-extended-downtime-amazon-and-whats-coming/) lately, but they have been resolved.
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Rough draft is done for all the missions and story scenes in the main story.
http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Script
Few things I'd like to add are a scene at the end of CH1St4 with Youmu and Ran discussing Youmu's worries about the journey and obligatory tea party scene at the end.
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In case anyone is able to play and give me some feedback before the end of the month, here is an early alpha version of 0.4.1 - (Win) http://bit.ly/12c0aK ; (Src) http://bit.ly/456hJo
Please report bugs to Bitbucket: http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public
I am targeting a release of 0.4.1 by the end of the month.
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Finally posting in here =X
I hope to get some portraits done before the release at the end of the month. I'm probably redoing Youmu's because I re-thought the style I'd use for the portraits, but once I get another example done I'll post it here and see what you guys think. If the old style is actually preferred I could stick to that, but I didn't consider it enough when I started on Youmu's.
I've been doing a lot of Touhou sketching but I'll try to get some more polished examples done soon.
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Link to beta version of 0.4.1:
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/149048/lostsky-v0.4.1beta-windows.zip
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/149048/lostsky-v0.4.1beta-source.zip
Took down 0.4.1 alpha
Changelog since alpha
# 10/24/09 - Some minor tweaks to terrain / trait learning - 0.4.1 Beta
- Rearranged some info placement in move menu
- Added terrain data drawing function to map object
- Added drawing of data about terrain currently under cursor
- Traits are drawn grayed out if you don't have enough TP to buy them
- Updated the last line of CH2ST2 to correspond with version number
- [Bugfix] Trait points at top weren't updating when you bought traits
# 10/18/09 - Tiny sized fixes
- Added ability to use Left/Right arrow keys on world map top level menu
- Moved Chen's starting position 1 tile down in CH1ST1
- Added some text explaining that Marisa can't take many hits.
- [Issue 29] Added an exit option to the world map menu.
At this point 0.4.1 is mostly feature complete on the code side. I decided not to mess with the AI any further. If anyone has art/music stuff, then putting them in isn't a problem however. I'd be happy to hear what you think.
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Ooh, I was thinking this was getting released at Oct. 31. I guess I took "the end of October" too literally ^^; I've been working on stuff though!
I'd be interested in some feedback on a tweaked design for Asa that I did. I know it's a bit irrelevant now when we're focusing more on the content that the game currently needs, but when looking at Elcura's design again I was struck with desire to draw from it ^^;
Here's a sorta sloppy picture of my redesign:
(http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/1245/asafinalcolor.jpg)
(She's not really faceless, I just didn't draw it in XD )
My thoughts:
-I liked the eye design on the skirt, but it seemed a little unbalanced, like it was too intricate there compared to the rest. I simplified it while trying to keep some focus on that neat eye motif, and I think having a flap in front seems Touhou-ish.
-The top with the sun emblem was cute, but it felt more schoolgirl-shoujo-heroine than Touhou to me (this might be subjective though XD ). I couldn't figure out a way to keep that sun emblem in a way I liked, so I added a pattern of it printed on the shirt. I'm not really sure if that's Touhou-esque either though, but I kinda like the look of it.
-I thought about removing the red schoolgirl-ish neckline top thingy, and changing it to some other type of collar, but for this I left it.
-I took the design from the sleeve and made ends to the sleeves with it instead.
-The shoes would be the same, sorry they're not in the pic. I made the socks a bit more ruffley though XD (ahh good ol' Touhou ruffles)
-This point is kind of weird. But I noticed with these colors and the way I drew the headdress thingy, it bears a bit of resemblance to Dawn from Pokemon. XD It shouldn't matter TOO much since the headdress probably wouldn't look like that when more properly drawn (and especially from an angle like the portraits are), but it's something to keep in mind.
My only other concern is that the design still has more interest toward the bottom, which I think looks nice but it wouldn't be seen as often as the top (because of portraits). Maybe the headdress can get some eye treatment XD I don't think it would seem like too much since I took away some from the bottom. (The more I think about it, the more I think this is a good idea right now)
Anyway, yeah. Thoughts? It was fun to work with your design, Elcura :D
Portraits are upcoming! I have numerous sketches if anyone's curious, but colored ones shouldn't be far along.
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It's only the beta out right now. Final version of 0.4.1 drops 10/31.
{posting on lunch break. More when I get home}
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Jamuko, I really like this iteration of the Asa design. I'm thinking we might merge the best of both designs. The sun thing looks better on her shirt as you have her drawn. I'm not quite sure how to change it, but the glyphs on her skirt remind me of the thing Ran wears too much. Elcura, what do you think of it?
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Hmm yes, the printed sun pattern on her shirt works well. While it's true that the original Elcura design was somewhat "bottom-heavy" in detail, having only 1 section of the skirt be patterned seems over-compensated. Fewer pleats on the skirt (i.e. same number as you have now), same "eye per pleat" approach might be better.
My only other concern is that the design still has more interest toward the bottom, which I think looks nice but it wouldn't be seen as often as the top (because of portraits). Maybe the headdress can get some eye treatment XD I don't think it would seem like too much since I took away some from the bottom. (The more I think about it, the more I think this is a good idea right now)
This is why the brooch in the original Elcura design was good - gives some detail to her top for portraits to show. If need be, elaborate the brooch or try a necklace/pendant but do keep it a sun pattern of sorts (optionally with an eye pattern added to it).
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Pushing the release back a week. There are a few things that I wasn't able to implement yet and there's a potentially game breaking bug that I need to sort out. If you unequip Master Spark from Marisa's inventory between CH1ST2 and CH1ST3, it leaves her with a crippled spell for the rest of the game. I'm going to go with a solution of deleting the spell at the end of CH1ST2 and restoring it in CH1ST3. Also waiting on Jamuko to get portraits in to me.
Psieye, could you set aside some time to play the beta version and tell me what you think could be improved?
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Well, shit's happened and I'm kinda back on track now. I won't go into details, suffice to say the last few weeks sucked ass.
I'm liking the feedback and the new take on Asa.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Asajointconcept.jpg)
This is a pretty old picture that I promised Fawkes a while ago...not sure what happened but it was where I took the design before shit happened.
I also like the sun pattern on the shirt, nice way to add some details. I like the parts that happen on the end of her sleeves. I believe some detail can be added (along with that part generally being thicker) but it's completely optional. ZUN tends to over design, so I reckon on that point more = more. I really like the new skirt design, though the best of both worlds would be indeed fewer pleats, the cloth in the middle and some eye designs per pleat. Could probably tone it down depending on how much attention we want to draw to her crotch... My original goal that didn't come across when I drew it (because I didn't draw it lol) was to have the top half match the bottom in detail by having a sort of hyroglyphics type stuff on her shirt. Oh well, swings and round-a-bouts.
In general, I'd say definite changes are -
fewer pleats on skirt (making it heavier/thicker in material, less creases and folds)
sun print on shirt, either side works (it's better when the shirt joins on one side rather than the centre)
stronger head dress.
points to be decided -
neck/collar area
shirt orientation (not sexual), centre, left, or right (influences neck area)
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Anyway, post your thoughts/pictures on those Jimuko, hopefully we'll get the design down after that. I was going to do a sprite as well...but I forgot who... maybe Yukari?
Oh yeah, here are some of the emotes I said I'd do. Open to more suggestions on what other emotes I could do as well as how to improve/change the ones I've done. It's all pretty experimental right now.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Speech-Bubble-sweat-1.gif)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Speech-Bubble-Anger-1.gif)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Speech-Bubble--2.gif)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Speech-Bubble--1.gif)
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Elcura, could you split the animations into frames as with the character animations? They look really nice. I can't import .gifs directly. I'll post about Asa later today once I've had a chance to absorb the information.
Another one I might suggest would be a (!) and a (?) exclamation.
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I don't think we should overdesign. We are going to have to scale this down to a 35x35 sprite with a 120x120 portrait, so most of the detail is going to be lost. ZUN only has 10 seconds to make a first impression with his design, we get time scales on the order of minutes to hours to make our visual impression.
Sprites: Yukari I think is what you said you wanted to work on next. We could really use Keine too. She's the only one I'm using placeholder images for that's in the party.
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Release 0.4.1 is here!
Bitbucket: http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/wiki/Home
Source: http://www.4shared.com/file/148238327/15f34e82/lostsky-v041final-source.html
Windows: http://www.4shared.com/file/148238452/2f973a4f/lostsky-v041final-windows.html
Added a new Marisa portrait by Jamuko.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_marisanewportrait.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=marisanewportrait.jpg)
From the Readme:
0.4.1 represents a major under the hood update to the engine. There have been a number of small minor fixes throughout the engine. Please refer to the changelog (changelog.txt) for details. The biggest update is a new AI system that behaves a lot more intelligently than the old AI engine. It is still very much an experimental work in progress. Some features that the new AI system has is that it tries to select the best target and destination in each turn. Support for healing units is implemented but not used in-game. The old AI system just looked for the closest enemy. The new AI system is also able to go after Spirit Source Points as demonstrated in CH2ST1. As far as new content goes, some more dialog has been added to CH1ST4 - Onwards to the Village.
Changelog since last time:
# 11/7/09 - 0.4.1 Final
- Enabled flags for Prologue/Splash Screen/WM Tutorial
- Added new Marisa portrait image
# 11/3/09 - Marisa Master Spark Bugfix
- Added Remove spell sub action to mission2wiki script
- [Bugfix] Remove spell sub action works now.
- [Issue 30][Bugfix] Forcibly removes Master Spark from CH1ST2 and adds it back in CH1ST3. Prevents the player from unequipping MS and having it remain crippled for rest of the game.
# 10/31/09 - Healing Spell Cards, Chen Trait Tweak, Bugfixes
- Added support for healing type spell cards
- Added "Sacred Treasures - Sunbeam Mirror" to spell catalog
- Chen starts with Regen Lv. 1
- Added a Remove Spell sub action
- [Bugfix] Canceling on the options menu doesn't change the music state properly.
- [Bugfix] Reset status effects for units at the end of mission scenes
# 10/24/09 - Some minor tweaks to terrain / trait learning - 0.4.1 Beta
- Rearranged some info placement in move menu
- Added terrain data drawing function to map object
- Added drawing of data about terrain currently under cursor
- Traits are drawn grayed out if you don't have enough TP to buy them
- Updated the last line of CH2ST2 to correspond with version number
- [Bugfix] Trait points at top weren't updating when you bought traits
# 10/18/09 - Tiny sized fixes
- Added ability to use Left/Right arrow keys on world map top level menu
- Moved Chen's starting position 1 tile down in CH1ST1
- Added some text explaining that Marisa can't take many hits.
- [Issue 29] Added an exit option to the world map menu.
# 10/17/09 - Pursuit AI - 0.4.1 Alpha
- Autosave enabled by default
- Added Pursuit type AI that does not have a restricted range (Best used with Flight trait)
- Added Flight trait to fireflies in CH2ST1 and gave them the pursuit AI
- Added a scene with Youmu and Ran to CH1ST4
# 10/4/09 - Yuyuko
- Added Yuyuko sprite / portrait images
- Added Yuyuko to the portraits catalog
- Added Yuyuko to Sandbox map as demo and replaced Asa.
# 10/3/09 - SSP Seeking AIs
- SSPs stored in map as a dictionary with keys as locations
- Added some support for SSP capture with the AI
- Moved CH1ST4 to Western Village Path
- Adjusted world map path unlocking to compensate for the the above change
- Traits are displayed in two lines on the battle screen. This fixes problems with long trait names
- [Bugfix] CH1ST2's Wooden Statue treasure item was stated as given but not actually added.
# 9/20/09 - Wind Weasels Youkai added
- Replaced 3 fuzzballs in CH2ST1 with wind weasels
- Added Wind Weasel sprite
- Moved some enemies around in CH2ST1
# 9/19/09 - Destination condition optimization algorithm + Bugfixes
- Attack AI has received a movement optimization algorithm
- Increased Rice Cake's spell use to 8
- [Bugfix] Enemy units not acting if a previous unit was just defeated
- [Bugfix] Crash due to typo in CH1ST3 mission xml
- [Bugfix] Crash due to failure to assign AI to one of the fireflies in CH2ST2
# 9/13/09 - Healing AI bugfix and improvements
- Moved some common methods to parent AI state class
- Deprecated old ai and moved it into the inactive code
- Rather than going directly to first target that signals, healer SOS response prioritizes among its list with same formula as standby mode
- Healer Standby AI seeks out nearest ally if nobody is in range
- [Bugfix] SSPs not resetting when mission is failed
- [Bugfix] Fixed an error where ALT+F4 wasn't triggering the quit command when certain other modifers were active like numlock
- [Bugfix] Crash when a unit in a healer's SOS list is defeated before they get full healed.
# 9/12/09 - Healer Standby / Healer SOS / Attack Retreat States
- AI is assigned at the initialization stage instead of the adding unit to map stage.
- Added assignment of initial AI to mission XML
- Added Healer, Healer SOS, and Attack Retreat AI States
- Added diagnostic print statements to the AI detailing target selection and state switching
- Added set HP sub action
- Changed the names of sandbox units to properly match what their sprites are
- [Bugfix] Crash when AI unit goes through prioritization with no spell equipped
- [Bugfix] Crash when last player is killed off by a status effect
# 9/7/09 - New AI Targetting Formula and Asa
- Changed targetting algorithm for AI to use a weighted avg of target's distance, weakness, and effectivness of AI's equipped spell
- Added Asa to sandbox
- Added Asa's sprite / portrait
- Moved a mushroom in CH1ST2 one tile down.
# 9/5/09 - AI Finite State Machines
- Created an AI Finite State Machine system
- Implemented current AI system in new FSM system
- Changed the unit cap on sandbox to 6 units.
- [Bugfix] Reward item named wrong (didn't catch one of the rice cake items)
# 9/2/09 - Item bugfix and tweaks / Version number update
- CH1ST1, CH1ST3 Typofix
- Updated version display to 0.4.1
- Moved Broken Lantern item to a map action given item.
- Bread Roll -> Rice Cake
- [Bugfix] Exiting a mission by failing / quitting allowed you to keep items added by Map Actions.
- Map Action items are now added at a missions' successful conclusion
# 8/29/09 - Deploy screen big tweaks
- [Issue #24] Placing a unit in deploy mode returns you to the character select level
- Added a max number of units allowed to deploy
- Updated the XML data to reflect max units by adding another required element in the deployment info.
