Hey everyone, we’re chugging along as usual, but it’s Wednesday so it’s blog post day! I thought that I’d take this opportunity some to talk about a new feature I plan to add to the game in the upcoming release as well as talk about the wiki some. Might not be super interesting to most of you but this month has been kinda light on new features (next month though…).
So to start off with is something that I’ve been itching to add ever since ‘Rescue Me’ was added to the game, the ‘swarm’ element. See throughout the game there area a few enemies that are swarms (swarm of bees, hopping piranhas, and crowd of fans) which does raise certain logistical issues when you consider that you can wipe them out with a single sword slash if you get strong enough. Though it’d be quite a massive undertaking to limit what single target attacks could do against these swarm enemies while also maintaining a balance that doesn’t make them impossible to defeat, approaching it from the other end of making attacks that hit ALL enemies be more effective against swarm enemies is MUCH easier to implement. As such I plan to try to finally get around to making it so that your AoE magics (and I guess the 2 techniques as well) deal more damage against these swarm enemies than a single target attack of the same value. Due to how RPG Maker VX Ace doesn’t really allow for dual-element abilities, I’ll have to go in and manually add this into the game’s code which isn’t hard, but it does mean that I won’t be able to really give the player direct feedback that their ability did extra damage for hitting a swarm. We might also give some other enemies minor weakness to AoE attacks even if they aren’t swarms, but we’ll apply that on an ‘as needed’ basis, and it will be a lot less than full on swarms. Still, keep your eye out for higher than average numbers due to this new ‘swarm’ element!
Beyond that and general enemy design though, the biggest thing that’s really been eating at me for this month is the wiki. As I’m sure any of you who use it regularly have probably noticed, it’s fallen a bit out of date as of late. While I have recently gone through and updated the updates needed page both for myself and anyone else who might be interested in earning the special wiki code, it’ll probably be awhile before I can comfortably say that the wiki is really up to date like it used to be. This is something that I’ve been meaning to correct for quite some time but it seems a lot harder than I’d like to find the time to really dedicate to writing out a new ‘optimized’ walkthrough than it was in the past. If anyone wants to help with getting the wiki up to date it would be greatly appreciated but this is more meant to apologize to those who rely on the wiki for their planning about how much I’ve let it fall behind. I’m doing my best to try to take care of it one piece at a time, but it’ll still probably be awhile before I can comfortably say the wiki is caught up with the game.
That’s really all that I’ve got to say in regards for this release. Now if you excuse me I’ve got some enemies to get back to designing!