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[Pixelologist]

I would rather see a gif of the improvements than a still image. Or at least some more visual imagery showing comparisons.

[tchassin]

I would rather see a gif of the improvements than a still image. Or at least some more visual imagery showing comparisons.

That's understandable. Here's a gif of the row-based targeting in action!

[GSK]

As stated previously, this does give the feeling of Breathe of Fire in a nice way. This looks like a nice J-RPG to bring back that classic feel. Looking forward to it, keep up the good work!

[tchassin]

Update 90
Hey there !

With the addition of ailments and a number of bug fixes, the combat system is now ready for the next demo! Hurray! Unfortunately, there is no visual feedback yet, so I don't have anything to show right now.

We designed ailments with 2 rules in mind:

• They must be useful for both the player and enemies. They should also work on bosses.
• They should never take control away from the player, because not playing is not fun.

Additionally, we decided to give ailments a 50% chance to work, but most skills that may inflict one also deal damages to its target, Final Fantasy XIII-style, to mitigate frustration when the skill fails.

We settled on 5 ailments:

• Poison deals damage to the target at the end of every turn.
• Wound prevents the target from being healed once.
• Silence prevents the target from using spells and Sigils.
• Bind prevents the target from using physical skills.
• Immobilize prevents the target from switching rows and running away.

We also set up a Discord server and a Twitter account for those interested.

See you next week!

Cheers!

[tchassin]

Updated 91
Hey there!

Unfortunately, I was sick this week and barely got anything done

On the bright side, Pierre and I had a very productive meeting yesterday. We listed all enemies, skills and items that will appear in the demo. We also finished the level design of the foxmen's village. Pierre even started working on a cool new key art:

I'll try to finish Blade of Verdance v0.6 this week then start creating all the assets required for the next demo build.

See you next week!

Cheers! 

[tchassin]

Update 92
Hey there!

I have exciting news today! A new composer is working on Blade of Verdance! Huzzah!
Duncan McPherson is now working on making an original soundtrack for the game. We hope to include his music in the next demo build.

Speaking of sound, I finally overhauled the sound system and we now have separate sound settings for music, sound and effects.

I also made a number of small improvements to the battle UI such as hiding enemies health during animations and displaying skill names.

Much better now!

I still have a couple bugs to fix before completing Blade of Verdance v0.6, but we're almost there.

In addition to working on the level design of Ver Lanec, the Foxmen's village featured in the demo, Pierre finalized the design of a new enemy: the ent (tentative name).

It's not a spider-ent, it only has six legs roots!

Now all that's left is turning it into a sprite and animating it.

See you next week!

Cheers! 

[tchassin]

Update 93
Hey there!

Blade of Verdance v0.6 is done!

Some features will need tweaking once we start testing the game, but everything needed for the demo have been implemented.

I added new enemies and skills to the game. We tried to come up with interesting patterns for each enemy type, so as to make use of the row system. I had to improve the AI system to make things work.

Right now, most of the new content uses placeholder art so I don't have much to show, but you can have a sneak peek of the treant sprite:

You will learn to hate this guy.

Oh, and the slime now have an idle animation:

That should make the battle screen feel a little less static.

I also started building the Foxmen's village. It's pretty complex with many cliffs and slopes, so we'll need to invest quite a lot of time in designing a good (and reusable!) tileset. The village will also features some unique set pieces, so it'll probably take a couple of weeks.

See you next week!

Cheers! 

[CesarD8]

This looks great, I'm a sucker for JRPGs I'll keep an eye on this, nice work! 

[SamLouix]

If all of the game art is as incredible as that last piece you posted of the forest & fox type fellow this game will go far.

Also, while BoF4 looks much better than the other games, in terms of gameplay BoF3 is probably the superior one - so for gameplay, check that out and look to BoF4 for the sprite stuff. Good luck!

[tchassin]

This looks great, I'm a sucker for JRPGs I'll keep an eye on this, nice work! 

Thanks! I'll hope you'll like the gameplay as well!