- Added a display for number of units deployed / max units
- Added directions to deploy menus
- First time the max unit cap is hit, the player is automatically returned to the front menu
- Tweaked handling of unit placement:
--- Units may now replace already deployed units
--- C key deletes the unit underneath it if one has been already deployed
--- Units can now be moved directly without needing to delete it
# 8/27/09
- Autosave set to before/after missions
- Moved autosave code to up around the event execute code in the location class instead of within each event
- Changed "Autosave before missions" in options to Autosave before/after missions
# 8/26/09
- [Bugfix] Crash when using ally/enemy centering if allies/enemies have been defeated
- Added a queue of 2 auto-save slots with #1 containing most recent autosave data, and #2 containing the next most recent.
- [Save Data Change!] Added a comment to the save data that shows when the save was made and whether it was an autosave
- [Bugfix] Crash when the last spell in a spell inventory list is swapped out for another spell
# 8/25/09
- Added rudimentary 1 slot auto-save functionality
- Added auto-save enable/disable to the options system
- Expanded the save data slots to include an autosave box
# 8/23/09
- Added a script mission2wiki.py that exports the mission data to the Mediawiki format
# 8/22/09
- [Bugfix] Post mission results screen displays the location portrait / description
- [Bugfix] Results display uses form [Delta(SC)] to [New SC] for both attacker and defender
- [Issue #21 ] Added option to end a mission
- [Issue #20 ] Send all print/error statements to text file output.txt enabled with "python srpg.py -p"
# 8/21/09 - SC now represented as Ints instead of Floats
- Bugfix to address Issue #16
- Converting all spirit charge values to ints instead of floats.
- SC displayed as 500 instead of 5.00.
Thanks to everyone's hard work and contributions to the project. I'll work on getting the goals for the next version put together in the next week or so.
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Here's my list of goals for what I'd like to accomplish for 0.4.2 which I am tentatively setting as a release for the end of the year. Might push it back a little since 0.4.1 was delayed a lot. I don't think we had a Fall release last year. I intend to pretty much power though this during Thanksgiving and winter break though.
http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky#To-do_List
I would really love to hear what could be improved in 0.4.1. I haven't really heard much of any feedback from anyone.
I deliberately left out Art and Music since I don't know where everyone stands as far as the next few months goes. Anyone able to say what they would be able to work on coming up?
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(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_emotion_bubbles.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=emotion_bubbles.jpg)
Implemented Elcura's emotion bubble animations. :D
The "..."s in Marisa's Arrival have been replaced by the dot dot dot emote.
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Developers mainly, I've added a single mission launcher script. It'll allow us to test a mission without needing to play through the rest of the game. It's only available in the source version since it requires editing the python file to set the characters up. Please grab it from the internal repository.
Instructions are included in the mission_launcher.py with an example.
I'd also like to propose an update to the spell crafting system. I don't think that having the player manually combine the crystals is a good way to go. It is terribly unintuitive and relies on a lot of trial of error. One of the problems that we've been presented with is that the player doesn't really know what they get when they combine synth item A and synth item B. I'd like to go with a system that's based on recipes and these recipes would be acquired by completing missions. Optional missions would give you access to additional spells that you can craft.
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First off, I'm really loving Google Wave as a collaboration tool. I've sent out all the invites I have to people who were online at the time, but I will prioritize development team members in the next batch of invites I get. Let me know if I didn't get you in the first invite batch.
I posted over at Pooshlmer on this thread [link] (http://pooshlmer.com/wakaba/res/414011.html). The responses were largely positive and supportive.
There were some good suggestions that I'm planning on adding to 0.4.2
- Notification that a spell has run out
- Unit death quotes
There was also the suggestion of Mouse and Gamepad support. I'll have to research how to do that so it is unlikely to make it into this version.
I already implemented the spell exhaustion alerts. I also started into the SC cost implementation. It wasn't too difficult of a fix, but note that this does break Save File compatibility. It's difficult to say how well this works, but this does make things a little more tactical especially in areas of lots of enemies. I changed the SC rewards from regular attack gives you 5 SC to regular attack gives you 20 SC.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_used_up_spells.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=used_up_spells.jpg) (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_sc_cost.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=sc_cost.jpg)
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Also posted on the Wave.
Revised spell synth system is mostly in place.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_spell_synthv2.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=spell_synthv2.jpg)
[X] Recipe system already in place. Make it the primary interface to the spell crafting system. At this point the free create system has been deprecated.
[X] Unlock recipes. Implemented as a sub action in usual mission scripting XML.
Tutorials
Item Creation Basics
[Next Version] Treasure Crafting
[Next Version] Crystal synthesis
[Next Version] Treasure Crafting
[Next Version] Crystal Synthesis
[Next Version] Tier 2 recipes would be unlocked by a sidequest in Chapter 3. Basic recipes would be available immediately after CH1ST4:
[Next Version] Another feature I would like to add is a way to decompose non-story critical treasures into elements. This gives the player some choice as to whether they want to trade in the treasures for items or use them for crafting.
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I only recently joined the shrine maiden forum, and only just recently discovered this project.
I'd love to help out but i don't know where...
oh I got it.
Having done programming for years now and having developed a few simple games, I could possibly assist in testing. I enjoy discussing game mechanics at length but lack the programming skills to carry out my visions. So while I cannot succeed with independent developing, I'd like to help out in any way I can.
On the game:
it reminds me of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance crossed with Fire Emblem.
I'm concerned that the battle themes are too calming..I always think of SRPG themes as fast paced and grand. The grandeur of armies fighting armies. I suggest making a touhou-esque remix, but make it grand. Study the music in Fire Emblem for inspiration.
Also allow me to disable exp messages in the options please. The pop-ups while useful to some, distract me from the battle. Can you guys find a way to allow in mission saving, or at least suspend data.
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We could use all the help we can get. If you have IRC can you hop into our channel at some point? ( irc.psigenix.net #lostskyproject ) I'm in the middle of final exam deathyness right now but I'll try to get you set up for testing in maybe the next week. Welcome aboard!
I don't think we should change the current music since we are really short on hands in that front. We could use more ears for feedback for future music though so thanks for your input.
Disabling the exp messages can be added with not too much difficulty, but mid-battle saving will need a lot more work. I have given it some thought but it's not an expected addition in the next couple releases. I would love to have that feature though.
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the exp messages are a minor point to me though.
Great..
however I too am in the middle of final exams.
How about we wait till mid December when all this exam stuff is over.
it's better for the both of us.
Then comes the question of what you expect alpha testers to do.
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We'll need to get you set up with Python / Pygame and running from source. Are you at all familiar with using version control software like SVN, Mercurial, or Git? We use Mercurial for our version control so I can show you how to get that working and be able to access the latest code versions. There's a GUI version of Mercurial (TortoiseHg (http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/)) as well as a command line version, and it is fairly straightforward to use.
As for what tasks need to be done, mainly whenever new features are added they should be tested by as many people as possible and we need feedback as to whether the implementation could be improved. Bitbucket's bug tracker (http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/issues) makes reporting bugs and suggestions easy to keep organized.
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Are you at all familiar with using version control software like SVN, Mercurial, or Git?
No, but let's wait till after exam season to start.
Strange thing: on the mission Lost lantern, I made a mistake and decided to retry the mission. When I restarted the mission Marisa had a redundant master spark in her skill menu.
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I ran into a problem when my character's basic attack ran out and I don't know how to replenish them. I liked playing the game but past the human village.
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You need to use the Spell Synthesis menu to create new spells. I think you should have at least an iron ore to build a Dagger Throw. I know that Youmu runs out of her standard attack by this time.
I realize that this part isn't well explained and we're completely restructuring it for the next release to be more intuitive.
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Speaking of that point though...
I've got to the third mission of the game and I'm already running low on healing spells..
Should this be happening?
And is the thing with the redundant copy of master spark in the character's spell menu a glitch or what?
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Back on track, working on sprites. Will just post them here if googlewave doesn't work.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Idle-1.gif)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Idle-2.gif)
Working on making it all...pretty now.
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Sorry I haven't been replying. Almost done with semester.
@mew77
You should have gotten a rice cake item after mission 2. We maybe need to add a reminder to equip it.
Did you at some point remove Marisa's masterspark? At the end of ch1st2 the game is supposed to remove it from her inventory and add it back in ch1st3. I'll doublecheck on that.
Also do you have Google wave? We are doing some of our planning stuff over wave so I'd be happy to send you an invite.
@Elcura
New youmu looks very nice. I'll need to add support for animated idle stances. Are you planning on working on the map sprites? I think we still need some (Asa/Lord Fuzzy/Fuyuhana) to push on to finish ch2. I'll see what I can do about placeholders for them. We also need basic attack animations for Reimu who never received any.
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Yeah, I couldn't imagine doing it without an idle. Can be used just to make things less static around the battle screen, can be used on menu screens etc, besides that I think I may have found my stride so to say. But idle frames are easy compared to the rest of the animations.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/YoumuSpriteTest.png)
Hopefully everything will look like that, so let's get it done~
Anyway, I will finish some map sprites later, I'm getting a new computer for christmas, so during that downtime I can do some map sprites.
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I'd recommend just adding a notice when the player gets a new item. No I did not remove any spells since I downloaded it.
As for the master spark glitch, I had started the mission and according to the plot Marisa got master spark back. partway I made a mistake and decided to restart the mission. In which case the plot event probably gave her a redundant copy of master spark. Perhaps have the program remove master spark from the inventory if a player tries to restart the mission.
I do not have google wave.
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To clarify the duplicate MS spell appears in ch1st3? I'll see if I can fix that. The entire repairing Marisa's MS spell opened up a whole slew of bugs that required not so elegant fixes.
Can you pm me your email so I can add you to our Wave?
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maybe good news and maybe bad news. I'm home for christmas but I think I left my tablet pen back at uni... so I dunno how well I'll be able to make sprites, but I should at least be able to finish the idle animation and do the map sprites. That's of course if I can't find a work around.
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@Elcura - Thanks for the update. Hope we can get a lot of progress over the winter break.
@Mew77 - Do you have IRC/AIM/MSN? I'd like to get you access to the latest internal version for testing. Also what OS are you running? In light of the fact that spamming Master Spark is no longer an option due to the new spell cost and I'd rather not have to write hackish workarounds to get Marisa's MS spell restoration working for what is essentially a one purpose event that'll never get used in the game again, I set MS to have 2 uses and just fully recharge between CH1ST2 and CH1ST3 as if it were another spell card. The dialog has been changed a little to reflect that.
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My MSN is my e-mail.
And I primarily use e-mail to communicate online...That and PM's
But you can find me on MSn using my e-mail
I use windows vista home
A few minor things..
It would be nice if healing attacks raised the spirit charge meter, I find I have underdeveloped characters because chen and ran need to be used for healing so much.
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Mew - Added you to the wave. I'd like to have some brainstorming sessions in the next few weeks. No specific time since wave just adds stuff. Just check our postings and reply to them at your leisure.
Re: Healing attacks recharging the spirit meter. We discussed this a while back and since everyone can attack, your healers will be able to attack and gain SC as well. I think a compromise could be that we allow healing spells to get a +5-10 SC boost while healing items don't. [Edit: I'm a (9). Healing Spells give you the same boost as regular attack. No crits. Healing Items do not] Oh and Chen if you level her up is a good defense character. Her attack is weak, but she can take a lot of hits and her regen makes her able to last long without needing a healer always backing her up. Ran is also useful as a caster. Not as fragile as Marisa, plus she has Defense+ lv.1 to hold off against physical attacks.
I'm working on a tutorial to get you started on the testing and for future testers. Here (http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Python_Setup_Instructions) is the tutorial. You'll need to at the very basic, get python / pygame set up. Nothing complicated, just two installers and then adjust your environment settings as shown there on the wiki. Then, you'll need to set up Mercurial to pull the latest releases. I can help you if you run into any trouble. Let me know when you've registered on Bitbucket so that I can give you access to the internal code repository. If you run into any trouble, please let me know. I'd be more than happy to help you get started.
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Last of the new SC cost system is in place. Added a display of the SC Costs to the post-battle screen. I'm uncertain whether to put a - sign in front of the SC cost or not. The version I committed to the repository doesn't have it since a Cost is a positive number, but it looks kind of odd since you expect to add those numbers in the column.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_sc_cost_display.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=sc_cost_display.jpg)
Since I'm snowed in, I'm going to be working on it all tomorrow. To do next: spell tutorials.
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http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Python_Setup_Instructions
I followed the instructions as per the video but i still get the error at the command line...
What should I do?
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Last of the new SC cost system is in place. Added a display of the SC Costs to the post-battle screen. I'm uncertain whether to put a - sign in front of the SC cost or not. The version I committed to the repository doesn't have it since a Cost is a positive number, but it looks kind of odd since you expect to add those numbers in the column.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_sc_cost_display.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=sc_cost_display.jpg)
Since I'm snowed in, I'm going to be working on it all tomorrow. To do next: spell tutorials.
It does look a little odd, but what actually bothered me was see Spell SC cost, since SC stands for Spellcard, it's a little redundant to have spell before SC.
I was thinking, cause there isn't a lot I can do sprite wise, perhaps I could take a stab at redesiging the interface and menus?
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http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Python_Setup_Instructions
I followed the instructions as per the video but i still get the error at the command line...
What should I do?
Can you post a screenshot of the error you are getting? You might have to reboot if you are using Vista.
It does look a little odd, but what actually bothered me was see Spell SC cost, since SC stands for Spellcard, it's a little redundant to have spell before SC.
I was thinking, cause there isn't a lot I can do sprite wise, perhaps I could take a stab at redesiging the interface and menus?
SC is used for spirit charge. Everywhere else in the dialog, I just write out spell card.
I would prefer that you work on the sprites as a higher priority, but redesigning the UI would be okay if you wanted.
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Possible success! Err, I mean my friend found a pen for an old tablet that I have, so all I need is the drivers and I should be able to work on sprites again. Happy days!
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tis happy... ;D
Oh and fawkes, you're right...it worked just fine once I rebooted.
I got myself a bitbucket account
username: mew77
I'd like to know what mercurial is before I get it.
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That's good news to hear, Elcura.
Mercurial is a Version Control Software. It allows you to track changes over the course of time in your code. Very useful. It also allows you to "pull" the code from the bitbucket repository that contains the latest updated code from the programmers' side. I'll add you to the list of people with access to our repositories now.
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Okay, I have the latest version now...
However my save file on version 0.41 doesn't work...
It lets me continue from where I left off, but the game crashes the moment I try to move a unit.
When I tried to make a new file...the game crashed when Chen's regen lv 1 ability activated.
