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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsFalse Skies - GBC-styled class-based RPG
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Feenicks
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« Reply #20 on: January 14, 2021, 09:17:16 AM »

Enemy descriptions, the next dungeon, and...

Three things today.

1.
I've had a bestiary for a while, but it was a bit dry, only having stats and elemental resistances to offer. To rectify this, I went and threw in another page that gives a short description, and spent some time writing up something for every enemy in the game so far. Some describe the gimmick of an enemy or a skill of it to look out for, while others are more purely descriptive:



2.
The next substantial dungeon's been mapped out [minus any changes I decide to make to it in the future, of course]. It's fairly straightforward, with a navigation-based trick that makes navigating it a bit easier than you'd first expect:



3.
It's actually not that much, but I've gone and added in a boat:



My next task is to finish mapping out the towns and other areas that have become accessible, then give a bunch of NPCs additional dialogue for plot-related reasons. I'll be getting back to plot stuff after that, hopefully by the end of the month.

____________________

@ThemsAllTook: Thanks; that's always good to hear. I still have a system or two to put in/modify from the engine default, but I feel the back half of this game will take a lot less time than the front half.
@Beastboy, cynicalsandel: Good to hear, too.
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Alain
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« Reply #21 on: January 14, 2021, 10:59:54 PM »

Great work on the bestiary, Feenicks. Your map makes me think of the old DOS days and Crusade (1995), which had a similar boat that I loved. Boats are just great man Wink I am also very intrigued with your UI. Looking forward for more to come!
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JobLeonard
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« Reply #22 on: January 15, 2021, 02:12:36 AM »

Quote
Some describe the gimmick of an enemy or a skill of it to look out for, while others are more purely descriptive
Low-key rewarding the people who dig into the lore, knowledge-is-power style. Nice! Wink
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TonyManfredonia
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« Reply #23 on: January 15, 2021, 08:06:52 AM »

Wow, this is fabulous!!! You nail the retro-vibe beautifully.

Very Pokemon-esque, with a flair of Final Fantasy. Great work!
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Feenicks
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« Reply #24 on: February 11, 2021, 04:54:44 PM »

A few things actually

I've done a bunch of stuff in the month since last posting here. A bunch of it is NPCs, events, and the like that don't necessarily make for the best screenshots, but I've also been doing a bunch of other important stuff.

1.


The left/right arrow keys used to act as a page up/page down feature in the bestiary menu, but as you can use the actual pg up/pg down keys to do that, that was a bit redundant.
Now, it goes through the various forms of enemies that have multiple forms [even if they're graphically identical, differing only in attack patterns/some of their stats]. It's a feature of FFV GBA's bestiary I liked, and it was actually pretty easy to implement.

A minor change I made was that enemies you encounter in battle now pop up in the bestiary, even if you don't beat them. This way, you can potentially use the strategic element to a bestiary, as opposed to just page through it after the specifics are not longer relevant.


2.


Just walking over forest tiles on the overworld doesn't feel right, so I did some stuff and got a graphic overlay to pop up over the player sprites when they were in the middle of forests [and also the middle of swamps, since why not].

...I actually set up this for the shallow water in the current dungeon I'm wrapping up making, but two .gifs next to one another is a bit distracting.


4.


I showed off this dungeon before, but here it is again, 4 times over in fact. I wanted a bit more of a cleaner sense of progression through the place, beyond just the floor tiles being different on each floor, so I made a few extra palettes that have more of a gradient to them.

3.


I'm about done with the next dungeon, the Seasons Garden. It's your typical seasons-changing deal, with each season having certain things that appear and don't appear, as well as an enemy that'll only appear in that specific season.

Still in need of a boss to cap it off, though; you already fight something that has a seasons-changing gimmick to get in the door, so doing that again in a different form is a bit repetitive.

Once I square this dungeon away, there will only be two more dungeons left to hash out before I need to figure the point of no return I've had planned out for years. Calling this the endgame would be completely wrong, but a milestone's approaching.

____________________
@all: Thanks. All good stuff to hear.
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JobLeonard
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« Reply #25 on: February 12, 2021, 12:58:14 AM »

Nice update!

Quote
The left/right arrow keys used to act as a page up/page down feature in the bestiary menu, but as you can use the actual pg up/pg down keys to do that, that was a bit redundant.
I'd be a bit careful with that: not all keyboards have easily accessible pg up/down keys (some of the smaller laptops I owned over the years had them hidden behind FN + some other key, and those tended to not work well with games).
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Feenicks
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« Reply #26 on: February 12, 2021, 09:05:16 AM »

I'd be a bit careful with that: not all keyboards have easily accessible pg up/down keys (some of the smaller laptops I owned over the years had them hidden behind FN + some other key, and those tended to not work well with games).

