Sunday, November 20, 2016

Testing 11/20

Test stream from today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e647Hww2avw

New glitches:

- Entering a cave on floor 1 softlocked once with the SD2SNES.  I haven't been able to reproduce this on SNES9X with the same ROM/same cave.  Going to try again at some point with the flash cart.

- The sprite has Lumina listed under his spell levels menu, and the girl has Shade listed.  This one should actually be fixed as of now.

- If I buy an HP/MP restore from the NPC while I have dead characters, they get restored to full HP but not actually revived.  There's probably just some event command I'm missing in here. (11/21 - fixed I think)

New issues:

- Still getting wrecked after floor 10 or so on what should be easy difficulty.  Going to try turning enemy stats down a little and maybe also not bumping mana power up at all.  Unfortunately, keeping mana power at 0 means that spells won't level, so this is a temporary solution - the more complete solution will be reducing the effect that mana power actually has on weapon damage. (11/21 - updated .. halved all 8-bit enemy stats (str, int, etc) on casual difficulty and removed mana power scaling temporarily - will see how this feels next test stream)

Sunday, November 13, 2016

Some Changes & Fixes

Based on yesterday's stream.

- Tables (and bookshelves) shouldn't overlap stairways anymore.

- Leveling up now restores MP as well as HP.

- On the easiest difficulty, two elements and two restore NPCs now appear per floor, versus only one previously (and still, on other difficulties).

I'm also considering randomizing status effects caused by weapons.  I'd have to go into the weapon descriptions and change them too, so you could see which did what.

New test stream at some point soonish.

Things that I'd like to have done before a first release:

- More detail on the inside areas for each of the three tilesets
- Mana Beast testing for longer ROMs
- More palette variations
- A few other minor fixes

Saturday, November 12, 2016

Test Stream

Streamed a fresh ROM (8FBF7481FE3CFBF9) for a bit again today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d63GcfX9g3A

New issues:

- Tables in ruins tileset sometimes cover/intersect with stairways
- Next floor teleporter in forest tileset was in the middle of a mountain ledge once, though it was reachable
- Some stairways to nowhere in forest tileset.  Though this looks weird, it doesn't really have any negative impact on the gameplay
- At one point I ended up with two Midge Robes and one of them could not be thrown out.  Not sure this was even something that I caused.

New ideas:

- Make levelups restore MP as well as HP

Exp & Drop Tweaks

The characters didn't seem to grow as fast as I'd've liked them to on the previous test, so I'm going to try doubling exp, with all other stats remaining equal.

Also, the way I handle drops is changing a bit.  Each floor equates to a piece of gear in each category (hat, armor, bracelet) that is "normal" for it to drop.  This grows linearly based on which floor you're on.  Difficulty levels each have different "spreads" around this value which indicate the pool of items that can randomly drop on a given floor for that difficulty.  I'm tightening the lower spread for the easy difficulty so it drops less garbage and more good stuff.  I'm also taking Overalls, Kung Fu Suit, and Midge Robe out of the drop pool entirely since you start with them.

The issue I saw last stream with orange bars coming up at the top of the screen on layer 3 should be fixed.  That was an issue with the placeholder event I use in each map's walk-on event to, if the floor music changes, inject a music change.  For no-change maps, this was triggering and creating that graphical glitch.  I use a different placeholder now that shouldn't do that.

The other issue I saw where Ruins tileset maps that should have started me on the roof were instead starting me on the ground right next to the exit has also been fixed.

Friday, November 11, 2016

New blog

Created blog for the new Secret of Mana project.

No initial release yet, but it's probably almost ready.

Me surviving until floor 15ish in a recent 32-floor test (A702DF223D52874E) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umyjc2ahpyI&t=55m5s

Main feature list on left side of blog.

Suggestions for features are welcome.