Again, this is the most recent version downloaded off of bitbucket.
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I caught the Chen regen bug in today's testing. Good to see that you were able to get it working. 0.4.2 has broken backwards compatibility with 0.4.1's save file system. Be sure to check the changelog with every pull since that'll tell you what major changes have been made.
I'll make the commit tonight to fix the bug. In Bitbucket, you can be set to get email notifications whenever new stuff is committed by becoming a follower of the repository. That's helpful since I tend to commit whenever I finish with a night's work.
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I'll wait for a stable version to continue testing then...
Oh and if i manually edit player_dat.txt
Can i give myself like 10 extra levels?
Just wondering because I haven't seen the implementation yet.
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Player_dat.txt is just a dump of the data when saving. It doesn't do anything in game.
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Darn...but that's to be expected...
And i was hoping the test versions would have debug mode.
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You might end up breaking stuff, but open up the data/XML/playerunits.xml and you can change the levels there. Make sure you have a backup copy in case you accidentally break anything doing it.
Okay I just committed stuff to the repository that fixes the regen crash as well as adding death quotes which are lines that are said as a unit dies. You can specify in the unit's setup XML whether to have multiple death quotes (it'll select one at random if there are multiple ones of them).
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_deathquotes.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=deathquotes.jpg)
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Merry Christmas everyone!
Here's what's been updated as of last night:
Some new treasure icons have been added to give the interface some more flavor and help you to identify your items. These icons come from YuFe who hangs out in the #anotherdream IRC channel.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_treasureicons.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=treasureicons.jpg)
Additionally, AI turns are now prioritized in the following order:
1. Retreating units fall back to towards healers
2. Healers take their turns
3. All attacking units move.
It's demonstrated in Sandbox only since we don't have an enemy healing unit in story missions yet.
Elcura, could you give us a quick pallet swap of the Fairy sprite? Maybe add on a nurse hat with a + on top to indicate that it's a healing unit.
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So you know that Sort option that has been grayed out since v0.2.X?
Finally implemented it:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_unitsorting.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=unitsorting.jpg)
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You know...marisa is a bit too fragile for the early game.
I've used at least 5 rice cakes in mission three just to keep her out of kill zone.
Because the mission apparently requires her at least for the scripted event in the house I'd assume.
Oh well beat it anyway.
Strange though..there's 5 faeries to the far left of the map that don't do anything. I'm assuming their there for exp farming. Come to think of it the map is pretty spaced out. The faeries and the walking trees to the far left do nothing but sit there for exp farming. Was this your intention?
the spell synthesis menu is simple enough...but i don't know what your planning for the alchemy portion. And I'm thinking attacks should do more than damage...consider status effects differing attack ranges. Something like what's been done in FFTA. Just a thought.
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# 12/27/09 - Minor Balance Tweak
- Marisa starts at level 4
- Fried Tofu recovers 40% HP instead of 25% to improve usefulness at start of game.
Marisa's fragileness is a problem that we've heard a lot about. The original idea for her character was to have her be highly mobile but also fragile. I tried changing her defense stats (DEF: 3/ MDEF: 5) to (DEF: 4 / MDEF: 4) but that didn't seem to have much of an effect. Is it just Marisa that's giving you problems? I bumped up her starting level to 4 instead of 3 in CH1ST2 in the latest commit to the internal repository. See if that helps any since you don't have to overcome the hurdle of having her at a lower level. If that doesn't help, let's look into tweaking the offensive stats of enemy units. I'll have to take a look at redesigning the placement of units in CH1ST3. I agree that the map is way bigger than it needs to be, so maybe the entire map is going to get redone.
I think increasing spell damage might be problematic. Enemies use the same spells as allies, so that would result in your team dying much faster. I don't want a lot of one-hit-kill spells. I think near the midgame of FFTA/A2 I had units that could 1hit kill flunkies on the map which made the game a lot easier.
Spell Synth - Alchemy Portion will involve the ability to combine synth crystals into rare crystals and take any treasures you find and break them down into crystal items.
(http://imgur.com/dXAFds.png) (http://imgur.com/dXAFd.png)
Status effect spells: Doable in the short term. All the support is in game. We can create them in spell synthesis. We need to plan them out first.
FFTA-type Multi-tile spells I don't see being included in the engine any time soon. Main problem is that the battle system is strictly designed only for one-on-one battle events.
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The multi tile should be done differently. Insteado of just having a radius of two to choose from you have a altered multi-tile area to choose your targets from.
marasa wasn't an issue in mission 2. In that one you didn't need to keep her alive.
As for CH1ST3, I'd suggest simply cutting the entire far left area and focusing enemy unit placement on the remainder of the map.
I do like the glass cannon archetype you are trying for with marisa. I'll see what combinations I can do with marisa's traits.
Do you need me to test CH1ST2 again?
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Can you elaborate on your multi-hit target? I don't really get what you are trying to say. Could you give an example?
You don't need to keep Marisa alive. I find "keep X unit alive until the end of the mission" objectives to be extremely tedious especially for early game. Just have anybody visit the house will complete the mission objectives.
I pushed a revised CH1ST3 to the repository. Major features include the following:
- Resized from 40x40 to 25x25 tiles
- Moved units around so there aren't many units just sitting far out of the way
- Two Cherry Blossom trees with treasures on them. I think that it is important to get the player into the habit of visiting out of place locations in search of treasures so I made them rather obvious locations.
Screenshots
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_ch1st3v2_001.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=ch1st3v2_001.jpg)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_ch1st3v2_002.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=ch1st3v2_002.jpg)
Another feature that I added is that outlined text has been added for no-battle animation mode. It was hard to see against the background so I added a 1px outline around all battle map number displays.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_outlined_text.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=outlined_text.jpg)
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What I was trying to get at was how currently most attacks have an attack radius of 2 panels. I was considering different tile patterns for attack ranges. For example
x is the unit's position
= is part of it's range
---------------------------------
currently we have
=
=== =
==x== and =x=
=== =
=
The player targets a valid location and enters the battle screen
The only attack with a true variable range I see is master spark, and I don't care to illustrate that at the present time.
But what if the attack ranges were varied?
=== === =
Like x or this x=== or this x==
=== === =
Each time the player is given a slightly varied attack range. Or to make things simply just have attacks with target radius of 3 or 4.
Remember I'm just suggesting stuff here.
I'd like to as the scripted event on the house is supposed to replenish master spark and max out marisa's spirit charge...rather useful for the boss.
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I get what you're saying now but I don't think we can implement it without drastic changes to our battle system. Our battle system has no concept of "direction facing" like FFTA, so our spell actions are programmed in a way that takes only a min and a max range which is what Fire Emblem does with its battle system. It is a good suggestion, but doesn't really fit in with the rest of the gameplay. Later on in the game we will see some varied range spells. Youmu already has one that has a max of 1. Marisa's MS is a long range sniping attack.
My strategy with Marisa at the beginning is to have her fight alongside the group for a while until she gets enough SC to get a spark, send her off into the forest to snipe off an enemy with MS from outside their attack range and fall back to the party to heal.
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Best to discuss balance with numbers at hand. Can you give me a dump of Marisa's stats, typical enemy stats and an outline of the current target-choosing AI? I can look up the combat formulae on the wiki.
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Stats for enemies in CH1ST3:
| Unit Name | HP | STR | MAG | DEF | MDEF | ACC | AGL |
| Marisa (Lv. 4) | 28 | 4 | 10 | 5 | 7 | 6 | 14 |
| Fairy (Lv. 4) | 35 | 8 | 8 | 5 | 4 | 6 | 13 |
| Firefly (Lv.5) | 22 | 8 | 8 | 3 | 8 | 6 | 15 |
| Walking Tree (Lv. 5) | 37 | 9 | 8 | 9 | 4 | 6 | 10 |
| Wriggle (Lv.7) | 85 | 10 | 10 | 8 | 8 | 9 | 12 |
Targetting Determination is described here: AI Targetting outline (http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/AI#Attack_AI_.28Standard_Mode.29)
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I was just suggesting.
I see why it wouldn't work out.
ffect = (Attacker's STR * attacker's equipped trait STR bonuses + Attacker's STRmod) * Attacker's Spell's Base Effect
Magical Attack Type:
Effect = (Attacker's MAG * attacker's equipped trait MAG bonuses + Attacker's MAGmod) * Attacker's Spell's Base Effect
Physical Damage Type
Since you're multipying by the trait bonus, and Marisa's equipped flight trait has a trait bonus of 0.0%, and fireball has a magic modifier of 0, wouldn't the section inside parentheses be equal to zero. But ingame the attack does do damage. What am I missing in this formula?
Physical Damage Type
Shield = (Defender's DEF * defender's equipped trait DEF bonuses + Defender's DEFmod) * TDEF * Defender's Spell's Base Shield
Magical Damage Type
Shield = (Defender's DEF * defender's equipped trait MDEF bonuses + Defender's MDEFmod) * TDEF * Defender's Spell's Base Shield
Again there is a chance for the stuff inside parentheses to be equal to zero. So what is it I'm not seeing? Is there an extra pair of invisible parentheses?
Is there a reason that the enemy AI favors attacking Youmu over attacking marisa, when it seems more effective to attack marisa or even Chen. Why did all 8 monsters attack youmu. The fireflies decided to commit suicide. The AI should know that youmu cuts fireflies in one hit.
At the very least they should seek out the weakest member of the player team rather than the strongest. They also make it hard to build SC on marisa.
Again they target Youmu..are the monsters set on pursuit: Youmu?
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What am I missing in this formula?
From what I can see and remember, the logical way of interpreting that attack formula is:
(Attack Stat * (1+trait bonuses) + extra bonuses from spellcards/terrain/special mission situation) * Weapon Base Damage
where 'trait bonuses' are in percentages, so Attacker Lv 1 = +10%
Is there a reason that the enemy AI favors attacking Youmu over attacking marisa, when it seems more effective to attack marisa or even Chen. Why did all 8 monsters attack youmu. The fireflies decided to commit suicide. The AI should know that youmu cuts fireflies in one hit.
Check the AI decision making link. They don't think about their own safety (which is about right - we don't want cowardly mooks). Weighted decision means proximity plays a large part. Also note that the current AI is not taught to assess if the target is extremely likely to dodge.
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So, I will assume that all Spells have base power of 2 and base shield of 1. Let's output some numbers for Marisa combat in that mission:
First, the Real-type tank check... she'll only get an 8% dodge chance against most enemies there (on neutral terrain) so no, she cannot rely on dodging. All the enemies have an attack stat of 8 whether it be STR or MGC (except for the tree and the boss). Assuming no bonuses, that's 16 attack power and so Marisa eats 11 or 13 damage from a single attack assuming neutral spell alignment matchups. Clearly, putting her at the front is suicidal. Her job would then be mopping up whatever the tanks failed to kill on their counter attacks the previous enemy phase - she does around half damage when she hits a fairy or tree and if Youmu has done her job then that should be a killing blow.
That's not broken from my perspective. If anything, the only thing she needs is higher agility so she has a reasonable chance (like... 30~50%) at evasion - maybe even give Flying an agility boost. Balance can be sorted later though, so I don't worry about it at this stage.
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I increased Marisa's AGL growth stat from 7 to 9 pts. I also gave Flight a +30% AGL bonus. That puts her evasion rate somewhere near 15-18% against a walking tree at level 4. I can imagine a second level flight trait down the road that combines Flight with Mirage that gives automatic -15% hit rate.
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Work's started on CH2ST3. I'm using a semi-transparent Kodama Lord as a stand-in for Fuyuhana at the moment. I also added support for animations to be displayed on the battle map like here with Mokou setting something on fire:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_mokousettingstuffonfire.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=mokousettingstuffonfire.jpg)
It'll be added to the repository this week since I don't want to commit until I have a working rough draft of a mission. I hit a big snag today when I spent an hour trying to debug a simple but not so obvious mistake in the mission XML.
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Well... I've done most of Yukari's field sprite. Except my external HD's USB connection is broken so I can't access jack shit. Argh, I have no fucking luck at all. I pray it recovers...should be fixed today or tomorrow hopefully.
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Added Yukari to the source repository.
CH2ST3 progress. It's playable now with about half the enemies in the targeted final version. I was able to finish it in about 5 turns because the healers are a little hard to kill. Mission launcher is set to automatically start it with a semi-realistic set of party members. I am not very happy with the dialog in the current build. There seems to be something missing between Fuyuhana appearing and zipping off with Asa. Dump of the current script appears here (http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Scripts/CH2ST3#Pre_Mission_Event). Can anyone suggest improvements to the script here? Zer0, we could definitely use your help here.
I gave Mokou a fast charging spellcard (400 SC minimum with 50 SC cost but only 3 uses), for pulling out a short burst of powerful spells that you can't spam constantly.
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Continuing work on CH2ST3.
Major changes in the repository which I think should make things a lot more manageable in the earlier missions. I was finding that the Fairies, the Kodama Lords, and the Fireflies had too big of a movement in that they would get a quarter of the way across the map in one shot. Understandable for Fireflies, but I lowered the move rate for Fairies to 5, for Kodama Lords to 4 (Healthy amount of HP so they can last a while), and increased Fireflies to 6 to make them the fastest moving units in the game.
Also added some more enemies to CH2ST3 and an intro scene showing the Healer Fairy. I'm going to take a page out of Valve's game making playbook by allowing the player to get to know the enemies a little before sending them against the foes. (Kind of unrelated, but I'm playing through HL2:Ep1 and the developer commentary about how they design games is very interesting and englightening.)
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_healerfairy.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=healerfairy.jpg)
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Gekko put in some bug reports and suggestions to the issue tracker (http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/issues/?status=new&status=open) so I started to address them with the update tonight:
# 1/6/10 - Status Effect fixes and displays
- Increased basic spell uses from 30 to 45 (He was reporting that characters were running out of spell uses by the end of CH1ST3 before you got spell synthesis available)
- Added display for when status effect has ended. (It was unclear when a SE ended.)
- Added display when HP/SC changes due to a status effect. (Ditto for what amount of damage you took.)
- Output damage from poison to console
- [Bugfix][Issue #31 ] Crash due to death from status effect
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_statuseffectupdate01.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=statuseffectupdate01.jpg)(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/th_statuseffectupdate02.jpg) (http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v189/rune_devros/?action=view¤t=statuseffectupdate02.jpg)*
* Final version doesn't have the minus sign. I fixed it after taking the screencap. Appears as usual damage on the map.
