Door To the Heavens [The devlog thread]

[Feenicks]

Yeah, I do feel the OHR can do a lot these days.

Anyway!

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I changed around some wires and now I can have enemies on both sides of the field. Not entirely sure where I'd use this, though; probably some sort of minigame/arena area.

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Hitting random targets is an effect I've been meaning to do for a while now, but only got around to this past month. Most of the time they don't pile up on a single target like this.

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Changing enemy sprites! Their stats also get changed around a bit when this happens, outside of the regular buff/debuff system. I'd be hesitant to do this sort of effect normally, but end-of-scenario dungeon enemies get a bit of leeway when it comes to out-and-out cheats like this.

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I also went and added in an extra attack thing, to eventually reinforce Zhen's thing as the multi-hit attacker. It's actually working as poison and the like do, just focused at the enemy instead of the afflicted.

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And looking forward a bit more, I set up another background for an area in the second scenario, and also added in a bobbing effect similar to the one Float uses, but this time disconnected from any status.

++++++

Elsewhere, the desert continues to trundle towards being done. I've mapped out everything, and now just have to get all the NPCs/enemies/treasures/events set up in it.

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There's an oasis, of course.

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As well as guys who get in your way out in the desert proper [mostly in the area that only shows up if you go to the desert scenario third or fourth, but also in one other map].

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I also set up something similar to the circle of fuzz that pops up every so often in FF4.

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Lastly, you can get skill customizations from various sources outside of leveling up, and it's about time I made any sort of message for when that happened. Maz, as the main character, gets special treatment and so has their main elemental skills upgraded all at once.


But that's that for this month. I'm working on something tangential until the end of the year, so maybe won't be doing a january update. We'll see what happens.

[Feenicks]

Not that much this time. Blame christmas, and also me spending a bit of time attempting a christmas game but realizing a bit late that it was going to be too much work for the time I had.

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Continuing to look forward, I got four backgrounds done for two of the other scenarios. This is like a fifth or sixth of the backgrounds I need done just like that, if I'm being generous... but seeing how certain areas will need more than one it's definitely not that high an amount.

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So there's these guys. They normally won't leave in this particular situation; they have a grudge against Tara, and can only leave if she's KOd or absent from the fight entirely. Otherwise, they're the attack buff punishing Poppychop-using enemies of this area.

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So I was originally not going to have statuses that were just poison but elementally-oriented. For better or for worse, I reneged on that, and put in Burn and Chill. They do the same thing as Poison [percentile damage at the end of a turn], but are also affected by elemental resistances, so you can have a situation like here where an enemy is Chilled but get healed because of it.

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Lastly, have this fish.

Non-battle stuff:

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I've been putting off actually making the Blue Tower elevator, but was in the right mindset recently to actually do it. All hail moving around map layers.

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I've also started on all the cutscenes this part of the game will need. There's a few!

+++

Other things:

- I set up more of the desert field enemies and treasures.
- There's been some bugfixing, most notably one bug involving stat growths and another with npcs not checking for other npcs when going north.
- SFX and attack animation work continues onward. That's very much a thing I'll be working on throughout the game, as you do.
- I shifted one particular background down a little bit.
- I now have another town I've been neglecting the NPCs of. At least it won't require nearly as many.

Maybe next month I'll have started on the final dungeon of the desert scenario. Hope I don't go down too many other rabbit holes.

[Feenicks]

Another month, but this time I got a fair amount done.

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I'm finally hashing out the look of the desert scenario's final dungeon. There's a few tilesets associated with it, one of which I've actually had around for a while now but have only been drawing more stuff for recently.

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I've also been drawing some more plants. Don't expect the town tileset in the second screenshot here to show up again anytime soon; it's for the scenario last in line.

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The desert continues going; I've drawn a bunch of junk for it, and also had to figure out how best to put NPCs on a mostly-immobile vehicle. I'm one and a half fairly involved cutscenes away from being done with the whole thing.

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Lastly, here's another gimmick that I'm penciling in for more thorough use elsewhere in the game. If you interact with these flowers, you'll go flying. I already have a thing that involves getting sent off in a direction, but this one is way more useful as I'm not forced to design for all four directions to be an option.

++++++++

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Battle stuff now. First off is another background, this time for certain backroomy-type areas.

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Perfect Shield now works a bit differently. Prior to now it zeroed out one attack, then went away; now the stack goes down by 1 for each hit. Cygna, who I originally made the status for, will be getting the one-hit version; it'll be a handful of enemies in the icy scenario that get it innately or have the ability to apply it to others.

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89 now has the option of getting a few skill customizations for himself, one of which is this dubious randomly-targeting version of his heal. I've already made a few changes to it [lowered the hit count from 7 to 5 and made the target text more succinct, to name two].

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And lastly, two more visual things. I can now have wider lasers, an effect that Maz gets for one of their higher-level customizations. 89's Nightmare, on the other side of things, gets this background-darknening effect. The actual spell animation part of it probably deserves a bit more pizazz, but I have one more dungeon left to figure that particular out.

+++

Other things:

- Turns out getting the NPCs of a relatively smaller town done up is actually a pretty reasonable thing to hash out in an afternoon.
- I got some more equipment sorted out [named, statted, and given descriptions].
- I got some more sound effects and good amount of attack animations done. I'd post some of the latter but this update is already getting pretty substantial.
- I fixed a minor bug with switching view modes in the equip screen, and probably also a few more substantial ones.

I have a bunch of mapping, a good few cutscenes, and several more enemies to set up next.