Door To the Heavens [The devlog thread]

[Feenicks]

I'm already giving some enemies some minor animation [pic related], and while I have thought about doing something for regular enemies [some minor moving around, maybe], how exactly I'd do that [as in, how I'd want it to look; I gave the idea a shot a while back and didn't like how it turned out] is still up in the air.

[RMZ]

The floating keeps the fluidity of your animations going for sure. I'm sure with your distinct enemy poses it's not always easy to animate them even simply. The fact that you're doing it some of the time will help a lot. It looks great in motion.

[Feenicks]

It's been about a month.

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Work on the main hub town continues, with all the exterior maps for it and a lot of the interior ones at tiled out, but I also went and got the tileset for one of the other towns set up. I ended up drawing a bunch of interior stuff as well, but I'll wait until next month to show some of that off.

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Stairs that cross over one another, as well as more generally stairs that can pass over regular walkable terrain, have been set up. There's a few places I want to use these, so having them around before I start building that stuff for real seems smart.

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As it's a dungeon without too much event stuff going on, I've been setting up a few maps of the ice cave, and also got the battle backdrop for the area drawn up. I've also gone and drawn a few more enemy sprites, but that's exactly that interesting.

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On the topic of battle backgrounds, I also stumbled into a heat haze effect [to be distinguished from the other wave effect I've shown off in the past, just not in this thread]. Also slightly on topic, I went and made the character UI boxes a set size, instead of having them scale to fill the entire width of the screen.

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And on the topic of battles in general, I'd finally had enough of debugging weapon positioning issues and made a quick reference thing that takes all the battle animation frames and tiles them out, with the equipped weapon positioned as they would be in battle. It's a lot easier to spot and correct improper weapon positions when you aren't looking out for them when a quick animation is actually playing.

______

As for other things I've been doing:
- The cliffside dungeon is more or less complete. There's one scene at the end I've been putting off, and I'll probably muck around with the enemy formations again, but all the mapping is done [and treasure placement is pretty straightforward after the fact].
- I've been doing a lot of database stuff. I finally have some base weapons/armor with which to better test enemies, and while setting up all the area-specific gear [there's a lot] will take time I've at least got most of what I need there started on.
- I redid the pitfall script a bit so that there's no map layer shuffling going on. No need to map stuff out so that NPCs of any sort aren't around pitfalls now.
- Bugfixes, as are inevitable.

And that's another month's work. Let's see if by mid-May I can actually have a town squared away.

[Feenicks]

Another month, another update.

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I finally got all the maps and NPCs in the first area of the game sorted out. Thank goodness.

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I also gave the overworld graphics a try, as having them be the really placeholdery versions for the demo didn't feel great, but I'm not a huge fan of them honestly. I'll probably be ripping these out and replacing them with something else when I start drawing stuff for the rest of the overworld maps.

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On a mechanical level, conveyor belts! I'm able to change the speed at which they push the player around as well.

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Cygna also gets a proper shield bash animation.

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I also got a bestiary screen set up. Compact is definitely the wrong word, but all the information is over two screens now, instead of four as in False Skies. It's also organized by area/subarea, as due to the way this game's set up doing things as a single big list would be problematic.
_____________

Other things of note:
- I got a bunch of enemy and item descriptions done up, as well as some organizational database things done.
- Some more weapon/shield graphics got thrown into the file.
- I reorganized the menu a little bit to put all of the less directly important stuff into their own System menu.
- Also I got another demo out! Go check it out maybe.

[Feenicks]

Another month!

This was one of those months where I didn't advance the playtime of the game any, but did get a bunch of mechanical and art-related things done. Funny how that is.

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One of the main things I did was work on three other temporary characters you get, this time ones only encountered if you take certain scenarios first. They're all healers of some description, but they also cover some other position in the lineup you'll be lacking in at the start:

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89 is a Sage, who acts as a second magic-user for the party, and gets [fleeting] buffs and debuffs to use.

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Buur gets to be the sole physical fighter in a party of magicians, and gets both a good self-buff and the ability to spread effects on themselves to allies.