A suggestion he pointed out (http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/issue/33/passive-sc-receiving) warrants some discussion. This does seem to be a good addition. Something we also discussed doing was have a trait that allows all members of the party to receive 25% of every SC point that a character gets.
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I tested the mission. It felt like a survival mission was supposed to.
After the first few turns the mission devolved into a war of attrition that I was losing badly.
It didn't help that healing prevented my from counterattacking. I do not doubt the design, and will try the mission again later.
What felt annoying was that SC was charging rather slowly this mission. To tell the truth I think the team was just underleveled for
the mission launcher. On my file I have a handful of level 6 characters mixed in with level 5 characters. And this is just after I finished chapter 1.
I'll wait to test it again with my regular save.
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A suggestion he pointed out (http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/issue/33/passive-sc-receiving) warrants some discussion. This does seem to be a good addition. Something we also discussed doing was have a trait that allows all members of the party to receive 25% of every SC point that a character gets.
There are various possibilities with giving SC to units who can't be as battle active, whether they're done in traits or an inherent part of the mechanics:
- fixed, small gain in SC per turn
- fixed, small gain in SC when ally kills an enemy
- a low ammo, low power, no-counterattack, high shield spell which gives bonus SC when user gets attacked
- consumable items for one-time boosts to SC
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I think the consumable items and the fixed small gain are most logical options.
Although all of the options are feasible.
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As an alternative to consumables, mark certain trash mobs as "gives extra SC". This way, players can plan ahead to give one character more SC than normal just by carefully choosing which mob to kill with what unit. Depends whether you want players to be fielding many or few "difficult to use" units. Also along that line, consider whether you want any dissuaders for over-using the best units - currently I get the impression if you deliberately keep Youmu away from the battle then you're playing at Challenge Mode difficulty.
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Well you see Youmu is the jeigan character for much of the beginning becuase of how much damage dagger toss does now.
I can now one shot enemies with it without even adding focused movement. And I jsut started chapter 2
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By the "Jeigan" do you mean the true sense of "EXP sink that noobs waste kills on and then realise he doesn't grow in stats" or just "powerhouse at start of game you can rely on"? I haven't played through the latter missions and haven't looked at the data to tell, but has Youmu been deliberately gimped so that she'd be weak in the mid-endgame? If not, then Youmu is a regular powerhouse, not a Jeigan. She starts with much higher Attack Stat (Str) than other characters and given spells (weapons) inherently have a x2 aspect to them, it really hurts enemies.
So my point stands: do you want players to safely rely on Youmu for the entire game with no concern for the other characters, except for the rare (or will they be rare?) situations specifically tailored to take advantage of Youmu's weaknesses? Doesn't need balancing now, but it's worth thinking about as you design future missions.
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I meant it as an early game powerhouse.
Actually I think it is because Youmu has both attack +1 as an action trait coupled with deadly strike as a support.
Blows gaping holes in enemies.
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Actually I think it is because Youmu has both attack +1 as an action trait coupled with deadly strike as a support.
Meaningless if her base stats were sucky. Attack+1 means at most +1 Str in earlygame, translating to +2 dmg. Deadly Strike adds 10% crit chance, where a crit gives +50% damage. These effects are dwarfed compared to how she has some 5 more attack stat than say Chen or regular enemies, resulting in some +10 dmg in comparison and making those occasional crits really hurt as opposed to being a minor bonus.
Granted, Marisa has almost as much attack stat as Youmu but people are finding her too fragile to be a tank. Likewise Ran is almost as good as Marisa in offense and hardly is the most fragile of your earlygame units but compared to Youmu who has superior offense and defence... Well, later in the game it'll balance out as you start to face strong magic attacks from enemies but in the earlygame they all have similar MDEF and Youmu has so much more HP than anyone else she can easily absorb the extra damage her inferior MDEF gives her.
I'd say wait until some Ch 4 or so before thinking seriously about balance tweaks. You can't put much weight on earlygame results.
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Regarding Youmu and other story characters: Since the stat growth system uses a linear function of level and growth constants, we don't have a way of tuning the growth of characters down at higher levels at the moment. I think Youmu should be a reliable character throughout the game and not lose usefulness. She is after all, the one the story is being told from, so she would be like one of the Lord characters in Fire Emblem. Regarding how she plays, it seems that Psieye is right and that her HP is good enough to absorb any magic damage that she takes. It also is an important factor that we haven't really introduced any hard hitting magic using enemies. Later on when we face off against characters like Misaki and Patchouli, Youmu isn't going to be as useful. My use for Youmu is mainly to have her strike first and have everyone follow up. She can soak the initial counterattack hit and if others get the subsequent hits in, at least one will avoid the counterattack by defeating the target. That's my strategy for taking on walking trees and powering up Marisa early on.
Redesigned the interface to the predictor as shown in the screenshot below. Two arrows are shown for very Strong and very weak cases and a dash is shown for neutral and healing. This has been committed to the repository. This addresses two problems.
1. Feedback from testing indicated that people didn't really get that strengths and weaknesses were associated with spells instead of units. I got the question of why Fireball is less effective against a tree. This clearly ties the advantage disadvantage to the spell's magic type.
2. The old way of displaying strength and weakness was not very clear and unexplained. This way intuitively shows which unit has an advantage using arrows.
(http://imgur.com/o9Zlkb.png) (http://imgur.com/o9Zlk.jpg)
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Great...the interface looks more like the fire emblem battle prediction window now.
And I can finally tell without having to constantly refer to the status screen for the chart. It gets tedious flipping between the battle and the chart.
But in truth fire should be good on walking trees...I mean they are freaking trees. Trees!!
then again swords are effective on trees too so I guess it makes sense, but I sometimes feel the system isn't intuitive. When designing you want the player to read your tutorials and have it make sense. I read through the in-game tutorial and then proceeded to fight...then in the next mission I ran into walking trees. Logically fire would be supereffective on trees. But in the system force works better. "lolwut" I thought. The system clearly ties the weakness to spell type rather than unit type, but it still is strange that fire is not effective on a tree. Maybe it's just too much time around the pokemon type chart.
You want the design to be done in such a way that the player doesn't question what the developers were drinking, though in ZUN's case that point is moot. (That creature is always drunk)
Spell synthesis makes sense as is, but how about also getting recipies as mission rewards so I can make more than basic attack types. I know you're already hard at work getting this to work so no rush.
This interface upgrade is a step in the right direction.
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Hmm... would changing the basic elemental spell to something other than a fire spell help? I can see how a player would be confused by that kind of a system. I've always had in the back of my mind that we could go back and rename everything to more Touhou-y things. Most of the names were chosen based off of generic fantasy settings.
Recipes as mission rewards: Planned. You get healing crafting at the end of CH2ST3-4. The goal is to have main spell upgrades occur in missions. We might get a package of spells at the end of CH3 with tier 2 spells when Yukari and Yuyuko return. I guess the reason I haven't pushed towards making a larger set of spells to use is that trying to test against so many spells is going to be difficult at this stage. I think the final count from the old forum thread was something like 27 generic spells by the end of the game + special character Spell Cards + items.
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There will be fire spells somewhere in the game (HI THAR MOKOU), even if not in the earlygame. Something needs to be done to convince people that your system makes sense. It could be as simple as "the spell gives them elemental alignment - even if they were made of paper, if they're wielding a spell that's strong against fire, they'll have high resists".
Personally I have to wonder why people think wood should be weak against fire when other more flammable things aren't, but I acknowledge this game logic is very widespread.
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That's a good point. Let's try to incorporate it into the first mission's tutorial.
To do list tonight:
- CH2ST3 work
- Maybe expand the prologue to include the planned Yuyuko / Yukari scene that we had long since planned.
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The wood weak against fire is known partly because well lets see...
megaman does it
pokemon uses it
most things that have an element/type system makes plants weak to fire...
SO that point still holds.
Perhaps if the basic elemental danmaku was charged bolts or ice ball...something that isn't fire...might make it more intuitive.
Then again we should discuss synthesis spells and what unique synthesis spells the player can make.
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I'm having a lot of trouble developing CH2ST3.
Current draft goes like this:
- Enemies show up from all corners of the map
- You hold off the bad guys for 7 turns.
- Enemies end up all bunching around you tightly.
In essence, it's not a very interesting or fun mission. The player has no motivation to actively engage the enemies and one strategy that seems to work (from Gekko's report) is to split off and run to a corner of the map. I think at its core the mission design needs to be rethought for this mission. Here is what I propose. Let me know what you think.
The map will be divided into three sections
[ ##### Graveyard #### ]
=====================
[ Island ]||[Island]||[Island]
=====================
[ ##### Exit ######## ]
= and || represent rivers. Islands are connected to lands by bridges. We can say that there happens to be a river that flows to the south of the graveyard with a number of little islands in between.
- Most of the dialogue is the same up to the part where Fuyuhana's minions come into play.
- To cover Fuyuhana's retreat, she sends a number of very high level Kodama Lords / Walking Trees / Fireflies to the top of the map. It is very clear that this entire mission was a trap. She can cover her retreat and try and take care of the greatest threat to her at the same time.
- Your objective is to retreat and make it to the exit at the bottom with at least one unit.
- We can add a treasure or other discovery event in the middle of the map.
- There are forests on the islands. As soon as you step onto the islands, some enemies will appear out of the forests. I added a new map action to support spawning of enemies mid battle. We can definitely make good use of this.
- To prevent just rushing Marisa down to the exit, fireflies patrol the central island. They have extended range (Move+) and flight.
I think this would make for a much more exciting mission to give the impression that the player is being chased by some powerful enemies. It also gives them a specific goal to aim for and progress towards (reach the exit) rather than hold on for a certain amount of time where progress is not as clear.
@Mew77: I can understand what you're saying. Maybe we can introduce some dialog that says:
- The trees are in tune with the type of magic that is associated with nature.
- Remembering that in Japanese mythology, things that live long enough can eventually become youkai, these are Youkai trees. By manipulation of magic, they can actively resist elemental attacks like fireballs. By manipulating spiritual spells they can resist the blades that try to cut them down. Danmaku battles are very complex duels with both sides weaving elaborate sets of offensive and defensive spells.
Spell Synth: What ideas did you have for it? I'll have to pull up my excel spreadsheet that I had describing the various combinations.
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SO that point still holds.
Perhaps if the basic elemental danmaku was charged bolts or ice ball...something that isn't fire...might make it more intuitive.
but I acknowledge this game logic is very widespread.
If I must rephrase my previous statement: Warning! TVTropes Link! (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect)
I can go on trying to point out why it makes sense in Megaman and Pokemon but not in this game, but this'd be a pointless debate done for fun only. Trying to sidestep the issue with "let's not use fire for elemental spells" doesn't help because Mokou MUST use fire attacks at some point and people will bring this issue up again. We are going to have to teach the players to accept this game's elemental system of "what you equip determines what alignment you are, not who you are".
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Right, as for this CH2ST3... I see, yes that's a meaningless mission indeed if all you're tasked to do is survive 7 turns. As I recall, all "survive for X turns" missions I've seen always had a "and defend this while you keep yourself alive" added to it. Otherwise stuff happens like in Gekko's report - you can run around however you like.
Your new "escape from this map" setting is more appropriate for this "we got ambushed" scenario. Best to have that as "get every unit to the bottom of the map" though, even if we have the strange "you can get KO'd to escape the map" loophole. Actually that's a question: what happens when a unit reaches 0 HP? Is there any penalty for letting a unit die?
Anyway, problem with allowing only 1 unit to leave is that you then get players who clear out all the mobs at the bottom of the map, then leave 1 useless unit there to end the map with, while they go tackle everything else on the map in complete knowledge they have an 'insurance' of 'get out of this sticky hole I dug myself into'. We are approaching the mid-game by this point. I know there will be players out there (because I'm one myself) who will power level say, Youmu by sacrificing entire maps to her, and then have her beat up all those high-level mobs you put at the top of the map for even more EXP. Better yet if she can bring a team of support units with her that can spam heals and distract the enemies so she can fight ever longer. Unless you intentionally make those high-level mobs unkillably high in level.
If you don't mind such behaviour, then the mission is fine. If you want to discourage it, then add "everyone must escape" and possibly also "within X turns". The map layout of that mission seems sensible though.
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Alright alright already...I get your point psieye. You don't need to bludgeon me with it.
I'll post again after playing the game a bit more.
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Mew77, we will have to integrate some clearer explanations of the battle system. It is good that you raised those points because many players may have the same confusion.
I think everyone escaping would be too harsh on the player. I don't really like the idea of having to restart the mission after losing one unit. I do think that get to the goal by X turns will work very well. I hadn't thought about what you had said so you brought up really good points about needing to rush the players along.
As far as penalties for units being defeated goes, I think the only one is they lose the EXP they may have gained for the rest of the battle. Would you suggest something like an EXP penalty that I've seen done in MMORPG games?
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I think everyone escaping would be too harsh on the player. I don't really like the idea of having to restart the mission after losing one unit. I do think that get to the goal by X turns will work very well. I hadn't thought about what you had said so you brought up really good points about needing to rush the players along.
As far as penalties for units being defeated goes, I think the only one is they lose the EXP they may have gained for the rest of the battle. Would you suggest something like an EXP penalty that I've seen done in MMORPG games?
Wahaha, restarting after losing 1 unit (on any map) was the norm in FE games, but you choose not to be Spartan. That's fine.
Not being able to earn EXP they could have isn't much of a penalty to players who suicide their units at the very end of the map in a calculated way. But if you don't mind that sort of behaviour, then it's fine as is. You could go for "they aren't available next map as they're healing" for non-plot-essential units or some 'financial' penalty or maybe "items they were holding take durability/ammo penalty".
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Do units need a penalty for being defeated? I would think that losing the unit for the mission was enough, losing EXP at the same time is MMO tactics for added grindan. And not usually well recieved in that environment. I think it would be pointless, too low is the same as nothing and too high (or even the perfect mid-ground) is frustrating.
After all, not everyone is a tactics god like Psieye, some of us make mistakes lol
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Yeah I've just been exposed to (and pulled off a couple) so many "we gotta do this even though the developer never intended it - they didn't specifically forbid it!" stunts and feats from the early SRW and FE games, I've gotten used to thinking "is it ok if they do something ridiculous like this?"
Perfectly fine if we're happy to let stunt artists pull off those feats.
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I don't really mind not harshly penalizing the player. I actually found restarting missions due to losing one character in FE to be more frustrating than enjoyable. I think I agree with Elcura that our current system works as in.
CH2ST3 Gameplay draft has been committed to the repository. This illustrates most of the idea I'm going for here. Script has not been edited to reflect the new objective.
