New Features in v0.24

First off, backers should make sure to keep their eyes out for the backer release coming today if it hasn’t already been released! NoMoshing’s been working hard to get everything together for this release in the past few weeks, and from what I’ve seen I think that it’ll be a GOOD one, oh man are there a lot of things that I’m looking forward to from it… Some of which are by my own design, so NoMoshing and I thought that it’d be a good idea for me to explain the new little additions that I put together so that you guys can better make use of them! Also sorry for non-backers but you’ve got to wait another week to see these new features!

First up, the menu changes. Given how big of an impact various stats like threat, hit rate, critical rate, and evasion rates play into this game and it’s balance, one of the new additions will be making it so that you get to SEE those numbers instead of having to work somewhere between guess-work and calculating them yourself! So from now on, instead of just seeing the 6 traditional stats, the status page will now also display threat, hit rate, critical chance, and physical/magic/critical evasions! Not only that, but if you head to the equip page, you should notice a new ‘Page 1’ on the top right of the stat area, if you hit the CTRL button you’ll be taken to page 2 where it’ll show threat, hit rate, critical, and the evasions so now you can see how each piece of equipment affects those stats much easier! Not only that, but I know that I don’t always enjoy having to return to the main menu when I want to switch which character I’m looking at on the status, equip, or skill menus, so any of you who don’t like doing that will enjoy this next part! See, turns out that you could already switch between characters with the page up/down buttons, I don’t think that’s very intuitive to a lot of gamers so I decided that using any arrow keys on the status page, the up/down keys in the top row of the equipment screen (the one that says equip, optimize, and clear), or the left/right keys in skill type column (where it says techniques, prayers, spells, etc.) will now accomplish this same functionality! More information and easier to switch between characters in the menu, might be small but I know that’ll make MY time with Harem Collector a lot easier, but still some of you might think that’s a bit small for my first addition to the game, and to that I have to agree, which is why there’s another addition of mine you’ll be seeing in the game.

See, all the enemies that chase you in the game utilize the Yanfly event chase script out there in order to determine if they see the player or not, and while that script is VERY good there are a couple of limitations to it, and given how it’s designed for just about any developer to use, those limitations are kinda inevitable, luckily I’m designing code specifically for HC so I can apply the more personal touch to better deal with these limitations. The first limitation comes more from RPG Maker, see the game screen fits in 17×13 tiles which means that some sight distances could see you while the enemy was off-screen, to me that’s not acceptable as there’s nothing that you can do about an enemy that you don’t know exists until it’s too late, so I made sure to fix it so that depending on how far the enemy can see and which direction they are facing their line of sight will be adjusted to better reflect their relative distance from the player rather than absolute (so enemies will uniformly see you at the edge of the screen, halfway to the edge, or close to you). The other limitation is that the base Yanfly system does not allow for cover, meaning that if there was a wall in between you and the enemy the enemy would just activate their X-ray vision and still see you. This little detail particularly annoyed me during the search party quest, so I hope that a few others of you appreciate the ability to hide from enemies because Harem Collector now has a basic cover system! It’s been kept pretty simple for the most part, if there exists something that offers cover between you and the enemy they won’t see you even if they otherwise would. Walls, houses, tents, stalagmites, bushes, and a few other things will offer cover just fine… Though if you’re the kind of person who likes to fully understand how these things work, keep in mind that there are two kinds of partial cover, vertical and horizontal cover. Basically, the idea is that if an enemy is looking up at you and there’s a bookcase in the way, the bookcase will offer you cover, if they’re looking left and a bookcase is in the way, it will NOT offer cover, similarly a cliffside will protect you from enemies looking right/left just fine, but if someone at the top of a cliff is looking down they can still see you. I’ve tested the system quite thoroughly so I am quite confident in saying the system works exactly as intended, though some maps may never see this system implemented (like the Mouning Woods in ‘Night of the Raping Dead’), I plan to add the cover system to every map that uses the Yanfly chase script. Hopefully you’ll all enjoy having a bit more control on how and when you fight enemies from here on out!

Anyways, that’s all the stuff that needs explaining, I doubt many of you are super interested in some of the small things that I got done like making the battle log display status effect changes appropriately. Regardless though, I hope that you’re all looking forward to this new release as much as I am, and if the changes that I talked about here are some that interest you keep in mind that these are just the start of what I’ll be adding to the game. I hope to get another 2-3 big things added for version 0.25.