It's an [often forgotten] feature of the engine's menu, so it's not actually something I'm adding in. They're not needed to navigate the menus, but are just a nice extra thing to have when dealing with a menu with 200 things in it.
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Feenicks
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« Reply #27 on: March 06, 2021, 03:09:35 PM »

I should probably explain the class system [and also some other stuff I got done this past month]

False Skies has a bit of an complex class system, but not in the way that a lot of other games go about theirs. There's no skill points or trees to worry about. Instead... well, let's just go through what's involved:



You start out by picking from one of eight [well, four before a certain point] classes. Each class has their own stat growths, equipment proficiencies, special/free attack, and skills to learn, but with a few obnoxious exceptions, a character in one class will have the same skills and roughly the same gained stats as any other character in that class.



Upon reaching a certain level threshold, a character can change classes into a class of a higher tier, with no restrictions on what class in that tier you choose. You can turn a more ATK-oriented class into a SKL-based or support class, and if you want to go that route I won't be stopping you.

The trick here is that all your prior stats and skills come along with you upon that change. In some cases, sure, that's irrelevant - a skill that's outmatched by stuff you learn later on isn't necessarily useful. But for utility skills, or skills that scale well, the ability to keep them around is very useful indeed.



You can class change up to three times, up to a total of four classes dabbled in through the game. Some of the higher-tier ones give highly situational and/or abusable skills to play with.

[For reference, each class gets a two-letter abbreviation. The classes this guy has are the follows:
SM: Samurai [gains Stances, which attack an enemy for elemental/physical damage, then sets the player's stats to certain percentages of their base values, ignoring any prior stat changes.]
LI: Light Infantry [The classic 'HP is a resource' class, which gets cheaper or more powerful skills that have the drawback of dealing recoil or taking off a percentage of their max HP... as well as a skill that deals damage based on HP lost].
GE: Generalist [a special class reserved for the first character you make; they get a mish-mash of skills, and the ability to equip anything with no changes to their stated stats boosts.]

But, of course, it's not quite as simple as changing classes as soon as you hit the required level.



There's a few Tier 2 classes available to choose from once the option to class change becomes available, but you'll have to find the class data for most yourself. Some are easier to find than others, and some are pretty well-hidden indeed, but don't let that discourage you from looking around the place for them.


__________________________



Anyway, that other stuff:



I finally swapped out the intro I was using for the demos for a less placeholdery one. It'll probably need a bit of tweaking, but it gives some context to the game and that's good enough for me right now.



The boss of those gardens I showed in the last update is a mirror match, of sorts. The specific ones that appear are set and stay the same after your first encounter with them, but don't go in with a single party member and expect only a single enemy in return: there's always going to be four enemies to deal with, and the enemy party will fill out in the event of a smaller player party or classes that'd result in repeats for the enemy team.



The mines dungeon has a very large funicular to shuttle you between the various floors. There's not *too* much to it, just that it's neat.


__________________________

I still need to get the events for the mines dungeon done, as well as a good chunk of other smaller things done, but everything's still progressing nicely. Next time I'll probably talk about the last dungeon before the point of no return.
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fingerman
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« Reply #28 on: March 07, 2021, 07:31:10 AM »

Ok, this is coming along really well!
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Feenicks
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« Reply #29 on: March 16, 2021, 11:01:33 AM »

To complement my talk about the overall job system earlier, here's some more specific stuff regarding each class.


Progress on other aspects of the game are also going well.
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Feenicks
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« Reply #30 on: March 31, 2021, 06:57:15 AM »





Finished up another dungeon yesterday, so have some GIFs.
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Feenicks
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« Reply #31 on: April 12, 2021, 03:26:56 PM »


Got an important/involved cutscene together today, part of which involved drawing a big backdrop that's quickly sped past. The whole image can be seen [here].



I also got another boss fight set up. There's a trick to beating it that I won't reveal here.


I've also done enough systems-related stuff that I'm tempted to make another public demo soon. There's two things in particular I want to test out and see how feasible they are, but they're relatively minor compared to stuff like proper widescreen and enemy descriptions.
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Feenicks
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« Reply #32 on: April 16, 2021, 03:55:46 PM »

More menu-related stuff

I got enough stuff done since the start of the week that I feel comfortable sending out another demo/version for those who wish to test it out and see how they feel about things. I made an update in my platesting thread about that, but it'd be good to reiterate here.

Onto this week's stuff:



The OHR's default skill screen is a bit lacking for some of the systems in my game [...well, one, mostly], so I finally went and finished up the custom one that I started laying out months ago.
It largely does the same stuff as the default menu, but non-SP costs are now separated out from SP costs, and, more importantly, the skill family the selected skill is a part of is also shown.




Late in the game, another currency [or, rather, several similar ones] replaces the one used through other parts of the game for a while. You'll need to track it from there on out, so I went and rearranged the status screen a bit, both to accommodate it and because it's spring and rearranging things is what you do this time of year.