(http://imgur.com/Ovylqs.jpg) (http://imgur.com/Ovylq.jpg)(http://imgur.com/xWOQ8s.jpg) (http://imgur.com/xWOQ8.jpg)(http://imgur.com/jnuFzs.jpg) (http://imgur.com/jnuFz.jpg)
Mission testers: mission can be launched by editing line 96 in mission_launcher.py and modifying the characters listed a little below that.
To launch CH2ST3, change line 96 to
mission_name = "CH2ST3"
(Realized I had forgotten to set the default to Ch2St3.)
Didn't realize until recently that Zer0 made some edits to the wiki. I really like the revised script so I'll try and integrate them into the revised version. Some more story stuff may follow in the wave tomorrow. One idea I've been toying with is giving the 4 kodama lords that appear in this mission personalities and names. We can have them reappear later on rather than use generic and flat enemies for the Kodama Lords.
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Heavy revisions to CH2ST3. I've integrated most of Zer0's edits and added some more stuff into the revised script (http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Scripts/CH2ST3). Check it out and let me know what you think. I also added personalities for some of the other Kodama Lords that show up. I've documented here what their personalities are and their histories: Wiki (http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Characters#Other_Kodama_Lords). Haruna's is the most developed since I was building her for a side mission a little later on that I've been brainstorming on. It'll be added to the mission design wave.
Lego posted her rendition of the shop theme to the Art wave. Please check it out and let her know what you think of it.
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Mew77 requested this: Spell Synth Database (http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AiT_qFotTXj-dEZhUjd4eTl0UmZYRURMRlVWVk5SeFE&hl=en). This was an old version from last summer that I never got around to finishing.
Added a new song that Lego made to the game. It is the shop theme. I figured that the best place to evaluate it is in game, so I added it to the internal version enabled at the Treasures menu, the Spell Synthesis Menu, and the Item Trading menu. We have a thread over on the wave so let her know what you think of the song. It is the first one she has composed for us and I think it turned out nicely.
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It prevents access to my gmail account. Can we fix that. And I just tested CH2ST3. I believe I MSNed you yesterday about the details.
Ah well...
(add to this post later)
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What prevents access to your gmail account? I'm a little confused.
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We're sorry, ninjaducklord@gmail.com does not have permission to access this spreadsheet.
You are signed in as ninjaducklord@gmail.com, but that email address doesn't have permission to access this spreadsheet. (Sign in as a different user or request access to this document)
Find out more about this topic at the Google Docs Help Center.
As I was saying. In the missions I can't seem to beat them without losing at least one unit during the process. In CH2ST3, I beat it with 4 units remaining after using heals a lot.
I think it's designed well, but I was considering adding another bridge in the center so I could split my group up into more than 2 groups to retreat.
Why do the faeries have more HP than the walking trees?
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Okay I guess I hadn't set my permissions right when I made the spreadsheet. You should have access to it now and I set it to be viewable without needing to log in.
Yeah this is intended to be a really intense battle that sets the player up for the rest of the game. I don't think it is unexpected that you lose units. I think I got through with one unit lost when I was playing (Mission tester is with level 5s). Lots of healers are a good thing. I'd like to maybe add a treasure box cherry tree along the way to add to the challenge. The intent was to split up into three but adding a second bridge would open up the battle more. That seems to be a good idea.
They have lower defense than the trees I think. We can tweak their HP values. I've given some though to redesigning how enemies are declared in the mission data. I think it would be better rather than to redeclare every enemy, we have a set of enemies to template from in a separate data file and then load them individually. Something like:
<enemy_unit name="Fairy A">
<template>Fairy</template>
<level>5</level>
</enemy_unit>
This way if we tweak one enemy we don't have to fix all the enemies in the entire game.
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I've given some though to redesigning how enemies are declared in the mission data. I think it would be better rather than to redeclare every enemy, we have a set of enemies to template from in a separate data file and then load them individually.
Yes, a template which can be overriden for individual instances (e.g. an unusually high HP fairy but otherwise normally statted) is a big step in a very good direction.
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What I see is that templtes will make it so much easier for you to code pre-mission scripts. Just initialize all enemeis based on the templates. Make the template a seperate class that can still be modified in the main game engine, just in case you need special enemy stats. Otherwise this seems fine.
I'm probably just repeating wht psieye was telling you anyway.
In the spell synth munu, is the order you select the synth items important?
What about spells that require three synth items?
Lastly...could you allow traits to be automatically set to standby when you learn them. I find it annoying to sift through menus to equip new traits. Just a little nitpick here.
mew77
Now returning to real life.
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Spell synth is just select a recipe and go. There's no order to it.
Three synth items the current system can support but nothing's been drafted up on them yet.
That's a good idea to automatically assign newly learned traits.
I updated CH2ST3 with more story in battle demonstrating the ability to trigger conversations in battle. I also added a brief ending. Next up is fixing the prologue and CH2ST4 which is the meeting back at Akyu's place. I think any new features on the engine level will have to wait till 0.4.3. I'd like to finish up CH2ST5 do our regular alpha testing and then launch. Ch2ST5 is a quick skirmish / boss fight to wrap up the chapter, so it should be a not too difficult battle.
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Merged Zer0's Yuyuko and Yukari script into the prologue mostly unchanged. Next up, Ch2St4, in which we learn about the past of the world. It might be a little difficult considering that we don't have Fuyuhana drawn up yet.
(http://imgur.com/oedras.jpg) (http://imgur.com/oedra.jpg)
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Okay, crazy idea time!
We have some main difficulties with the current setup for CH2ST4 - Legend of the Forest of Magic -
- Players hate passive, boring cutscenes.
- We don't have sprites for Fuyuhana or Ayaka yet. I'd really like to present them as they are for this scene if we ever change it.
So here's the draft version of CH2ST4 that I've been working on. The main story of Fuyuhana and Ayaka is presented in the form of a play that Akyu wrote. Reimu and Marisa at one point fall asleep because Akyu is so boring. It's a neat little reward for surviving CH2ST3. Most of the information from our script is intact but just presented differently.
(http://imgur.com/BlQsSs.jpg) (http://imgur.com/BlQsS.jpg)(http://imgur.com/5s3TQs.jpg) (http://imgur.com/5s3TQ.jpg)
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A theatrical play in an SRPG to tell the story. Epic concept.
Characters falling asleep because they find the play boring. Epic concept za 2nd.
Do it!
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Do it!
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Well for the second point that Psieye brought up, it's more that Akyu's giving them a straight lecture and they fall asleep. Keine threatens to treat them like the kids that fall asleep in her class. Akyu suggests the idea of using a play to show the story. The core of the play has been entered in the repository last night.
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is this play to explain backstory?
Inject some humor into it... Sure it's nice to show backstory, but make it somewhat sarcastic humor or something.
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Well it's Akyu doing the writing, so I imagine her writing is really formal and serious. A completed version of the event has been added to the repository. I also fixed a major bug with the loading / saving system from player state leaking between saves. Mission launcher is set to test CH2ST4.
Zer0, if we could get your thoughts as well that would be awesome.
Here's the draft script.
http://wiki.featheredmelody.com/Story_of_a_Lost_Sky/Scripts/CH2ST4
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Well it's Akyu doing the writing, so I imagine her writing is really formal and serious.
Akyu is only in charge of the script and the directing. Reimu, Marisa and possibly Chen are bound to muck about - depending on how you've characterised them. I haven't been reviewing scripts so I'll leave the characterisation choice to you and Zer0.
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Akyu is only in charge of the script and the directing. Reimu, Marisa and possibly Chen are bound to muck about - depending on how you've characterised them. I haven't been reviewing scripts so I'll leave the characterisation choice to you and Zer0.
Yeah, I agree with that. Reimu would likely not be paying attention, but Marisa and Chen would be playing around, if Ran is around she would be busy doting over/punishing Chen.
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I don't feel like doing an in-depth look see so I just skimmed it for now.
For the part where Keine says: Hey, you two! Wake up! This is important! Don't make me treat you like one of my students who fall asleep in class!
Show a battle animation of Keine throwing a piece of chalk at the two sleepers.
for Akyu's line: Keine, I could use your help. I have an idea. And Reimu and Marisa and Youmu.
change it to: Keine, Reimu, Marisa, and Youmu. I could use your help. (pause) (dramatic sound effect) I have an idea.
That's it for now.
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(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Idle-3.gif)
Done Idle (for the most part, a few more things could be swaying like the fluffy thing at the end of the sword, but I figure it's time to move on. Doing attack and magic now.
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Idle looks good. Looking forward to seeing attack and magic.
Could you add the swirly white things on her dress?
http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/touhou/images/thumb/5/56/Th075youmu01.png/256px-Th075youmu01.png
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I'll do that later, when I go back and refine things. Just make a reminder note for me in google wave (or it's here). Sword fluff thing needs to move more, redo hair sway a bit, add white swirls.
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Oh yeah, what character concepts do we need to do? And where is their description?
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I'm happy with what we have for Asa. Jamuko I think is in the progress of working on Fuyuhana but we don't have a design for her yet. I ended up moving Ayaka to ch2st3 so we need her next. Last character we need will be Misaki in ch3 but that's a bit far out. Character descriptions are on the wiki under characters.
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Alright, can you post the chars and descriptions up on the wave? I'll do some concepts every now and again.
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Started a new wave for characters and story design.
I'm curious, does anyone here use Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/)? We used it very effectively in one of our school projects to share and synchronize files.
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Cool, I finished the attack motion, I quite like the way it flows.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Attack-1.gif)
Anyway, gonna start on magic and/or character concepts.
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I see on your front page all of these builds and stuff, how would we actually be able to play the game?
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All the builds are just incrementing the version of the alpha. You can grab any on the first post and play - so you may as well grab the latest one.
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We're in the middle of working on 0.4.2, so that version isn't out yet.
If you are using Windows, you will want to get the executable [ lostsky-v0.4.1final-windows.zip ] here (http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/downloads/). The latest version will always be on that page. Unzip and run srpg.exe. Alternately, you can use the source version that can run on Windows, OSX, and Linux which requires that you install Python (http://python.org/download/releases/2.5.4/) and Pygame (http://www.pygame.org/download.shtml).
Elcura, the attack animation looks great. A big improvement over her current battle animation.
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Fuyuhana outline
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Fuyuhanaearly1.jpg)
Fuyuhana outline 2
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Fuyuhanaearly2.jpg)
Some parts of it are really rough, but others I think are looking quite nice. I can kinda imagine the massive last boss...thing that happens to every Touhou final boss, based on the leaves behind her head. Anyway, thoughts etc on this would be nice, areas to change/tweak blah blah blah, will work on another concept tomorrow.
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Really loving the design that you made for Fuyuhana. The staff is a very nice touch.
Committed a working version of Ch2st5 to the repository. Eh... it's the last mission, but it's not very fun right now. Needs a lot of work on the balancing side. I wanted Lord Fuzzy to be a defensively strong character but not very fun fighting him just chipping away at HP. I'll see what I can do tomorrow.
Also my computers fan's been acting weird so it may be out of commission for a short time in the future. I've switched over to daily backups so the data should be safe.
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Perhaps you can make it so that the player needs to kill/destroy specific targets to weaken its defenses? If they're strong enough, they can zerg rush it down as is, but they can play more strategically and destroy the targets in order to make it easier to kill.
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Perhaps you can make it so that the player needs to kill/destroy specific targets to weaken its defenses? If they're strong enough, they can zerg rush it down as is, but they can play more strategically and destroy the targets in order to make it easier to kill.
A good idea, yes. This isn't like SRW where every boss is about chipping down a massive HP bar - you had a bigger army and numerous ways of getting a LOT of one-off damage boosts that your mechanics don't support.
Regarding Fuyuhana's concept art - good first impression yes. It probably won't matter too much since we usually don't see the lower half of the body, but the skirt seems plain compared to her torso, even after imagining in various folds that woudl be there in the final design. Perhaps if it was a 3 layered skirt with the same pointy design at the end of each layer? As in, imagine a medium skirt on top of the long skirt, and then a short skirt on top of the medium skirt.
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That's a good idea, I'll give it a try and post the results. Where's Jimuko, I'd like to see her take on the character as well, based on this design or just the description.
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haven't modified the dress yet to see how it looks, but I did rough out another concept sketch for Youmu. This one could be used with magic, I set a few frames up that can be used as charging animations with a little added effect. Basically she charges her energy for a sec, then releases it all with a swing of her sword. I know there's the whole thing about refined swordplay, but I figured that would be saved for physical attacks, since I wanted magical attacks to be more forceful. I used Fawkes concept for this, since it seemed to make Youmu out to be more of a deligent hardworker than someone who breezes through magical attacks. That, and simple moving an arm to use magic was a little boring.
Blah blah blah, justification over.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Magic-1.gif)
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I don't know where Jamuko stands on her design at the moment.
We don't have a way to support tying defenses to how many units are on the map at the moment. The current way the mission goes is to introduce the player to a new status effect: stun. (1 turn automatic heal). I haven't had much time to give this mission much thought due to problems I've been having with my computer.
I like the new animation for Youmu. She's definitely putting a lot more effort into this type of attack.
Laptop being shipped out for repair this week. I'll stay in contact from my office computer. Don't think I'll be able to do much. Everything's backed up. Praying that nothing goes wrong when I send it out.
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Don't worry Fawkes! I've had to ship my laptop out once before too, and it was kinda scary, but it came back great, and fast too. They even cleaned it, I think.
I've been wanting to add my comments about Fuyuhana but now I'm just dead exhausted. I'll followup soon.
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got some designs some for Ayaka and Misaki. They're both done on paper, so I need to find the time (and effort, ugh) to draw them out on the computer. Because yes, I hate scanning shit in that much. Ayaka mostly has the look described, I made some parts more misty than others (kinda wanted her to have like, mist around her feet and coming off her hand band). I also tried her out with a naginata, because I don't think anyone has a spear weapon in Touhou, and it seemed Samurai-ish without being just Youmu 2.0. Misaki I designed pretty much the same as described, though I wanted her to have Fuyuhana-like feel, but a lot more grand. Like a stage 3 boss that holds back against you and could very well be an extra stage boss. But that's my interpretation without having gone too far into the script.
Anyway, working slowly on magic animation, though I'll probably take a break this weekend to complete some uni stuff. Hope your computer stuff goes well, shit goes so wrong so often with laptops.
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If we do Extra, I definitely want to involve Misaki. She's too interesting of a character to only get one scene in the entire game.
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I have to say i like the concept art...but then again I compliment all art work because I can't draw for the life of me. Anyway...it's nice.