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Manan is a second archer, with the ability to shore up defenses a little bit if pure offense isn't a great answer. Unlike the other two, I haven't yet given him any really notable animations for when they're in battle.

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Other battle stuff! I've had the bomb status penciled in since I started getting statuses set up, but waited until now to get it working. It does nothing until it hits 1, at which point the afflicted is KOd and does their HP in nonelemental damage to everyone in battle.

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I also got some other items set up. Multitarget healing items can now work out of battle, and the all-important elixir equivalent is now set up. The power being there and at such a high value is a bit silly, though - might have to get that to display N/A instead.
[Ignore the numbers getting carried along like that - I need to get a proper solution to displaying the item count on this menu set up.]

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Another battle backdrop, and a new background effect to go along with it. It does a vertical wave effect, which does require the right background to really make apparent, but does help sell anything water-related.

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Kyantegi, the next town on the list, has now been mapped out. It's in two parts - an upper portion on the hills, and a lower portion by the sea.

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The interiors are also done. I'll probably end up mucking around with the graphics further at some point in the future, but that's a problem future me can fuss over.

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And, moving onto the next area I'll need to map out, I moved some things around to allow for the ground effect zones to work when other mechanical zones are around, letting me do stuff like what's going on here, where I can have these shallow water currents around.

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Now, the original plan was to go with the tan cave tileset for the next dungeon - but making a substantial dungeon out of that would get a bit tiring, and ultimately isn't really that appropriate for the location. So instead I went and drew up something with much more of a seaside feel to it.

_____________

Other things I got done:
- There's now the ability to press the option key on some menus to display some secondary information - stuff like skill lists instead of equipment and the like.
- You can now also equip your entire party in the equip menu, not just those in your current lineup.
- I drew some other enemy sprites, but you can see them ingame or if I decide to use some of them to display an effect of some description.

But that's another month. I have a few things I feel I should get done, but it's really a case of choosing what to deal with first at this point.

[Feenicks]

Well, another month.

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A good chunk of the time was spent mapping out this cave, which I talked about a bit last month. Its main gimmick is currents, which come in two flavors: slow ones, which you can walk against, and fast ones, which can't be walked against [but typically are linked with a switch nearby that changes what direction they go in].

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Like this.

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Enemies: the former steals your buffs if you throw up a DEF buff, while the latter does an attack every few turns that hits everyone. The first one required a fair bit of newish targeting scripting to work, while the latter required some slotting in of the water effect between the background and sprite portion of the battle screen, as well as some trickery to make the tiling effect work.

____________

Other, non-cave stuff now:

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I didn't have a sell menu in the shop screen, but do now. It's pretty basic, so I might have to change it up, but it's fine for what I need it for.

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There's going to be a few larger-than-normal NPCs here and there, and here's the first I've set up. I had to do some marginally jank stuff to make the combination of things I'm doing here work out, but that's fine.

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I've also started on the tileset for the next dungeon, a large rambling temple. There's still a bunch that needs to be drawn out for it though, seeing how a dungeon is more than just a bunch of walls.

____________

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And that's it for this month. I have a bunch of cutscenes that need setting up, and even more NPCs, but hopefully that should be done by the time I post here again in mid-august.

[Feenicks]

Want to have these updates back in the middle of the month so this'll be a bit light.

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I made a small font for the battle UI. It also lets me fit in a numerical MP counter, which is nice.

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Damage numbers still use the default, bigger font: there's enough space for it out on the main part of the battle screen.

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I've implemented more basic versions of the elemental amplifying statuses, which only boost outgoing damage from one side, rather than it being a two-way street. They'll be used on elemental staffs, so there's more of a reason to use them beyond the free elemental damage they already enable.

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I also set up a slightly more involved run system. In the demo, running is guaranteed and goes off immediately; here, it's delayed until the end of the round and has a chance of failing [based on how many party members attempt to run and how deep into the battle the attempt is]. I'll probably muck around with the numbers a bit more before I finalize this.