The rewards screen didn't need any rearrangement, thankfully, as there's just enough space to fit in another line of text on the right-hand side of the screen. The two highest currencies are much rarer than the other 5, as they're for optional and/or postgamey stuff, so they're not getting lumped in with the others.

I'm still leaving the distribution of this currency for my future self to figure out. As you can at most get 1 of each sort from an enemy [and that won't be a very common occurrence], both its relative rarity and its stratified nature may pose some problems.

Or they may not. We'll see.
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joe_eyemobi
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« Reply #33 on: April 16, 2021, 05:41:56 PM »

Great style!  This definitely gives me retro nostalgia  Gomez
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Feenicks
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« Reply #34 on: May 24, 2021, 03:47:20 PM »

Elte, the Tower of Babel, and map switching

Been a bit.

I've finished up two more dungeons since my last post. Both are fairly straightforward, at least in the sense that neither has very serious gimmicks attached to their designs.

Elte:


A city built in the middle of the desert. The path through it is twisty and passes over itself, not made any easier by the various roadblocks put in your way.



Tower of Babel



A very, very tall tower, with many segments both outside and inside. There's an elevator down from the top, which thankfully you can use once you're registered. Bring some ranged weapons with you, as almost every single enemy here is weak to that sort of damage.





Well, apart from these guys, who'll probably be two-rounding your party up until you're ready to face the final dungeon. They move slowly on the field, sure, but their stop-start motion may lead to an unintentional encounter.


World map swapping



This is a JRPG, so a second overworld's almost required. The world map adjusts, sure, but if you feel like looking around the old world map, the option becomes available as soon as you'd expect it to.

___________________

I'm still taking playtesters, so if you're interested in playing this, or want to contribute in some way, message me!
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Feenicks
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« Reply #35 on: June 21, 2021, 03:13:32 PM »

Cave of Shaon/Lunate Ruins

The next two dungeons I've been working on are a bit more gimmicky than the last few:

   

The Cave of Shaon is heavily waterlogged, and introduces rafts and water currents to deal with. Luckily, you won't run into any enemies on water, but deeper in the cave those currents do get very convoluted.



___________________



The Lunate Ruins center around a large chamber, in the middle of which is a mechanism that creates various paths to reach the doors along its edge.

   

And you'll need it to traverse the ruins, as hundreds of years of neglect haven't been kind to them.



___________________

I also found a second composer to help with some songs in the back half of the game. Here's the battle theme they did!
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JobLeonard
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« Reply #36 on: June 22, 2021, 12:46:03 AM »

Oooh, environmental puzzles Hand Thumbs Up Left
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Ashedragon
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« Reply #37 on: June 22, 2021, 03:37:09 PM »

I get more excited by each update.
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Feenicks
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« Reply #38 on: August 03, 2021, 11:42:36 AM »

I'm definitely making stuff regarding the lategame now and that's slightly concerning; and also some stuff about the 2nd currency

I've been a bit more occupied by commission work this past month, so progress has naturally been a bit slower than earlier in the year. I've also had a bunch of not-so-social media-friendly gamedev work that I've been putting off, so that's also contributed to progress feeling a bit slow.

But enough of that. I've got a new demo out [message me if you'd like a link to it], and once I do another runthrough of the older stuff to make sure things flow right and still make sense I'll get back to setting up the next area.

And this next area's pretty important, as it's the city that's at the heart of the proceedings of the game. There's a few dungeons between here and the final dungeon, sure, but this is where things will come to a head.


Here's some pictures of the place.





___________________

I referenced it earlier, but a second currency pops up late in the game, the collection of which works differently than regular currency.

Here's how the bestiary screen looks:


Each of the five values there is a rate out of 9 of how likely that particular color of currency [violet/blue/green, and then yellow/red] is to drop; they're independent of one another, so it's very much possible to get multiple types from a single enemy if you're lucky. Each enemy can only drop one of a particular currency at a time, though; as the amount of this sort of currency you need to buy stuff is always in the single digits, I feel that's fine.

___________________

As for how I'm implementing it/having it set up? Well, I'm lazy, and want to be able to use roughly the same format for shops/enemy rewards/etc., so whenever a negative value pops up in situations where money is being looked for it means stuff pertaining to this second currency is used.




Each digit in these negative values is a different color of this money; the way I've set up things means that I can only have shop items cost up to 9 of a single currency, but as I'm using it that's not a huge deal.
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Feenicks
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« Reply #39 on: August 09, 2021, 01:30:10 PM »

Some short fanfares, and revising that one dungeon again

I got a victory song and a fanfare from one of my composers, and so I decided to implement them. You can take a look [here].

____________

The second main dungeon's still bugging me [largely for reasons of being overly generic], so I decided to give it a new tileset better suited for the history of the place. It's still the same floor layout as before, though, as I feel the mechanical design's fine for an early game dungeon.

Some pictures:





____________


I also stopped being cagey and put up a link to the most recent demo on my playtesting page, so take a look if you're interested in something that covers most of the game's runtime.
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