The youmu casting animation looks fine but why swing the sword behind you if the target is in front. The attack animation is good as well.
What can I say...I can't draw.
So fawkes...do you need me to test CH2ST5 sometime or what?
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Well regarding Youmu's magic animation, bear in mind whenever Youmu uses her sword to cast, she swings FAAAAAAAR (200 Yojana in 1 slash). Since we can't move Youmu's battle sprite in position though, a big wide swing on the spot is good.
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@Mew77 - Testing CH2ST5 would be good. I mostly threw it together so it is nowhere near finished. Considering starting over when I get my laptop back in working order. (Speaking of which, it gets sent out tomorrow, so I'll be less available.)
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Well regarding Youmu's magic animation, bear in mind whenever Youmu uses her sword to cast, she swings FAAAAAAAR (200 Yojana in 1 slash). Since we can't move Youmu's battle sprite in position though, a big wide swing on the spot is good.
Yes. Totally my intention, lol. I wish I could say that was the case, but now you mention it seems like a good idea. Anyway, I'll go with these animations first before making evade, damaged and defeated.
I have to say i like the concept art...but then again I compliment all art work because I can't draw for the life of me. Anyway...it's nice.
I get that, it's hard to criticize what you can't do yourself, but that never really helps anyone. I don't really care if you can draw, but it's nice hearing other people's thoughts, especially if it makes the design better. And it sounds like you have some, but are holding back. Don't bother, I've taken enough shit when posting art to know better than to get offended even at offensive comments, lol.
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SO I 'll get to testing the newest build when my laptop gets back from the shop. Yes it broke down last afternoon. I even wrote it a little epitaph. Good thing I backed up most of it. The two attacks I tend to see when watching kendo are downward slashes and stabs...strangely enough no horizontal slashes.
As I recall that was the purpose of a katana or at least some variaton of katana. It was meant to smash the enemy wit hthe force of the blade rather than cut little holes. Also the dashing attack for youmu in SWR is a knockback stab. Perhaps we could do the same, but for now the horizontal slash seems to work. I actually like the current attack animation right now.
For magic I see that it's supposed to be charging energy, but from the example
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Magic-1.gif)
I don't really see any charging. She seems to spin the katana in front of her and then slash so the idea is still good. I'd look into the spellcard animations in SWR for inspiration.
Look forward to see more.
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Oh, that's simply because the frames I'm going to use to extend the animation and portray the 'charging' weren't in the block out animation (since I simple duplicate those frames and paste them back to back over and over again). Basically, frame 2 (her sword lowers) could be a charge frame, I intended to have her sword radiate ghostly energy, and frame uhh, 5-7(?) are charge frames (where she crouches down and her hair and dress moves) are the key charging frames, they would probably extend the animation a lot. I'll post what it would look like charging if it helps you visualize it better, but it won't have any other effects to it.
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Lineart finished. Imagine like, glowing effects or a magic circle underneath when she lowers her body to charge. It would be extended so that animation would finish, ideally.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Magic-2.gif)
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Good job! I really like the current version of the animation. However, I think the charging time might be too long. It seems like she's sitting there. I'll probably have to wait to see it with the glow effect to get a better idea of how it will work.
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It's just to illustrate better for other people where the charging could happen. I dunno how the effects will work, I might have to do it IaMP/SWR style. I noticed they draw the spell symbols flat, straight up, then use some programming guru jumbo shit to make it go under the character and have some perspective thing. I dunno if this makes sense, but look at the spell circles when you declare a spell in IaMP, I wanna do that, but they draw it flat, not at an angle.
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OH so the graphic was front view that makes so much more sense now..I've been thinking these were in profile view like in fire emblem...That makes so much more sense now. thank you
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I'm 99% sure that IaMP uses those spell circles as textures to 3D objects and renders it via 3D graphics voodoo. Stuff that our engine doesn't have access to. This site (http://mrbubblewand.wordpress.com/) has some nice 2D spell animations (currently using on eof their fire animations).
Hopefully getting back to my house this weekend so I can use my old laptop with the half-working screen. I'd like to put the revisions I planned out for CH2ST5 this weekend and that'll make 0.5.0 feature complete (officially upgrading our version since we added a lot of content to it).
I'd like to target 0.5.1 for when Another Dream does their spring release, so the next will be mostly under the hood fixes and upgrades.
Something I came up with last night: Has anyone here played Kirby Super Star? One of the sub-games had you going around collecting a number of treasures and there was a screen that showed what treasures had been discovered. I'd like to add something similar with the treasures that we can find in our game to give players a collect-them-all incentive to find treasures. It looks something like this:
(http://imgur.com/lR3l9.gif)
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If we had access to 3D, environments would be wicked easy to do. Disgaea type shit with 3D backgrounds with 2D sprites *drools*, but alas, no matter. I'll just have to think of some shit, or just draw it with perspective and keep it simple. Anyway, it's a good idea, always nice to know how much you have and how much you're missing. Perhaps, some sort of hint system could be/is in place so that players have some idea where to find the next item (think Lost Odyssey). Hot and cold type thing, basically.
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We'll save 3D environments for Story of a Lost Sky 2. If you can't integrate it into the animation, what we could do is simultaneoudly draw the animation for those 2D magic circles from that website whenever a magic spell needs to be cast.
I've never played Lost Odyssey, so can you explain how their system works?
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That actually gives me some ideas. But I suppose that stuff I'll explore with you later on. As for the drawing animation, I got some ideas for that too.
Anyway, LO had a system where you had a treasure list, and basically when you unlock new hints it will tell you where to go. There's a list in the menu (under treasure) and it will describe a person, or a place that you need to go to. When you get there and are close to the location, the controller vibrates more and more until you find it.
Basically, it's just like hot and cold but for treasure. I imagine, the menu (or NPC like Akyu/Aya in the newspaper) would give you a list of interesting topics and people (maybe you could interview them with Aya, so you need to find interesting things to put in the newspaper for Aya) and your reward for doing so is an item or spell. It's just a rough concept, but I imagine that's a touhou way or doing things. Could be as quirky and weird or serious as we want, and adds some nice story elements to gameplay (or...vice versa).
Anyway, my crazy idea for tiles and 3D graphics would simply to use them as 2D images. Basically how IaMP draws the 3D texture except I can resize it in photoshop and/or animate it as normal. The effect should ultimately be just another gif/set of images that you can use without having to handle 3D files. For the environments, usually in 3D you make tileable textures, which is essentially what we're doing, but I wonder if we can do a fake 3D as in... Well... Like the 3D elements again in 2D space. So it's all side on (or top down) and there's no camera rotation (kill my sprites or make them Disgaea style - actually, a random thought is why I didn't do it like Disgaea in the first place... much easier for one guy), but everything looks nicer since it's in 3D. The downside is there the missions need to be layed out, unless I create tiles from 3D graphics that can replace the pixel ones.
If this is making no sense to you, then ignore it until I can test it out with the magic circle and perhaps get a few sample tiles done.
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Kind of reminds me of how FFTA did their integration of rumors with missions. Translated into Gensokyo's terms, rumors appear in Aya's newspaper, and if the player has read it, it triggers a mission to appear. We need more stuff for Aya's newspaper. I've been lax on keeping it up to date with latest info over the course of the story we've built.
Is what you are talking about something like this: FFTA2's map system (http://imgur.com/DXxOB.jpg). I would rather not change the way we handle our map drawing this late into the development of the game. It is so deeply embedded in our game engine that we would probably be better off saving it for if we do another project.
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I think it's worth exploring and will be a nice way of handling it.
As for the layout, it's...not like FFT in the sense that you can't pan the camera, it's mostly replacing sprite images with (maybe) higher resolution images generated from 3D assets. Generally, the view will be the same, but I'm curious to experiment with it. The BG isn't that important, I'm more thinking about the applications for character animation (in terms of effects).
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I'd be interested with seeing what you can make with it, but I have reservations about how to implement it into our current engine.
Anyway, mostly back up and running on my old laptop. CH2ST5 is in the repository as a revised form. Mew77, can you go ahead and test it as it is and let me know what you think about the flow of the level? There's going to be a treasure item down at the shrine at the bottom left.
(http://imgur.com/oNjGgs.jpg) (http://imgur.com/oNjGg.jpg)
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By tommorow...be happy I'm on break right now
Anything else to test while you're at it?
-
Thanks. Enjoy your break!
This is the last mission going into the next release so I don't think there will be new features added to test in the short term.
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A play by play test report
I've got three units stunned by turn 2
and fuzz balls approaching from two sides
Not complaining but that's just what's happening.
Not a big problem stun seems to last a single turn...
crap youmu's stunned again, but still a very useful tank.
What's the stun chance on these things?
I really think you should implement automatic trait learning or maybe that's because I'm testing the mission launcher version and not my main team.
Lost chen on turn four due to forgetting to heal
Steady flow, although still on north end of map at turn 5
correction: moving out of north end on turn five towards center
eliminated quite a few enemies so far.
No bugs so far but I'm not focusing on that right now.
encounter with lord fuzzy on enemy turn 6
struck back in player turn 7
Please remove the river or make it smaller...
turn 8
most of the group is on the treasure side leaving only youmu and keine to face the king
it's a mistake on my part but fuzzballs take at least three people to gang up on them
three fuzzballs closing in on treasure group who've failed to locate anything under cherry trees
marisa crossed the river to attack one of them from a calculated safespot
fortunately treasure group is keeping the fuzzballs occupied so the King Fuzz
(I prefer calling it that)
is defenseless while keine and youmu pound on it at map center right
music failed to play during this test but I assume it's a minor flaw at the moment
turn 9
marisa stays in safespot
king fuzz's HP now halved
turn 10
marisa can now master spark so
Blargh
oh wait youmu has enough for ageless obsession
1HKO
mission accomplished
overall the mission seems fine and I really don't think I needed to devote half the group to the left side.
the position of the bridge forces the units on the left to go the long way around but the heavy defenses around the left side prevent me from sending too few
I also believe I shouldn't have lost chen so early...though that could have been remedied by a quick heal
That is all
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Stardust has a Stun effect that is 80% effective. The idea with the stardust spell is that it can be used to stun your temporarily and then you can get back on your feet again. The other thing is that stun is 1-tile ranged, so you can avoid it by attacking from 2 tiles away.
Regarding the flow in the later half of the mission, I am thinking of moving the SW bridge somewhere closer to the middle so the group going for the treasure can quickly join up with everyone to fight Lord Fuzzy. In general though it does seem like the majority of my goals for this mission are working.
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What are these goals?
80%?
And how do you expect a player to figure out that they have to attack form two panels away?
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I wanted to create a mission where the objective was to fight up through a set of enemy fuzzballs and then battle with the boss. Previous versions had too big of a distance between the fights or had everything in one big and confused battle. I also wanted to introduce a sense that the party was moving towards their goal.
80% was what I set it to since the attack did very small amounts of damage. Would it be a better idea to go with something like 60% + heavier damage?
Press C over the unit to see their attack range. I guess it is not that obvious but we can add it to the speech before the battle. One of the Fuzzballs will demonstrate it.
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Oh I already knew of that...
how do you think I found a safespot for marisa
the stun chance can stay where it's at. Unless a player is very unlucky they won't have more than half their team stunned at a given time. I think I got lucky.
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Pretty much finished up CH2ST5 and we're semi-officially at 0.5.0 alpha stage. I want to build an exe when I get my new laptop back tomorrow.
Rearranged the map and added Keine giving some advice on dealing with Stardust.
(http://imgur.com/yO7Axs.jpg) (http://imgur.com/yO7Ax.jpg)(http://imgur.com/yJiTes.jpg) (http://imgur.com/yJiTe.jpg)
The epilogue is pretty much word for word from the wiki script.
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0.5.0 Alpha version is here
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/149048/lostsky_0.5.0alpha_source.zip
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/149048/lostsky_0.5.0alpha_win.zip
No major changes from internal version.
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I am playing the update and I have come across an annoying bug. If you try to play the optional missions the game shuts down when the enemy has it's first turn.
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Ack.
Which optional mission has the bug?
At some point I'm going to remove those anyway, but I will see if I can fix that tonight.
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Both the fuzzy one and the alice one.
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After the crash there should be a text file in the same directory as srpg.exe (srpg.txt I think). There should be some cryptic messages inside with the word TRACEBACK somewhere in there. Can you copy/paste the stuff in that file here?
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Traceback (most recent call last):
File "srpg.py", line 49, in <module>
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 36, in __init__
pygame.error: Couldn't open images\splash_fmp.jpg
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "srpg.py", line 102, in <module>
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1574, in title_screen
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1607, in launch_wm
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 449, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 401, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1246, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1203, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1422, in menu_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1695, in execute
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1772, in turn_loop
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1593, in ai_turn
AttributeError: 'Unit' object has no attribute 'ai'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "srpg.py", line 102, in <module>
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1574, in title_screen
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1607, in launch_wm
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 449, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 401, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1246, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1203, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1422, in menu_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1695, in execute
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1772, in turn_loop
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1593, in ai_turn
AttributeError: 'Unit' object has no attribute 'ai'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "srpg.py", line 102, in <module>
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1574, in title_screen
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1607, in launch_wm
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 449, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 401, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1246, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1203, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1422, in menu_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1695, in execute
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1772, in turn_loop
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1593, in ai_turn
AttributeError: 'Unit' object has no attribute 'ai'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "srpg.py", line 102, in <module>
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1574, in title_screen
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1607, in launch_wm
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 449, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 401, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1246, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1203, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1422, in menu_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1695, in execute
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1772, in turn_loop
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1593, in ai_turn
AttributeError: 'Unit' object has no attribute 'ai'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "srpg.py", line 102, in <module>
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1574, in title_screen
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1607, in launch_wm
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 449, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 401, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1246, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1203, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1422, in menu_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1695, in execute
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1772, in turn_loop
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1621, in ai_turn
File "battle_system\ai_fsm.pyc", line 49, in execute_turn
File "battle_system\ai_fsm.pyc", line 464, in act
File "battle_system\spells.pyc", line 210, in action
File "core_system\char.pyc", line 2105, in battle_event
File "core_system\char.pyc", line 1883, in can_counterattack
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'validattacks'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "srpg.py", line 102, in <module>
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1574, in title_screen
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1607, in launch_wm
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 449, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 401, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1246, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1203, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1422, in menu_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1695, in execute
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1772, in turn_loop
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1593, in ai_turn
AttributeError: 'Unit' object has no attribute 'ai'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "srpg.py", line 102, in <module>
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1574, in title_screen
File "core_system\engine.pyc", line 1607, in launch_wm
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 449, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 401, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1246, in navigate_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1203, in user_input
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1422, in menu_loop
File "worldmap_system\worldmap.pyc", line 1695, in execute
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1772, in turn_loop
File "battle_system\mapobj.pyc", line 1593, in ai_turn
AttributeError: 'Unit' object has no attribute 'ai'
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Ah. Yes, that would be exactly as I suspected. Those units don't have an AI assigned to them since we changed the way AI got set up and I never updated the old test missions. Eh... since those missions aren't going to be used in the future, just ignore them for now. The Lord Fuzzy mission got incorporated into CH2ST5 and I think Alice is getting her own mission later on. Thanks for the update!