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The next dungeon, a sacred spring-turned-public baths-turned-temple complex, is also in the middle of getting made. It's the first instance of a dungeon that's basically skipped over if you do the scenario it's in first or second, so I've technically done all of the mapping needed for now - but waiting until later to finish it off feels like an invitation to just never do it.

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But that's it for now. I've done some other things - a bunch of writing, a few enemy graphics, actually getting treasure and enemies set up in the dungeon I was working on last month - but a screenshot of a treasure chest is hardly the most interesting thing.
Will I finally finish off the NPCs in one of the towns come mid-September? We'll see.

[Feenicks]

So it turns out that no, I didn't get around to those NPCs. I did get within striking distance of actually finishing the next dungeon, though.

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As it turns out, having a bigger screen, faster movement, and maps that require dealing with on-field enemies means that a lot of ground needs to be created. Combined with wanting a bit more open area this time around, there's a lot of pillared hallways here, and a lot of smaller, off-the-main-track ones as well.

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As what'll mostly be traversed as a mid/late-game dungeon, there's a few mechanics at play here. The first is a more battle-focused one; step into certain shallow pools, and you'll be conferred a buff [or a debuff] that the entire party brings into the next battle. You only get one pool's boon at a time, so choose wisely.

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There's also deeper pools you have to empty to get past, and some minor puzzles associated with them. I'll probably find a place to reuse these puzzle concepts, since they probably deserve to be developed out a bit more.

I'm not entirely done; I still have a few cutscenes to set up and enemies to place, but it's all laid out. Balancing everything will come later though, once I know exactly just what I'll have handed out to the level 35/45 party that comes here.

____________

Other things!

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I've had a lot of these walls in my big sketch file for a while, but eventually the time comes to take them out and put them in a workable tileset. Anyway, the next dungeon I'm working on is a tower, complete with a DQ3-esque tunnel underneath it. Mercifully, I'm not planning any puzzle stuff for it, so once I get to it it should go fairly quickly.

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I've set up the option to choose the master palette's saturation. It's implemented by having six different master palettes, so it's a bit finicky, but between that and not giving people the option to choose a palette that looks oversaturated to them I'd rather choose the former.

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The Inlet Cave was feeling like it needed one more enemy in its back half... so have this fish. It gets nasty if you let its buffs get out of sync - but you have someone to deal with that [or, you know, you could just target it first].

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I also set up another background. It's for the overworld area the colder-looking caves from a few months ago are a part of.

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Other, non-screenshot-worthy things:

- I found a silly bug where elemental resistances stacked up way higher than they should have [that's now fixed]
- A few more attack graphics, as well as another attack animation type, got done.
- A good few more enemies that I'd rather not spoil got made, and not just the fish up there.
- I did some more work on getting skill customizations set up. It's one of those things that's not hugely interesting to bash out, but it's one of the progression systems and needs to get done at some point, lest I balance everything assume a vastly lower power level than is on tap.

____________

But that's this month. Onto the next.

[RMZ]

Been a minute since you shared anything on this. Are you still working on this project? I enjoyed seeing the updates and hope you post more soon. This kind of project has definitely inspired me.

[Feenicks]

Nice to hear you're seeing this as competition being inspired by this.

I was busy at the end of last year making aSFF and have been busy this year drawing stuff for spoon's project, but I've been poking away at this here and there:

[RMZ]

Nice to hear you're seeing this as competition being inspired by this.

I was busy at the end of last year making aSFF and have been busy this year drawing stuff for spoon's project, but I've been poking away at this here and there:

Man those rotating barrels look good. Fun to understand how you did that. Charbile taught me that trick which I used for the Jerk Chicken boss in Takoyaki. Definitely not a competition. Think it's kind of a fun and challenging exercise to use the commands to make your own engine within an engine is all. Hope you get back to serious mode soon on it, glad it's not abandoned.

[Feenicks]

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Might as well start posting updates here again.

