Walthros: Renewal - Now available

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The Wobbler
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Re: Walthros: Renewal - Demo 2.1 Now Available

Post by The Wobbler »

Having fun filling the hotel rooms with weirdos
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Hank is feeling fine.
Hank is feeling fine.
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Blacksmith's Room
Blacksmith's Room
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Sometimes fans go a little too far and make giant balloon versions of you.
Sometimes fans go a little too far and make giant balloon versions of you.
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The Wobbler
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Re: Walthros: Renewal - Demo 2.1 Now Available

Post by The Wobbler »

Hotel Hopland is done, time to move on to an underground fun house! I've got a whole backstory in my head for these NPCs, but it's not a part of this story. I like the idea of every NPC having their own history that could be its own story.

I am thoroughly uninterested in most townsfolk in RPGs I've played. It's extremely rare for them to be memorable unless they're part of the story or a quest. I want all of my lesser NPCs to have something unique about them, whether it's visual or personal.
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Re: Walthros: Renewal - Demo 2.1 Now Available

Post by The Wobbler »

Worms
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Woo hits hard but she chooses her own spells! Whether it's doom or a dud, you never know what to expect from her. She has the highest magic defense of all the heroes and her upgraded weapons can inflict status ailments.
Woo hits hard but she chooses her own spells! Whether it's doom or a dud, you never know what to expect from her. She has the highest magic defense of all the heroes and her upgraded weapons can inflict status ailments.
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Working on setting up Woo's abilities. The interdimensional rabbit pop star fights with a ribbon that can be upgraded into a snake (may poison) or flail (may stun). The choice is yours!!
Working on setting up Woo's abilities. The interdimensional rabbit pop star fights with a ribbon that can be upgraded into a snake (may poison) or flail (may stun). The choice is yours!!
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The Wobbler
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Re: Walthros: Renewal - Demo 2.1 Now Available

Post by The Wobbler »

Battle balancing for Woo is complete! She's ready to join the party.

Woo has 22 different skills that can hit the enemy, support the party, or, if you're unlucky, do nothing at all. Don't worry, there's a 96% chance of success!
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Re: Walthros: Renewal - Demo 2.1 Now Available

Post by SwordPlay »

you are a one-man-army
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Re: Walthros: Renewal - Demo 2.1 Now Available

Post by The Wobbler »

Thanks James for helping me get parallax scrolling working! The fog in Bayswater Woods looks a lot nicer now.
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Adding a little more functionality to the Salom Phone. You can now check your play stats right from your (in game) phone!! Maybe there will be an extensive Yuk Farmer game on there too.
Adding a little more functionality to the Salom Phone. You can now check your play stats right from your (in game) phone!! Maybe there will be an extensive Yuk Farmer game on there too.
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The Wobbler
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Re: Walthros: Renewal

Post by The Wobbler »

Hello fellow elderly people, the original Walthros is 20 years old now. Development started in 1998, final version released in 2002, I feel so very old.
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Walthros Then and Now: Dr. Pescado's lab, 1998 vs 2022
Walthros Then and Now: Dr. Pescado's lab, 1998 vs 2022
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Re: Walthros: Renewal

Post by Bob the Hamster »

Gersh dern whippersnappers with their modern fancy pants Walthros Renewals! Back in my day, our Walthroses had twenty-by-twenty en-pee-sees, and dad gum it, that was good enuff fer us! Next yer gonna be tellin' me they've got dang blasted transparent clouds and paralacksey scrollering! ... ... ... WHAT?
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Re: Walthros: Renewal

Post by The Wobbler »

Sam and Hank relive some of the most significant moments in their lives in The Memory Hole. Sam's have been the toughest, emotionally, for me to write but it's important that I do.
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Sam and Hank face off against the Diploganger. This won't be an ordinary boss fight! Ignore the numbers those are not part of the fight!
Sam and Hank face off against the Diploganger. This won't be an ordinary boss fight! Ignore the numbers those are not part of the fight!
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OHR Oncfessions
OHR Oncfessions
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Re: Walthros: Renewal

Post by The Wobbler »

Into the FARM ZONE YEEHAWG
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Sometimes your outlines just get thick
Sometimes your outlines just get thick
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Re: Walthros: Renewal

Post by The Wobbler »

Changing up the way difficulty selection works to give players more options! Story/Normal/Frenzy mode still determines enemy types, attacks, and number, but you can now individually set recovery options and bonuses regardless of level.

