I'm Trying My Hardest

Densetsu no Okami/Wolf's Quest has been uploaded.

I think one of the major problems with the old version was the fact that I tired to hard not to make my Christianity obvious.

The second problem was a random, irrelevant, (and therefore) irreverent Bible quote early in the game. It's been on my concnience since I put it there, big and obvious as a typo, but I never went back and got rid of it.

The third problem was one I came to grips with after discovering the Fair Use exception of copyright law. No longer am I confused by James mentioning FF4 and SPAM in Wandering Hamster. No longer do I feel guilty about spelling Peridot as Paradaux(except that it's a stupid mispelling). No longer do I beat myself up over having made a reference to Vlad the Hamster midway through the game.

The fourth issue with the old game is, in my opinion, the most important.
The gameplay is no fun.

Now, I like the standart RPG-battle setup more than the next guy. A lot more.
But even I can see that the battles in this game are too slow to be fun in the Final Fantasy sense(simply levelbusting and buying tons of powerful equipment to kill lots of things quickly with high damage numbers); likewise, the gameplay was too simple to qualify in the old DW1-4 sense of requiring careful management of resources and a deep knowledge of the differences between your characters.

One of my favorite new features is the one I've wanted since the dawn of Handshake; the ability to disable the ESC button run. Now I have a reason for there to be a Flee command; which I have implemented.

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

Alright. I'll give the game a shot.

EDIT: After playing this, I am now unsure if I will ever know what you were talking about in the intro.

The intro refers to:
1) I made a world.
2) I populated it with furries.
3) The evil half of me(who uses 1337 and Arfenspeak) decided to be a threat to it.
4) I made a few furries into heroes so that they can level up and defeat him. Every once in a while I make a non-furry into a hero, as well.


I need Dead sprites.

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

Then make them.

I suppose the easiest way would just be to rotate your weak-stance sprites 90 degrees to the right and then cutting off their legs, or something to that effect.

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♪♪♪ Du du duuuu ♪♪♪

I know what you mean. They suck to draw right? My solution is that I make my Dead pose look what normally might look like a Weak pose. The characters will be on their knees or something to that extent. The weak position for me would be somewhat similar to their main position.

This works for me conceptually because I don't like the idea that a hero reaching 0 HP means they're dead. It takes too much away from actual death. Am I the only person who thought that when Aeris died in FF7 they should've just used a phoenix down?

So the theory behind my method is that if they reach 0 HP, they are too weak to fight any more, but not technically dead. But if they all reach 0, then well, they're screwed.

So they're just sitting there, but no one attacks them anymore?

Other FF games call the status KO, Unconscious, Swoon, or whatever. It might not make sense to call it "dead," but it's silly to just have them sit there.

Unrelatedly, FF Tactics did the best job of making the Dead status make gameplay sense. If a character stayed dead for three rounds, he would die permanently. Valkyrie Profile did something similar, with the slight difference that all its characters are dead to begin with. Valkyrie uses her divine materialization to summon her Einherjar; if she falls in battle, then the game is lost in three rounds unless she's revived because the materialization fails. This is pretty much never a problem, but it's a cool addition nonetheless.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

I think it's actually less silly than having a method of bringing people back from the dead that's actually really easy to use, but not using it when someone dies outside of battle (i.e. Aeris). To me, that's a plot hole.

I like the idea of calling it KO or unconscious, or whatever. The whole point is not making them actually die in battle. I just choose to show this by not having them laying on the ground. Plus it's a lot easier to draw (ok, that's probably the main reason).

No, you aren't. I've never played that game, but I still think it's stupid.


That's the position I usually take with my games, but for this one I decided that the characters actually die, but the only truly easy way to revive them is to stay at the inn. The revive spells are only used by two characters, have huge delay times, high MP costs, and occasionally miss.

[quote]
I think so too, but I'd rather just not kill characters off in the story and make plotholes.


Actually, even when they aren't dead, but are too weak to fight(I.E., unconsious) they'd be lying down and not doing anything. Most people won't go around to make sure all their enemies are dead until after all those who can still fight have been knocked down.

I've actually thought of doing a death script, though that would require someone else's help. What it would do, ideally:

Reset all characters to 1 HP and 0 MP
Bring the party back to Peridot castle
Halve the party's current money
Halve the party's current supply of consumable items
Erase all experience gained since the last level up




Too bad the sprite editor doesn't have rotate buttons. That would make things so much easier

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

Well, from the looks of that, it would seem that dying would cause most players to just reset from their last save. Unless they don't save very often. I'm not sure how to "erase all experience gained since the last level up", and since it would affect different characters differently, I don't think I'd recommend that. Ideally I'd say let the EXP stay the same, and then this doesn't seem so bad and seems like a realistic alternative to starting from the last save.

Unfortunately, since we don't have a command to read item data, halving only consumable items will not be particularly fun. The script would look like:


However, if you could arrange your items in the item editor cleverly, this could be simplified considerably. Maybe make all consumable items starting at item zero, and all non-consumables starting at 254 and counting down?

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I am Srime

SaGa Frontier allows enemies to attack unconscious party members. In addition to HP, player characters have LP (Life Points). You can recover unconscious characters with any form of healing, but once a character's LP are exhausted, he can't be revived by any means until you find an inn. If your main character runs out of LP, game over. It's a cool system, one I'd like to see more of.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

So far I've only got three consumable items, #1, #2, and #22. I erased all the unused item slots when I first started the game's file to save space, and add new items one at a time. Maybe just halving their beef jerky and cola, as those are the ones they'll care the most about.

EDIT:

Now they've got dead sprites. The most painful graphics to draw.

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

I've just updated my game again and would like any possible feedback I can get; it's mostly graphical updates this time, but I now have walkabout/hero graphics for all but one of my heroes. And I need more dead sprites.

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

I'd be happy to take a look and give you my thoughts on it. It may be a few days, but I will get around to it.

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Cornbread Chemist

I've played maybe an hour or so, but this is what I've noticed so far:

The Inn probably should be more expensive or the Jerky should be more powerful. For one room at $5, you can completely re-fill one's HP. Jerky from the store costs $10 and restores 3 HP. Doesn't really make sense.

I understand what you are trying to do with the wavy grass/world map, but I think that some changes can be made for it to look a little bit better. Personally, I would work on making some animated tall grass swaying in the wind rather than the entire tile itself shaking violently.

The world map looks as if it is alive...maybe not so much animation on tiles other than the sea?

You should consider changing the BAMs that you are using into a newer music format.

The sunken tower area was kind of meh. The first two rooms look exactly the same and there is nothing really to break the monotony in the tiles. Consider making the the design and layout of the dungeons a little more exciting and use a bit more props. Also, you may want to consider making it a bit longer as one can traverse the entire tower within one minute.

I noticed the treasure chests shut themself back up after you open them and then leave the room. You may want to adjust that some.

I will keep playing through it as I have time and let you know what I come up with.

EDIT: If you have the colors to spare, you should really consider making some darker outlines (not necessarily black, but a darker green to your greens, etc...) to your hero/enemy/walkabout sprites. At the very least this technique will give your sprites just a tad more depth rather than them looking like cardboard cutouts.

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Cornbread Chemist

tagged to remind me to download later, ill give it a shot and yet you know what i think.