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[dspencer]

Only finished a couple of tasks, but they took all night.

Every chapter gives you a primary goal and a secondary goal. Right now, the primary goal is always "Kill all enemies" or "Kill the boss" and the secondary goal is always "Win within 7 turns" but they're abstracted enough that it'll be easy to add in a bunch of different goals (or set the turn count higher for missions with kill all enemies - it's really pretty impossible to kill ~15-20 enemies in 7 turns!).
I kind of misreported yesterday - revamping growth rates were done designwise, but not implementation wise. Now they are both. Since this is my last update for today, I'll see if I can explain it.

Each character is assigned a rank for each stat: bad, ok, or good. each rank above bad is worth one point, and each unit gets roughly 5 points. After these points are assigned, units specialize based on their class: for example, armor knights get one extra rank in armor, but lose a rank in speed. You can't go below rank 0, but you can go higher than rank 2; although I think in the future there will be a chance of losing the bonus each time you try to advance above the max)
These ranks are now turned into a range between 15 and 60. So, a bad skill would be somewhere between 15 and 30, and a good one would be between 45 and 60. A rank 3 (very good) would be between 60 and 75, and a rank 4 (almost unheard of) is between 75 and 90 (!!!). Growths are then assigned, to a multiple of 5 in that range.

This way, your character gets some good growths, and some bad, or medium across the board. Armor knights wont't be true speed demons, but they'll never be terrible for defense.... growthwise, at least! Theives are interesting, cause they get +2 speed and +1 skill, in exchange for taking a hit on power and defense. They'll never have less than a 45% speed growth, which is pretty decent.

[dspencer]

I spent the last few days consulting with a designer friend on character classes. The result: 63 different character classes (9 basic classes, 18 intermediate, and 36 top tier promotions) ranging from the squire (lance wielding warrior) who can eventually upgrade to a pegasus knight (using flight for increased mobility) or the mighty dragoon (who wields dark magic to pierce the armor of those who would be otherwise invulnerable to his attack), to the mage who could promote to a summoner (bringing in extra, but impermanent units to help in combat, at the price of the exp they gain) or to the versatile mage killer (wielding anima magic, swords, and debuff wands).

I'll need to playtest these a lot to figure out which work well as is, and which need buffs, but at least I have a starting point.

We haven't had a screenshot in a while, so here's one where you can see the rather silly looking color scheme I've added to units, based on their promotion path. EW

[dspencer]

Ugh. Finally. After a long time of beating my head against the wall, I have a working mac build (I use a mac for development). I also have a windows build, but my guess is it doesn't work. I'll have to figure out where I can get a windows machine to test on, at some point; but for the time being, I have both of those builds available here:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qg2xxbv8tuo5uy0/XjDfbZYgAJ

If you are able to run this on windows, or aren't able to run it on a Mac, please let me know!

Hopefully back to real (meaning fun) development soon.

[jonbro]

this is looking great! Working fine for me on mac. I am at work right now, but will give it a play later. It would be useful if you extracted to a folder with a clear readme file with the controls in it, but that is just my first blush feedback.

[dspencer]

Fantastic, thanks for checking! If you haven't played yet, do you mind pulling the latest? I've added in a (brief) readme and fixed most known game crashing bugs (except that the fortune teller doesn't work, still. Don't try it.)

Also keep in mind that there are a lot of really rough edges; hopefully this communicates what I'm trying to do. In the near future I'll release a version that has more enemies + scales as you go on in the game.

[dspencer]

Done:
~ outlined all remaining tasks.
~ for attacks, select the weapon, then the target, rather than how it used to be (vise versa)
~ implemented staves skill (for healing, generally) - planned entire staff list.
~ implemented wands skill (essentially, the inverse of staves) - planned entire wands list.
~ begun implementation of the animation queue- adds some meat to the game via ANIMATIONS. The animations themselves don't exist yet, but once I figure out the graphic side of it (groan) it'll be nice! Little blips for "you healed" or "you were affected by poison" - eventually: "these units are now in your aura's range" or "this unit has turned to stone" etc.

[juan]

Tried playing this on my PC, clicked on it and nothing happened, and it wasn't running in my task manager.

[Miguelito]

Same here.

[dspencer]

Roger, thanks for trying. I'll update when I have a solution.

[dspencer]

Hey folks, it's been a while. Been real busy with work lately, and between that and other obligations, haven't had much time to work on Maquis, which is sad. I did have time to play through most of the new fire emblem game, and I've had some thoughts about maquis as a consequence.

I want to focus on the strategy of making a rounded team that can handle any situation, out of individuals who cannot (think Pokemon, actually), and the positional tactics of how to abuse/punish the weakness of the opponents current position. I have some drastic changes (again, largely influenced by pokemon) to make out of this, but I'm pretty excited for them.
1) The weapon triangle is now a weapon pentagram. We're seeing the addition of Axes and Magic to the triangle. Alongside this, different types of magic attacks are no more: now it's all just "magic."
Pentagram is as follows: Sword > Axe > Hammer > Magic > Lance > Sword ...
2) When wielding a sword, you will at least be extra effective vs someone with an Axe, and weak to someone with a lance (as it was before). Possibly, though, Swords will have a minor advantage over hammers, and a minor disadvantage to magic.
3) Characters, in addition to the weapon they wield, now have a type/affinity/fighting style/build (unsure on the name, yet). This is going to give them a preferred weapon, with which they deal more damage, and a weapon weakness which deals more damage to them. For instance, a "Nimble" character is well suited to fighting with swords; however, their nimbleness does nothing against magic, so they take get penalized when attacked by magic. This is chosen INDEPENDENT of their class, however.
This will hopefully lead you to make some interesting choices - your character is an archer, but is Nimble. You do already have another sword user on your team, but it might be worth promoting to Ranger to get swords for the bonus damage...

The goal of this is, honestly, to add a bit more complexity to the decision making process, and make the world a more dangerous (but abusably so) place for your units