If all of the game art is as incredible as that last piece you posted of the forest & fox type fellow this game will go far.

Thanks for the kind words!

Also, while BoF4 looks much better than the other games, in terms of gameplay BoF3 is probably the superior one - so for gameplay, check that out and look to BoF4 for the sprite stuff. Good luck!

While the visuals were heavily inspired by Bof4, the mechanics were inspired by several games such as the Shin Megami Tensei series and spin-offs, Etrian Odyssey, recent Final Fantasy games, etc. I think the game has a distinct feel when you play it, it's quite different from the BoF games.

[SamLouix]

While the visuals were heavily inspired by Bof4, the mechanics were inspired by several games such as the Shin Megami Tensei series and spin-offs, Etrian Odyssey, recent Final Fantasy games, etc. I think the game has a distinct feel when you play it, it's quite different from the BoF games.

That's awesome. Well done! I am just going to drop you a message, hope you read it! Thanks

Sam

[Cannoncow]

One gif of your game was enough to convince me to play it

[tchassin]

That's awesome. Well done! I am just going to drop you a message, hope you read it! Thanks

Sam

Thank you Sam! I just saw your message, sorry for the late answer!

One gif of your game was enough to convince me to play it

Thanks! The current demo is outdated, but we're working on a new one right now. I hope you'll like it!

Update 94
Hey there!

I've been making fixes and improvements to our level build tools after working on the village map. I also worked on small improvements to the game feel: new sounds here and there, smoothing visual transitions, etc. It's not much, but we believe it's important for the player experience.

Pierre and I also made a lot of progress on village interiors. We now have a core concept and a rough layout of each building.

Finally, after noticing we forgot to add an enemy with poison-based attacks, we decided to add a new one instead of changing those we already had.
...
..
.
And that's why there's now a fourth type of slime in the game :}
(Don't worry, it should be updated into a new type of monster later)

Ahem. Moving on, Pierre also overhauled the heal/save statue sprite:

We still need dozens and dozens of new assets, but improving this one was definitely a wise decision!

See you next week!

Cheers! 

[tchassin]

Update 95
Hey there!

Last night's update was delayed because I thought I would be able to code a full working cutscene and record a gif by tonight. Unfortunately, things were a bit more complicated than expected, so the gif will have to wait until next time.

Once I can start making cutscenes, I'll start writing dialogues for the demo, so that the story makes sense even without the prologue. I'll also have to make some arrangements to introduce Erik, who is supposed to join the party later.

See you next week!

Cheers!

[tchassin]

Update 96
Hey there!

This week's update have been delayed again after I discovered that cutscenes system were not as reliable as I thought. After investigating, I decided to stop relying on Unity's Timeline system and write my own cutscene system from scratch.

I managed to finish implementing all I needed to play simple cutscenes and finally record a gif today. Behold!

Our current solution requires a good amount of hard-coding and doesn't support preview tools but at least it works all the time.

I was going to work on the level build after that but it turns out I made another mistake: I upgraded Unity and just found out a bug was introduced in the tile system that we rely on to build our levels, which is why it's usually recommended to not upgrade the framework you're working with during development. Anyway, it's rollback time.

See you on Sunday (I hope)!

Cheers ! 

[tchassin]

Update 97
Hey there!

The roll back did not go well, the Unity Editor crashes when I try to open the recent versions of the project. Fortunately, earlier versions from two weeks ago seem to work so I think we'll be able to resume work on the level build.

While I was struggling with Unity, Pierre worked on the tiles I need to build the demo levels. I hope I'll be able to finish at least one map by the end of the week in order to have some screenshots to share next Sunday.

See you next week!

Cheers! 

[tchassin]

Update 98
Hey there!

I made some progress on the level build and Blade of Verdance is starting to look like a video game again!