I want to add a "guarantee drops" option if I can get it working. What else would be helpful?
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Re: Walthros: Renewal

Post by Hedera »

auto-win battles you're overleveled for, a la earthbound?
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Re: Walthros: Renewal

Post by Fenrir-Lunaris »

I wholeheartedly approve of the ability to tweak the game's balance options this way. I'm also seconding the option to auto-win battles you're well above the average level for. If I could've figured out a way to do it in Vikings I would've, instead of settling for toggling random encounters on or off.

Actually toggling on/off random encounters isn't a completely terrible idea either, though as a certain someone once pointed out, it does bring up a whole host of gameplay balance issues. Dungeons generally lose their teeth if the player isn't really worried about needing to recover after every encounter, and especially if there's no encounters aside from a boss. I've played way too many games where it's expected that you'll max out your inventory with healing potions, just to find you STILL don't have enough because the developers insist on making their games an absolute slog to get through. Then again I'm of the opinion that devs should make their games on the easy side for themselves, if only because the person making the game is going to know where all the hidden equipment and exploits are - and the average player won't, so they'll naturally find the game more challenging.

That said, you could take a page from a few other games and instead consider what each character brings to the table outside of battles. Surlaw seems to be more of a treasure collector this time around, so maybe having him in the active party gives a passive bonus to finding extra loot? Same with the other abilities - whoever has a nurturing personality may try to top off a little of the party's HP, whereas a strong/brave character might grant a little extra XP. I like the idea of Woo occasionally changing the settings when she gets bored.
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Re: Walthros: Renewal

Post by polkakitty »

Fenrir-Lunaris wrote: Tue Feb 15, 2022 6:45 amActually toggling on/off random encounters isn't a completely terrible idea either, though as a certain someone once pointed out, it does bring up a whole host of gameplay balance issues.
In Vikings of Midgard, I found that sometimes I would need to explore an area with different characters from the ones I had in my party the first time I was there, to find things like the clerics that only appear when Frumpy is in the party and teach him new spells, or the secret entrances that are only marked when Styrge is in the party. That was where I found the ability to turn off random battles the most helpful, because it (and the run button, obviously) made it much faster to survey a dungeon for anything I couldn't have seen or done with my previous party lineup.

What I would generally do is, the first time I explored each area, I would do it with random battles on, and if I needed to just walk through an area I'd been to before (which often happened with Nidavellir Fields in particular,) I'd turn the random battles off, just so I didn't have to spend time fighting enemies that were ridiculously far below my party's level and didn't give me enough XP or gold to make it worthwhile to fight them. When I approached the game that way, I would always be at a reasonable level for each new area I explored, and I didn't ever have to stop to grind for XP, or find anything to just be insultingly easy.

If a game has a system like Earthbound where you can see enemies as you walk around the map, and you can choose to fight or avoid them, I think, for the most part, that's functionally the same as being able to turn random battles on or off at any time. You can end up with situations where you can't avoid enemies anyway if the player isn't mobile enough, or if the areas they're exploring are too cramped, and it would be bad if that was the case in every area of the game, but I think situations like that could be used purposefully to create a sense of danger in some areas. If you're making a dungeon where you want attrition to be an issue, and you want the player to have to ration MP and items before they fight the boss, you could make it so enemies appear in twisting corridors where they're hard to avoid, or suddenly jump out from pits and surprise the player.

(I don't think it's just random happenstance that you can see enemies on the map before you fight them in games like Earthbound and Chrono Trigger, where you can move one pixel at a time, but you never see that feature in games made at the same time that use tile-based movement. I think that's why, even though people in the OHR community are always praising that feature in Earthbound, they don't usually implement it in their own games; they probably tried to make a proof-of-concept for it at some point, but found it was just too awkward to work well with tile-based movement. Lufia 2 is an exception, but that's because it essentially makes enemy movement into a puzzle element. Enemies only move when you do, they all move according to some sort of consistent rule (which is often something like "follow the wall on my right" or "whenever the player moves, move the opposite direction" instead of "move towards the player on every turn",) and there are some puzzles where you have to make an enemy move onto a pressure plate to open a door, or some such thing.)