Edit: Bug has been fixed. Those links to the alpha have been updated with the patched missions.
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Found some free time earlier than I thought, I started a campaign from the start in v0.5.0. I skipped most of the dialogue as those can be edited easily and it's gonna get long if I give feedback on that now.
CH1ST2, I killed everything there without using a single heal item. Everyone was darn close to dying, but none of my units actually died. Definitely not something most players would pull off though, as my starting move was "send Youmu to solo all the trees East, send everyone else to walk into the forest West". The game was expecting me to go immediately North to spring the trap, so when I walked through the West forest, the fairies didn't come all at once.
Whether this kind of accomplishment is acceptable or not is up to you. I'll just be giving a play review without nitpicking on the few things I'm noticing.
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I don't expect the suggested strategy to be the only one. I'd be perfectly happy if players come up with another strategy as long as there isn't a single dominant strategy that makes a level trivial to play. Your strategy doesn't seem to be something that a lot of people would come up with.
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CH1ST3, Chen became a healbot so that Youmu could have 2 spells for alignment mixup. Marisa is my backup tank. Ran is mostly useless except for picking up items and pulling mobs one at a time. Mind, she dodged on a 20% chance when I needed her to weaken Wriggle just that little bit more. I expected her to die from that task - and it shows I'm abusing the "no penalties for if your units get KO'd" feature that I'd even consider such an attack. Used 1 too many heal items on Youmu, she'd haev been fine at 3 HP at the end of the map but I didn't calculate Wriggle's damage properly. Again, every enemy mob was killed before I finished the map.
as long as there isn't a single dominant strategy that makes a level trivial to play
Some of those dominant strategies are going to open up around mid-game when a diligent player who has sacrificed whole stages to their one Chosen Unit starts to reap their reward. I'll seeif I can hit that by the end of chapter 2, as I'm not giving any kills to Ran or Chen.
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There's been some feedback on the wave regarding that our characters aren't really distinct enough. Ran and Chen don't really have well defined roles. I think that we could assign them some specialized spells that could be put to good use. For instance we could replace Ran's spell card with something that'll give a unit temporary evasion bonus since her class is an illusionist. We don't have any support spells at the moment but I would like to see some. We also need to create more class and character specific traits. I use Chen a lot more than you do Psieye, but I don't know how useful she is to other people. She can take hits a lot better than most characters since she has fairly good defense if you bring her up to level. At this point, the engine is stable enough that we can push on to content development in earnest.
Here are the latest builds:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/149048/lostsky_0.5.0alpha2_source.zip
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/149048/lostsky_0.5.0alpha2_win.zip
# 2/27/10 - Bugfixes to spell synth and battle system, mission story tweaks
- Added a treasure to CH2ST3's right side
- Tweaked the intro story event to add a startle emphasize which Fuzzball is talking
- Added terrain data display to "View Map" mode on deploy unit menu
- Changed Mokou's death line to something more intimidating
- [Bugfix] Unlock Youkai Mountain set to after CH2ST5
- [Bugfix] Fixed spell synthesis ingredient information not updating after a spell is created
- [Bugfix] Fixed a crash in checking if a unit has a valid counterattack when one side has no spell equipped
# 2/26/10 - Battle Map Gameplay Optimization
- Minor optimization to unit.get_moves_path and unit.get_prohibited
- Removed unnecessary blits when backing out of a menu from sc_loop_a-c, move_loop, menu_loop
- [Bugfix : Targetted at Issue #49] Removed an extra call to map.get_all_moves in unit.menu_loop
- [Bugfix] Fixed uncontrolled blitting causing 100% CPU usage in Traits Loop
- [Bugfix] Gave a mission name to Ch2ST3 which did not have one
# 2/24/10 - Extra Missions Bugfix
- [Bugfix] Fixed a bug in CH0ST2 and CH0ST4 due to ai not having been assigned.
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I use Chen a lot more than you do Psieye, but I don't know how useful she is to other people. She can take hits a lot better than most characters since she has fairly good defense if you bring her up to level.
Oh yes, I'm quite aware Chen isn't useless. Just that for this campaign run, I decided I'd concentrate all my Player Love on Youmu and Marisa. Thing about Chen is, she needs to be fed kills to level efficiently and moves slowly. Nothing wrong with that, I've built up such units before. But for this particular run, I chose not to use her. Especially in the earlygame when we're very limited in spell variety.
On that note, I'll have to see what you've got later on, but right now in CH1ST3 it feels extremely limited in what spells I have available for use. Of the basic attack spell given for each alignment, only Force (dagger throw) is "check against DEF" and everything else is "check against MDEF". Ideally there should be 4 basic attack spells for each alignment, so the player can optimise for "uses STR/MGC" and "check against DEF/MDEF" without being bound to which alignment they're using.
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You make a good point about the lack of spell variety at this stage. As I previously alluded to, I didn't want to make a lot of spells because of the engine instabilities up to this point and that we were going to eventually replace the spell animation system.
Our spell crafting system has a few holes to fill: Spreadsheet (http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AiT_qFotTXj-dEZhUjd4eTl0UmZYRURMRlVWVk5SeFE&hl=en). I haven't updated this in a while so I'd like to sit down and put in some ideas. I'll also start a wave for the discussion.
I am targeting the final version of 0.5.0 this weekend so I'm considering what we have in the repository feature complete.
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Your spell list needs to satisfy 2 criteria: a satisfying set of relationships for how they get synthesised and a distribution of properties to fill in all the needs of the player (P vs M in Att/Def). You need to build a 2nd table to investigate whether you're satisfying this 2nd criteria, just as you've investigated for the 1st criteria.
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0.5.0 is here!
http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/downloads/
Thanks to everyone who contributed or did testing and gave feedback/bug reports. Couldn't have done it without you all.
Screenshots:
(http://imgur.com/nlDaus.jpg) (http://imgur.com/nlDau.jpg)(http://imgur.com/xh2Zys.jpg) (http://imgur.com/xh2Zy.jpg)
What are the major changes in the latest version?
-Spirit Charge Cost for spell cards
-Recipe based Spell Synthesis System
-New Predictor Panel
-New Content:
--Additional scene added to prologue
--Missions: CH2ST3 to CH2ST5
--Mokou playable
--Shop/Spell Synthesis Theme Music
Here's the changelog:
# 3/6/10 - 0.5.0 Final
- Removed test trades from item trading system
- Set debug flags (splash), WM tutorial to true
# 3/5/10 - Aya Stories Added
- Added 2 more Aya articles to be triggered after CH2ST2 and CH2ST4.
# 2/28/10 - Reduced shield for Healing Drop to 1 - 0.5.0 Beta
# 2/27/10 - Bugfixes to spell synth and battle system, mission story tweaks
- Added a treasure to CH2ST3's right side
- Tweaked the intro story event to add a startle emphasize which Fuzzball is talking
- Added terrain data display to "View Map" mode on deploy unit menu
- Changed Mokou's death line to something more intimidating
- [Bugfix] Unlock Youkai Mountain set to after CH2ST5
- [Bugfix] Fixed spell synthesis ingredient information not updating after a spell is created
- [Bugfix] Fixed a crash in checking if a unit has a valid counterattack when one side has no spell equipped
# 2/26/10 - Battle Map Gameplay Optimization
- Minor optimization to unit.get_moves_path and unit.get_prohibited
- Removed unnecessary blits when backing out of a menu from sc_loop_a-c, move_loop, menu_loop
- [Bugfix : Targetted at Issue #49] Removed an extra call to map.get_all_moves in unit.menu_loop
- [Bugfix] Fixed uncontrolled blitting causing 100% CPU usage in Traits Loop
- [Bugfix] Gave a mission name to Ch2ST3 which did not have one
# 2/24/10 - Extra Missions Bugfix
- [Bugfix] Fixed a bug in CH0ST2 and CH0ST4 due to ai not having been assigned.
# 2/21/10 - 0.5.0 Alpha
- Set debug flags to alpha readyness settings
- Typo fix in prologue
- Set version number to 0.5.0
# 2/20/10 - CH2ST5 Revision 4
- Moved the bridge and the shrine item closer to map center.
- Added Ibis Tapestry, Cell Phone, and Magic Lamp as treasures
- Added CH2ST5 Prologue Event, Treasure Event, Ending Event
- [Bugfix] - Set all units to regular color (turn not ended) at the end of the mission
# 2/14/10 - CH2ST5 Revision 3
- Decreased map size of CH2ST5 to 25x20
- Added three wind weasels guarding a shrine to SW corner
- Stripped down all the story part for now.
- [Bugfix] Target spell incorrectly displays as None on predictor if unit is equipped with a different spell slot.
(Cause was the target unit's spell lookup using the caster's spell index)
# 2/13/10 - Various Bugfixes: Objectives display, Item trading, CH1ST2, Ch1ST3
- Changed "Enemy Objectives" to "Mission Failure Conditions" and wording of objectives to match
- [Fixes issue 48] Set end turn after all units move to on by default
- [Bugfix] Unwrapped description text in item trading menu for treasures
- [Bugfix] Fixed a bug in Ch1St3 where Marisa instead of game narration said "Marisa's SC is maxed out"
- [Bugfix] [Fixes issue 45] Closes up the gaps in the CH1ST2 Kodama reaction
# 1/30/10 - More work on CH2ST5
- Continued work on CH2ST5 - Added a pre-mission sequence, adjusted stats.
- Separated out check if a unit can counterattack into its own method
- Stardust has a 80% chance to stun.
- [Bugfix] Stun status effect blocks counterattack actions.
# 1/29/10 - Started working on CH2ST5
- Started working on CH2ST5: Created Mission Map and basic battle setup
- Added Lord Fuzzy sprite
- Added Stardust Spell (Stun Status Effect)
- Corrected description of Poison Dust's effectiveness. (30% -> 60%)
# 1/24/10 - CH2ST4 completed, Fix to player state leak between save data loads.
- Draft of Ch2ST4 Finished.
- [Bugfix][Issue #46, Issue #47]
-- Problem: Player state was leaking through between save data loads.
-- Created a reset state method for units to restart them.
-- Reset all units to starting state between loads
-- Reset list of units in party between loads
# 1/23/10 - CH2ST4 Groundwork
- About 75% through a rough draft version of CH2ST4
# 1/22/10 - Emotion bubbles added
- Added emotion bubble actions to prologue and CH2ST3
- Added emotion bubbles from Team Pockethouse
# 1/21/10 - Minor typo fix
- Fixed incorrect spellings of Lantern in the game.
# 1/20/10 - Prologue Expanded
- Added Yuyuko and Yukari scenes to the prologue
# 1/19/10 - Fleshing out CH2ST3
- Added a conclusion part to the mission
- Added some in-battle conversations to CH2ST3
- Gave Mokou a rice cake
- MAE execution check added before player's turn begins.
- [Bugfix] Dotdotdot emote frameheight
- [Bugfix] Number of frames in an emote incorrectly calculated
- [Bugfix] Support for triggers turn number, unit alive included in mission2wiki.
# 1/17/10 - Shop Theme Added
- Added a shop theme to Spell Synthesis, Item Creation, Treasure menus
# 1/16/10 - CH2ST3 Story Revision
- Revised story intro of CH2ST3
- Added names to Kodama Lords: Kotone, Ayaka, Haruna, and Miu
- [Issue #32] Added display of current turn number next to terrain display
# 1/14/10 - CH2ST3 Gameplay Revision
- Added the following triggers: unit_alive, turn_number
- CH2ST3 gameplay side drafted
- Added more enemies and changed the way they were distributed
- [Bugfix] Crash when unit's ai acts and unit has no spells available
# 1/13/10 - CH2ST3 Revision Groundwork
- New map for CH2ST3
- Started revision to convert Ch2ST3 into an escape in 15 turns map.
- Enemies moved around: E and W groups moved to NE, NW. Fireflies moved to central island
- Added escape objective
- [Bugfix] Crash when unit recovers from status effect
# 1/12/10 - Deployed Units
- Added deploy units sub action
- Added ability to set a unit as reserved to be place on the map later via map actions
- [Bugfix] - Assigning of multiple traits/ spells supported at map initialization to enemies
# 1/9/10 - More clear presentation of unit advantages at predictor
- Reworked the way the predictor is displayed
-- Predictor now is called as a single method from user.plot_predictor(target)
-- Display of traits at this predictor is dropped
-- Use arrows to show strengths and weaknesses
- Added arrow icons for displaying strength and weakness
# 1/6/10 - Status Effect fixes and displays
- Increased basic spell uses from 30 to 45
- Added display for when status effect has ended.
- Added display when HP/SC changes due to a status effect
- Output damage from poison to console
- [Bugfix][Issue #31 ] Crash due to death from status effect
# 1/5/10 - CH2ST3 update
- Enemy Movement Range changes: Fairy (7 -> 5), Firefly (5->6), Kodama Lord (7->4)
- More enemies to CH2ST3
- Added a healer fairy introduction scene in CH2ST3
- Added healer fairy portrait
- Added Show Animations sub action support to mission2wiki exporter script
# 1/4/10 - First Draft CH2ST3
- Removed a debug print in mapobj.py
- About halfway done with the enemies but mission is playable.
- Survive objective counts a victory if you defeat all enemies.
- Added a spell for Mokou
- Added Yukari portrait / sprite
- [Bugfix] Crash when all enemies defeated in survive objective.
- [Bugfix] Crash on launching mission2wiki due to add recipe map action
# 1/2/10 - More progress on CH2ST3
- Added more enemy units and dialog to CH2ST3
- Set up CH2ST3 deploy locations
- [Bugfix] Crash when attempting to remove a unit in deploy mode on an unoccupied tile.
# 1/1/10 - Mokou sets things on fire
- Added Mokou portrait image
- Added Fire Spell image
- Moved emote animations to images/anim/effects
- Emote effects loaded from xml file instead of hard coded into engine
- Added support for effect animations on the map
# 12/31/09
- Added CH2ST3 map and started working on mission.