I started replacing the placeholder tiles with more detailed ones (still WIP) but it turns out the generated autotiles look very blocky:

This is because of how we combine tile quarters to create the corner tiles. I decided to make the tileset generator use hand-made corner tiles instead of generated ones, allowing us to make rounder corner, which works a lot better for dirt and grass tiles:

I tried switching back to 32*32 tiles and I sort of like the rounder, softer look. I think it would be better for dark grass tiles since it would allow us for more gradual transitions. (Pierre is away so all you get is ugly placeholder corner tiles)

I'll need some more tests with other tiles before deciding on the final tile size, then I'll start adding details to the forest maps.

See you on Sunday in two weeks!

Cheers!

[tchassin]

Update 99
Hey there!

After settling for 32 pixels tiles and polishing the tileset generator, I started working on a new level build tool. Until now, we had to place props such as bushes and flowers one by one, then run a script that made sure every single sprite in the scene had a pixel-perfect position. Yes, it was as slow and cumbersome as it sounds. But not anymore! I made a handy tool that allow us to "paint" objects on the map and it's both fast and furi fun. Behold:

Don't worry, the seams between tiles only appear in the editor

The painted objects are placed on an isometric grid and rely on collisions to avoid overlapping existing objects. I think it makes them look more natural than if they were placed on a straight grid.

The new tool does a bunch of cool things:

• Pick a random sprite in a set with weighted probabilities
• Flip sprites horizontally and/or vertically
• Batch undo support (revert strokes instead of removing elements one by one)

It can be configured in Unity using a custom editor window (with incredibly poorly named parameters).

I spent longer than expected on this, but It will be extremely useful in the long run.

In the meantime, Pierre has been working on replacing my placeholder tiles with better ones so the game is starting to look better!

See you next week!

Cheers!

[tchassin]

Update 100
Hey there!

100 UPDATES ! We've been doing this for 6 years now!

A lot has been going on since the last demo. We set out to build an horizontal slice of the game, which helped us flesh out the game's world and story. We worked on the theme of each area and dungeon to make them feel unique. We rebuilt the combat system and wrote a complete first draft of the game's dialogues. We also figured out how to handle a large number of maps and created tools to help with the level building.

After all this, we decided to work toward a new demo of the Syl Brannvar forest, one of the early playable area, with a complete dungeon and the first town of the game. This proved more challenging than we thought and highlighted a number of weaknesses in our level building pipeline, especially with organic tilesets, like cliffs. Instead of compromising quality or pushing the demo back for a month or two, we decided to simply cut the town and cliffs from the next demo build.

Here's a little preview of what we have right now.

So, what's the plan ? We're working on an intermediate demo featuring the Syl Brannvar forest with improved visuals, the new combat system, merchants and a couple NPCs. The demo will focus on the new battle system and help us test the game loop (explore the dugeon, go back to the merchant, repeat until you reach the boss). We'll also add some story and lore elements to the game since a lot of people felt they were missing from the previous demo. This way, we should be able to release the game sometime in July. The first town of the game will have to wait the following demo.

Now time for some eye-candy!

Finally, I've been working on Blade of Verdance as my day job for some months now and I don't think I can continue. You've probably noticed that the game development have been slower for the past few weeks: that's because I've been looking for a new day job. Of course, I'll keep working on the game on my spare time.
Updates might be a little less substantial, but we should manage to get the demo out before I start working again.

See you next week!

Cheers! 

[tchassin]

Update 101
Hey there!

During the past two weeks, I built a first draft of each map featured in the demo, blocked all connections with other areas and removed unused maps. I also replaced the village map with a clearing containg a save point.

We also changed the game over system. Instead of loading the last save, which can be quite punishing, we decided to simply return the player to the last foxman statue visited with full HP and MP. Since this is a demo and there is no proper tutorial yet, Pierre and I thought it'd be better to make the game as forgiving as possible (for the moment).

I'm now polishing the level design and adding some more props and decorations such as flowers, trunks, etc. Here is a little preview of the new prop sprites:

Soon, the clearing will also contain some NPCs and a merchant. Speaking of which, here's some eye-candy (WIP):

Meet Marguerite, the main merchant of the game! She'll follow you throughout the game with here chariot, selling increasingly powerful items as the story unfolds.

See you in two three(?) weeks!

Cheers!