Friday, June 30, 2017

v0.80

I've held onto this for long enough, I think.  This may have some issues still, but we should be able to work them out in time.  The changes are:
- Major enemy stat/difficulty overhaul.  The three built-in difficulties have been overhauled, and every piece of them is now customizable if you so desire.  This will likely have some issues, so let me know if any mode is too easy, too hard, too grindy, etc.  Feel free to adjust stat values to find the right balance and submit them here.
- Remove Tonpole as a boss in Manafort - he doesn't seem to work on that map.
- Fix re-rolling for non-repeated bosses.
- Demetri Martin as random dialogue source
- Add Phanna, Watts, and Neko into the mix as random useless NPCs - this should give you a reason to see the comedian dialogue at least now and then.
- Overhaul how I handle the in-game timer - it should be more accurate now but hasn't been fully tested yet.
- Allow Evil Gate to be used on bosses.  Vanilla Evil Gate is an HP percent attack which is reduced to low, fixed damage on bosses.  I've replaced this damage fix with a 50% damage reduction, so it should work on bosses but (hopefully) not be TOO overpowered.

Link

As always, suggestions, bug reports, etc. are welcome.  There are a lot of changes here, so I would expect some things not to be quite right yet.

Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Enemy stat modeling for v0.80

The basics are in for v0.80's major enemy stat overhaul.  Preliminary testing shows customizable stats seem to "work" (not crash horribly).  Need to try a few more things before I really call it working.

Here's what's been added:

- Stat growth is no longer a simple calculation in SoM code based off the floor number.  The tool generates two tables of values for each stat that enemies and bosses pull from separately.  This is based on a simple parameterized formula for each stat: Stat value = b + (f^e) * m, where
   - b = a base value
   - f = the floor number
   - e = an exponent
   - m = a multiplier
b, e, and m are configurable for each stat.  This allows you to make, for example, HP grow in an exponential fashion while defense stays constant or grows linearly.

- The tool runs through some basic damage formulas and with some optional user parameters, figures out about what your stats will be at each floor based on how many enemies you tend to kill, whether or not you buy armor, etc.  It can then graph the progression of things like damage you'll tend to deal to enemies with physical/magical hits, number of hits to kill your characters, etc:


- All other parameters of a specific difficulty level are now customizable.  This includes things like your starting gold, cost of a continue, number of element NPCs per floor, etc.
- If you don't feel like screwing with any of this stuff, the old difficulties (Casual, Hard, Really hard) still exist as preset configurations of all of these things.
- If you do like messing with this stuff, you can save, share, and reload custom difficulty settings.  You can also export and tweak the built-in ones if you feel they aren't quite correct.

- The damage calculations I'm using are a simplified version of those found here: https://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/588646-secret-of-mana/69777977 (credit to StingerPA for these calculations).  These are still largely untested.  If you find issues with the accuracy of the graphs, let me know, and we can find what's not being calculated right.

- Player stats are still 100% vanilla.  I have no current plans to change them.  I sort of like having something from the original game still be present.