- Added a gravestone location to the landmarks file. Replaced statue.
# 12/30/09 - Marisa AGL fix
- Flight has +30% AGL
- Marisa has AGL base growth of 9 instead of 7
# 12/28/09 - CH1ST3 Map Redo / Outlined map text
-Added outlined text to map healing and no battle animation mode
-Set the display of numbers in no-battle mode to be consistent with healing items / regen
-CH1ST3 is resized to a 25x25 map from a 40x40 map.
-[Bugfix] Victory banner properly set to come before post mission events
# 12/27/09 - Minor Balance Tweak
- Marisa starts at level 4
- Fried Tofu recovers 40% HP instead of 25% to improve usefulness at start of game.
# 12/26/09 - Sorting Units
- Added ability to sort units by Name, Class, Level and any stats
- Added directions to party menu
- Removed sort option from individual character menu in party menu
- [Bugfix] First unit in the party list placed 10 pixels too high in the deply screen unit selection screen.
# 12/24/09 - AI Turn Prioritization
- AI prioritizes units in the following order: Retreating Units, Healers, Everyone else
- Refactored the Turn Loop method to split it up into separate function in the battle map object
- Minor fix to realign "empty" word in Treasure menu
- AI update state happens before unit turn prioritization instead of during the unit's turn.
- [Bugfix] AI not properly changing states
# 12/23/09 - Treasure Icons
- Added Treasure Icon attribute to Treasures object and XML reader
- Added Treasure icons to Treasure menu and Spell Synth
# 12/22/09 - Death quotes + Traits tutorial expansion
- Added support for showing a randomly selected line after a unit dies by both status effect / spell attack
- Expanded the Traits tutorial in CH1ST2 to provide more details on the Trait Learning System
- [Bugfix] Crash on use of a regen trait from SC cost display on results
# 12/19/09 - Spell Synthesis Tutorials
- Added a line to CH1ST4 directing players to tutorial
- Added basic spell synthesis tutorial
- Added some crystal and spellcard icons
# 12/18/09 - SC Cost System Results Display
- Added a display of SC cost to the battle results menu
- [Bugfix] SC Cost not loading into healing spells
# 12/16/09 - SC system tweaks, AI spell range fix, Marisa MS Fixes
- Automatically centers back on unit if cancelling either movement selection or spell target selection. Prevents cursor from being stuck off screen.
- Changed SC for hit to 15, miss to -10, critical to 40
- Added recipe unlock for basic spells to CH1ST4
- Attack AI now searches after moving if there's a target in range that it can hit if primary target is out of range.
- Marisa gets 900 SC after arriving at her house. Let's her unleash it on enemies to finish the mission.
- [Bugfix] Just set Marisa's MS uses remaining to 2 in CH1ST2 and have it recharge fully between battles.
Solution from 11/03/09 was causing a bug where she could receive a number of MS spells if you restarted the mission..
# 12/04/09 - Foundations for Spell Synthesis 2.0
- Reorganized spell synthesis system
-- Free Create Deprecated
-- Added elemental alchemy
-- Added recipe learning subaction to xml, mapaction
-- Added descriptions to spell synthesis interface
-- Added a summary screen to recipe synthesis
# 11/27/09 - SC Cost System ctd
- Added SC cost data to stats pages.
- Added SC cost data to spell swap, item creation, trading system displays
# 11/26/09 - SC Cost System / Spell Card Used Up Alert
- [Save Data Change!] Added SC Cost to spell actions.
- Implemented SC cost system on all spellcards.
- Rearranged spell display in SC Loop A to show SC cost
- Changed SC reward for successful attack from 5 to 20
- Expanded the glowy box in the battle menu panel to allow us to fit more stuff
- Alerts player to when a spell action has run out of uses
- Updated version number to 0.4.2
- [Bugfix] Spell cards no longer can be allowed to keep being used for counterattack after being depleted.
# 11/25/09 - Fixing SML
- You can now specify the setup for Youmu/Ran/Chen in the mission launcher.
- [Bugfix] Launching of missions not unlocked at start of game would crash mission launcher since they
were not recognized yet.
# 11/21/09 - Single Mission Launcher
- Added single mission launcher script. Run mission_launcher.py after configuring
mission / characters inside mission_launcher.py file
# 11/14/09 - Emotion Bubbles
- Added emotion bubbles to XML reader, map action, character, mission2wiki
- Added "end unit turn" to mission2wiki that hadn't been added yet
- Added the dotdotdot emotion bubble
- Changed Youmu and Ran's Emotion Bubbles in CH1ST2 to emotion bubble animations
- Fixed typo in CH1ST2 Youmu: "... they're behind this" to "... we're behind this."
# 11/13/09 - Map Background Rendering Update
- Map background rendering algorithm change. Faster and more efficient since map
image doesn't need to be generated on the fly every frame.
-- map.setup_background() : Render background once at map generation and save it
-- map.render_background() : Draws a slice from the pre-rendered background
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@Psieye - Started a compilation of all the spells in the game. Looking at this I already don't like the way we do our stat modifications. A lot of the spells seem to have had their stat mods chosen arbitrarily.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AiT_qFotTXj-dC16b040bjRxY2s5eWZ4cGRsa1ZRN1E&hl=en
A lot of people in the survey have expressed an interest in access to the work in progress builds of our project. I'd like to open our internal repository to the public and make it clear that it is a work in progress build where things can easily break.
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Finally got my PC back up. Well, that's a lie, it's a totally new PC, but still! But, uhh, FFXIII has taken me by the balls, will be a will before I get done with it. But I'll still comment on things up on the wave.
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Gotcha. That's great to hear! Looking forward to seeing new stuff from you. :D
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Not really many screenshot worthy things to show since most of the stuff is under the hood fixes.
I'm currently working on restructuring some of the old unreliable code that's been patched around since the firstt days of the project. I made some really bad decisions about how to store traits and spells back in my first few months on the project when I wasn't as adept at programming Python as I am now. These are deeply ingrained design flaws and I'm going to fix them now before they make updates to the engine unbearable.
The fix to the spell system has been committed. I think I've fixed almost all the problems that have arisen over storing the spells in a list rather than a dict.
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Hey Fawkes,
Sorry for dropping out of this project without notice, I know this is inexcusable behaviour. If you'll still have me, I can continue spriting where I left off. I finally got working on Wriggle, and her physical animation is complete:
(http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa242/Water_and_Wind/Lost%20Sky/WrigglePhysicalSheet.png)
Again, sorry for letting the team down. :ohdear:
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Welcome back! We really missed you, so it is really good to see you back. How have you been doing? Don't hesitate to let us know that you're busy. ^^;
Wriggle is very nicely done. I'll wrap her into the game soon. Elcura's been working on Youmu right now.
I'd like to get you caught up with what has been going on as soon as possible. Most of the planning is split between here and the Google Wave conversations, so if you could send me an email address, I can get you an invite into our conversations. We've also been discussing that we need new map tiles for the upcoming levels since we'll be moving into the Youkai mountain region soon.
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Thanks. I've just sent you my email. Also, I do remember you talking about needing mountain tiles before I left, those will be tricky to implement and probably needs some discussion as to the scale of the mountains (after all, how many mountains does Gensokyo have?).
Riguru's magical attack.
(http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa242/Water_and_Wind/Lost%20Sky/WriggleMagicalSheet.png)
A house, a torii and a shrine.
(http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa242/Water_and_Wind/Lost%20Sky/HouseShrineToriiTiles.png)
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Is there anything I'd need to do to help by this point in development?
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@WnW - Wriggle animations look great. Will hopefully try to add them to the game this week if I'm not too busy. Also thanks for the buildings. My generic thatched roof cottages aren't as good and now we have a proper Torii :D.
Regarding the mountain tiles. This got posted in the Wave, but I'll repost it here. Gensokyo only has 1 mountain so it doesn't make sense to have one tile equal one mountain. What I had suggested was a "cliffside" terrain similar to what these guys did with their RPG maker project. That way we can give the sense that the players are climbing up the mountain.
(http://imgur.com/VAL09s.jpg) (http://imgur.com/VAL09.jpg)
@Mew77 - I just wrapped up some heavy modifications of the internal engine that affect the trait and the spell system. Could you do a quick run through the game and see if there are any crashes? I also tweaked the traits swapping display to make it more clear which traits go where:
(http://imgur.com/KIu8Ts.jpg) (http://imgur.com/KIu8T.jpg)
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I recommend looking over this for pretty reference for maps :3
http://rpgmaker.net/games/471/ That XP one isn't really that impressive unfortunately.
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Ah those maps look nice. I'll have a more detailed look when I get the chance. Thanks!
So let's get everyone up to speed on what's been going on. Because of some of the new things that WnW wants to do, there's going to be an overhaul of the map data format in the future which will make it unbearably difficult to do things the way we've used to do*. So, I've been working on a map editor:
(http://imgur.com/pRwDRs.jpg) (http://imgur.com/pRwDR.jpg)
It's still very much a work in progress and the features are a little limited, but it's at a stage where we can safely ditch the old way of making maps very soon.
* Create a terrain map as an image (.png) and run a script to export it to a data file.
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Oooh and another would be this one: http://rpgmaker.net/games/8/
Hopefully they can be some inspiration for your future maps :D
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Really glad to see you again WnW, I was dreading doing all those sprites alone. I'll stop being lazy soon and get to work, lol.
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Updates from tonight.
First off, this week I made the WIP repository open to the public to read (but not write to). Our development repository can be found here. Be warned that this repository is highly unstable and prone to being very buggy since it is the development version. We don't do executable builds until stable release versions.
http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project
Secondly, there have been some major changes to the terrain data. It's loaded from XML data rather than being hard-coded into the game. This will make things easier to implement new terrain types. Moreover, since the editor now uses the same data as the game, updates to the terrain data will be reflected in both programs. Here is an example of WnW's new terrain that was added tonight.
(http://imgur.com/FJ6y1s.jpg) (http://imgur.com/FJ6y1.jpg)
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I know I'm gay and all, but I can't help but want to do these sprites better. I pick a style, I like it for a while then I want to do better. Such a self-destructive workflow I got, but I like this new style. And with more experience in drawing and animating, lets see where this takes us.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/YoumuNewStyle.png)
Note to self: Stop being a gay and stick to a style, lol. This is it!
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I actually like the new style more than the last iteration. Let's get a working set of animations for Youmu and then we can work on others. I'd prefer if we cover as many characters as we can first.
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This new style is cute, I like it. It might actually be better in the long run to go for this style because its smaller which can make spriting a little faster (less AA, at least).
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Did a few more, just need block and attack and Youmu is basically done. Keeping shit relatively simple, only thing that probably needs more work is the hit frame, but I imagine with some hit graphics (i'll impose one from IaMP/SWR) and some frame shaking it'll look fine. The magic animation has the repeatable frames for whatever graphics overlay and signify spell casting. Oh, I guess I could put a quick spell card animation on top?
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Youmu-New-Style-Idle-1.gif)
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Youmu-New-Style-Magic-1.gif)
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/Amythest/Youmu-New-Style-Hit-1.gif)
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Stance 1 looks good. Which ones do the 2nd and 3rd ones correspond to? With the second and third one, it seems Youmu's movements are unnatural since she seems to move just her arms and head without moving her body or legs at all. Does anyone else see this? Otherwise, they look great.
Updates to the terrain system are mostly complete at this stage. We now support a second layer for the use in cliff tiles:
(http://imgur.com/v0L1qs.jpg) (http://imgur.com/v0L1q.jpg)(http://imgur.com/6uQIJs.jpg) (http://imgur.com/6uQIJ.jpg)
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2nd and 3rd are magic and hit. Just keeping it quick and simple for now, I didn't want to spend too long on a character because well... new styles come lol. After I'm done with attack and block, I'll revisit those animations and see what they'll look like post effects. If it still looks weird to you I'll add some more frames and motions.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ok, what about future animations?
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
(http://imgur.com/AzXhvs.jpg) (http://imgur.com/AzXhv.jpg)
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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
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0.5.1 is live!
Download it at: http://lostsky.featheredmelody.com
Screenshots
(http://imgur.com/pshdns.jpg) (http://imgur.com/pshdn.jpg)(http://imgur.com/Qa7KKs.jpg) (http://imgur.com/Qa7KK.jpg)(http://imgur.com/fXQ0xs.jpg) (http://imgur.com/fXQ0x.jpg)(http://imgur.com/8jtems.jpg) (http://imgur.com/8jtem.jpg)
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.
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Link doesn't work for me :derp:
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Which link?
Try this one:
http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/downloads
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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.
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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.
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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. >.>
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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.
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Edit: (http://imgur.com/1yr1Z.jpg)
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 (http://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/issue/59/keines-healing-nerf), 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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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.
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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:
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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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandrake_(plant)#Magic.2C_spells.2C_and_witchcraft)
Treant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_creatures#Treant)
Jinmenju (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmenju), a tree with human faced fruit
Jubokko (http://www.obakemono.com/obake/jubokko/), a vampire tree
Kijimunaa a tree sprite (Not really able to find more info on this)
Hōkō (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penghou) - a dog-like tree spirit
Jorōgumo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jor%C5%8Dgumo) - 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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
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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.
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@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.
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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 (https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AiT_qFotTXj-dC16b040bjRxY2s5eWZ4cGRsa1ZRN1E&hl=en&gid=0) on Google Docs.
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It's been a while since I followed this project.
What's happened since then?
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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.
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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
(http://imgur.com/J0XE9s.jpg) (http://imgur.com/J0XE9.jpg) (http://imgur.com/FuVf5s.jpg) (http://imgur.com/FuVf5.jpg) (http://imgur.com/EOxwLs.jpg) (http://imgur.com/EOxwL.jpg)
Edit: TODO - Fix the text wrap issue in the first screenshot :/
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Mokou's flying phoenix. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEnH6x35Os)
Spiral Emitter test (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDEW2nEF2lg)
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.
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Hi! We finally have 0.6.0 ready to play! Downloads Page (https://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public/downloads)
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
(http://i.imgur.com/qw55Hs.jpg) (http://i.imgur.com/qw55H.jpg)(http://i.imgur.com/kSTK6s.jpg) (http://i.imgur.com/kSTK6.jpg)(http://i.imgur.com/cVSpqs.jpg) (http://i.imgur.com/cVSpq.jpg)
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Added some bouncing stars (Video) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PQJ5VwniGo)
This marks the first support for variable speed bullets in our animation system.