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I've been poking away at the next dungeon. It's a tower, with the main puzzle elements involving these barricades that move along lines on the floor. The rotating ones are in, but there's also ones that move linearly, as well as ones more like your regular push blocks [those go three tiles at a time]. It's mapped out, but still needs treasure, enemy encounter NPCs, and whatever events that are eventually going here added in.

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There's also a boat. I actually drew this before my hiatus, but coming back to it I went and messed around with it a bit, adding the upper deck area.

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The desert's also coming along, although it's not quite at the point I'm mapping it. There's a visual effect that'll be around for the first half that I did a while back, but in addition I also completely filled in a tileset with two more wall types. The exposed stone floor also got an edit done to it.

Battle stuff:

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Preemptive strikes and ambushes can now happen, based on the heading and positioning of the player and enemy on the field. Preemptive strikes may end up with the party advanced further to the right than normal, while ambushes can flip around or completely scramble the party.

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This is both an on-death spawning, but more importantly it's an on-death battle script. I'll be sure to find a way or two to be mean with this.

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You now get a few options after losing a fight. Some get changed or removed depending on a setting [that I haven't actually put in the settings menu, but it'll go in with the other difficulty stuff when I get to that]


I also got anti-enemy type bonuses working, but that's one of those mechanical things that doesn't easily shows up in a screenshot.
+++

Other notable stuff:
- I went and took advantage of the increase in walkabout frame counts to clean up them a bit. I don't know if there's enough space opened up by doing that to infill with all the ones I'll end up using, but maybe.

- New status: Extra One. It grants an extra turn if the affected goes first in a round.
- I got some more cutscenes done. Well, two, but things are actually moving again.
- The position in an area's music now gets saved upon starting a battle. No more restarting the song each time a fight concludes.
- Another town's drawn up. Its interior tiles are mostly the same as Kyantegi's, though.
- Speaking of Kyantegi, I'm considering its NPC situation done enough for the time being.

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I'll see where I am come December. Hopefully I'm not too sidetracked between now and then: surely I've dealt with most of the things in the way of me making areas, right?

[Feenicks]

Another month. I felt like I could've got more done before putting this together... but there's actually a decent amount here, huh.

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Out-of-battle healing via spells is now a thing, even if most characters just get their universal self-heal. The skill customization menu is also now just the skill menu, but that's a much minor change.

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The way stats were displayed on the equipment screen was bothering me, so I went and changed it around. Now, while you're paging through equipment it only shows the delta in the stat change, as opposed to the total stat change all your equipment is giving. You can go back to the old way by pressing the extra key.

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I can now set NPCs to use an arbitrary frame when setting up a map; prior to this it'd just force them back into one of the idle frames, which was fine when I was using different walksets for these non-idle/walk frames but not anymore.

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Noted now also shows the enemy's remaining MP, using a 'HP:MP' format.

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Other battle things: two new attack animation types. There's various flavors of the circle animation, and the beam has adjustable width.

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I also got a bit of the system setup needed for in-battle shops to work. Getting the shop itself to pop up was easy enough: it was forcibly ending the battle cleanly that was the more difficult bit.

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I've had this idea for a silly gimmick boss for a while now. There's a not-insubstantial amount of messing around needed to get all this to work properly.

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Desert enemies! The front two only appear when you do the desert 3rd or 4th. There's 7/9 regular enemies for the desert, which feels like a good count for the penultimate area of a scenario.

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And lastly, a background for one of the other scenarios. You can tell when I haven't drawn the tiles for an area yet when I'm freehanding its battle background like this.
The fog effect's being done through multiple layers of translucent rectangles. I'm pretty happy with it, actually.

+++

Other notable things:

- A bunch more mapping got done. Not enough to finish off a full area, but a decent amount.
- Some more cutscenes got done. I'm finally doing stuff around the second town.
- Running, and in general retrying battles, seemed to have a few bugs around it that only surfaced once I had other people play the game. Hopefully they're fixed now.
- I set up another boss but they're much more normal.
- The left/right doors in dungeons where the top walls can be walked under got their bottom corners sanded off a bit, so they're easier to get into.

+++

That's it for now. I'll see where I'm at in a month.