Overall, I think the issue with having to fight random battles all the time isn't generally excessive difficulty, it's boredom. (Though it is actually possible for both of these problems to appear together; I've seen newbie OHRRPGCE games where the heroes don't have any useful skills, so all there is to do in battles is to hold down the spacebar, and the heroes also don't have enough HP to be able to survive more than a couple of battles, so every time you venture away from an inn, it's a gamble to see whether you run into more random battles than you can survive before you make it back.)

I appreciate that The Wobbler wants to make Walthros: Renewal accessible for people who don't have a lot of experience (as it were) with RPGs, but I think an option to turn off random encounters, like what Vikings has, might be more helpful than adding more of this type of difficulty options, because it would benefit people at both the lowest and the highest skill levels. However, I do think the "extra XP" and "extra money" options are a good idea, because they could serve as both another way to tweak the difficulty and a way to accelerate the process of grinding for levels, if anyone still ends up needing to do that.
Fenrir-Lunaris wrote: Tue Feb 15, 2022 6:45 amThen again I'm of the opinion that devs should make their games on the easy side for themselves, if only because the person making the game is going to know where all the hidden equipment and exploits are - and the average player won't, so they'll naturally find the game more challenging.
This is one of the best pieces of advice for designing any kind of game which people often don't think of. As someone working on creating a game, by definition, you already think the concept for it is so awesome that you're willing to spend hundreds of hours working on it, but the same thing isn't going to apply to any random person who's just picking up your game for the first time. Not only does that person not have the same encyclopedic knowledge of the game that you do, they don't have the same investment in the idea of the game that you have. They need to be convinced of how cool your idea is, and if they play your game for the first time, and before they see anything that interests them and makes them want to find out more about it, they get killed by some hazard or enemy that they didn't even anticipate existing, they're going to feel that as a rejection, and they're just going to say "screw this slime, I'm outta here."
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The Wobbler
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Re: Walthros: Renewal

Post by The Wobbler »

Thank you James for the new customizable battle menu appearances/positions in the latest Nightly! I've been working on rearranging mine to feel a little less cramped to to better match the rest of the game's colors.

----

One of my testers who was playing Story Mode said that he wanted the game to be easy, but not so easy that he never has to worry about anything. Originally, HP/MP fully recovered after battle in that mode. Making that piece optional satisfied that tester, and was easy enough to implement.

I like the idea of being able to auto-defeat weak enemies Earthbound style, or switch enemy behavior to Avoid Player if you're strong enough. If I do that it will be something I implement after the rest of the game is done, because it would require a bunch of changes to work properly.
Fenrir-Lunaris wrote: Tue Feb 15, 2022 6:45 am That said, you could take a page from a few other games and instead consider what each character brings to the table outside of battles. Surlaw seems to be more of a treasure collector this time around, so maybe having him in the active party gives a passive bonus to finding extra loot? Same with the other abilities - whoever has a nurturing personality may try to top off a little of the party's HP, whereas a strong/brave character might grant a little extra XP. I like the idea of Woo occasionally changing the settings when she gets bored.
I really like this idea a lot, but think it would be best in a game built around that rather than implementing this late in development. Unlike Kaiju, I'm not doing anything with on-map abilities this time, and players don't get a choice of who leads the party (it isn't always Bob, but it's always determined by the story.)
polkakitty wrote: Tue Feb 15, 2022 3:11 pm They need to be convinced of how cool your idea is, and if they play your game for the first time, and before they see anything that interests them and makes them want to find out more about it, they get killed by some hazard or enemy that they didn't even anticipate existing, they're going to feel that as a rejection, and they're just going to say "screw this slime, I'm outta here."
I got this feedback from people who died in the demo, which led to building the Continue system that's currently in place. Anything that kills you only sets you back one screen at most, so you don't get screwed over if you haven't been saving regularly. Autosave also helps with that.
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