Category Archives: Indie Development

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of May 19, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Sent art feedback for Lash and Kelly round 1
* Minor menu fixes

Current focus

Balancing enemies and enemy groups.

Weekly goals

* Send in art feedback for everything
* Begin implementing a variety of (normal) enemy stats and enemy groups for the first continent
* Implement initial equipment for early-game characters and use those characters to test a range of attacks against various early-game groups

Comments

What time is it? Turn-spreadsheets-into-game time! I have enemy groups for the first continent drawn out on paper and about 70% of their stats penciled out, so I have enough material to enter into a test environment. Until now I’ve been testing with characters who are much stronger than the early game, though, so first up comes adding equipment for Tango, Telia, and Lucky.

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of May 5, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Various fixes to menus
* Various fixes to equipment
* Corrected Style stat formula
* I now know how to put in any of the following types of abilities: single-hit multi-target, multi-hit single-target, multi status effect, multi-hit plus single status effect, and multi-hit plus multi status effect

Current focus

Balancing enemies.

Weekly goals

* Send in art feedback for everything
* Begin implementing a variety of (normal) enemy stats and test a range of different attacks against them for balance

Comments

It didn’t occur to me until this week, but so far I’ve been conducting all my damage formula testing with playable characters and bosses. While boss fights will be Dreamblazers‘ centerpieces, I’m also aiming for interesting normal enemies. With only a few exceptions like Pokémon and Final Fantasy VI, I can almost always accurately judge how much I’ll enjoy an RPG by how much I enjoy its normal encounters.

So normal encounters are the focus this week! This is what I’ve been aiming for since the beginning, in fact. I underestimated how many things I’d need or want to do as foundations leading up to it, but now we’re here and a fun week lies ahead.

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of April 21, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Primarily damage formula testing
* Simplified energy attacks concept

Current focus

Battles!

Sample stuff

Pretty glorious.

Weekly goals

* Send in art feedback for everything
* Continue ironing out damage formula balance

Comments

Thought of the week:

I’d extend it to not only projects, but components of projects. As I implemented moves in battles, one of the first steps was setting up damage formulas. No problem, thought I; I already know what my damage formulas are, so I only need to add them in.

Little fine-tuning here and there, but things were going great! I picked eleven reasonably diverse characters and matched them against their own stats to test. All the calculations seemed fine, so hey, cool! Just as a final check and to have a reference lying around in a spreadsheet, I’d match them against each other—

Uh-oh. This quickly revealed that energy attacks were too powerful. They’re meant to be powerful because they bypass defenses, not because they’re inherently four times better than physical or magical attacks. I had modeled my damage formulas after the Pokémon series because there’s no RPG I’m more familiar with, but I had gone overboard with my changes for energy attacks.

Days of testing later, you see the spreadsheet above! Even now I’m not confident that I’ve settled on a final formula, but it’s infinitely better off than before. Continuing to plug away!

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of April 14, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Sent character profile and color scheme for Lash
* Sent round 2 art feedback for Leaf’s princess dress, final feedback for Autumn, final feedback for Astrid, and round 1 for Tango
* Slightly redid certain fashion effects to fix loop issues; fixed minor camera issue

Current focus

Battles!

Sample stuff

Character design for the goddess Autumn and Astrid Crys Alucia (click for larger)


Not drawn exactly to scale since I totally neglected to communicate Astrid’s height. =P I’m still wavering on whether to call Autumn and her sisters “goddesses” because it might not properly convey their power—they’re not tame Thor-tier characters, but they’re also not quite God-tier characters. They’re time-transcendent, multiversal, omniscient, and can warp reality and the laws of physics and magic (ergo de facto omnipresent), but they’re not capable of creating reality. Maybe “Entities” would be a better word.

Weekly goals

* Get at least ten attacks operational
* Get at least ten passive abilities operational
* Send in 50%+ of applicable art feedback for new rounds of stuff

Comments

This week: just because I say things like “I don’t know what I can expect to go right or wrong” doesn’t mean I’m any less surprised when things go right or wrong. =P

Until now, I’ve done all my testing with a one-character party to start small, but since I was delving into battles, I added two characters for more interesting dynamics. Before doing anything, the equipment menu revealed that fashion effects were kind of broken for the two new characters, which was especially strange since one of them was a clone of the one I’ve been testing with. I checked and rechecked the two characters and couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I decided I’d put that on the backburner for a while and jump into battles for the time being.

New problem: somehow I’d screwed up the battle camera to a point that getting new mechanics up and running would be impossible from my distorted, odd-angle view. This was also especially strange because I’d never touched the camera—I even checked to make sure. At first I thought it might have been related to spawn point settings I’d made in order to start the party right next to a battle, but nope!

Long story short, this week became half a retread of the week leading into March 24. Hunting through my ~300 fashion effects turned up that a few still had infinite loop issues, which broke the effects for the two new characters. The battle camera was also a consequence of the fashion effects for different reasons—simply giving battles ten times as much time to load (translation: 1 second instead of 0.1) so that fashion calculations could finish fixed it.

That final breakthrough happened on Sunday, so now I can get back into the meat of things. : D

Dreamblazers Devlog: Week of April 7, 2014

Last week’s achievements

* Finished layout of status menu
* Sent character profiles and color schemes for Tango and Telia; sent art profile for Kelly; sent art profile for Leaf’s princess dress
* Sent round 1 art feedback for Leaf’s princess dress, round 3 for Astrid, round 4 for Autumn, and round 1 for Telia
* Drafted character portrait requirements spreadsheet
* Slightly redid personality profile stats

Current focus

Battles!

Weekly goals

* Get at least ten attacks operational (in terms of damage dealt, timing of sound effects, etc., but not animations—those will be way, way, way, way, way later)
* Get at least five passive abilities operational
* Send in 80%+ of applicable art feedback for new rounds of stuff

Comments

Super satisfying week! I pulled off my primary goal of nailing the status menu layout, got a good chunk of my character portrait requirements finished, and sent in a flood of art feedback and requirements unlike any I’ve sent before. For next week’s post I’ll likely be able to share the designs of Astrid and Autumn here and on the Characters page.

Now to step back: why was I focusing on menus anyway? Because menus might influence the way I handle stats. Why did I care about stats? Because I can’t test battles without having them finalized. Over the course of all the menu stuff I feel that I got both menus and stats pegged, so now I can get back to what I’ve wanted do since forever: combat!

Battles are an enormous project with many moving parts, so I’m being tentative with my weekly goals for now since I don’t know what I can expect to go right or wrong. Like I’ve said before, though, a huge plus in all of this is being able to use an amazing Unity framework to help me out. No matter how much time I do spend, it would have taken either months and months longer or would have taken thousands and thousands of dollars more without it. Endless gratitude.