Hey everyone, hope everyone’s been doing well! It’s been awhile since my last blog post so I’ll just talk a bit about a few things on my mind.
First of all, why don’t we talk about enemy balance a bit. I’ve noticed a few times that players have talked about how the later levels of HC are difficult, though usually I wasn’t too sure how to take that since I have seen a comparable, though fewer, comments about some of the earlier levels in the game as well, leaving me without a strong understanding on how the enemies that I had been putting together the stats and AI compared to say the ones that NM put together when you consider that the player is supposed to be having an increase in stats and resources in general as the game progresses, but during the recent testing release it became very apparent as both me and NoMoshing picked out the original stats for the enemies for the two quests that we’ll be adding, both quests share the same recommended level, and when we got initial feedback from testers, it seemed that we had both missed that recommended level mark but in opposite directions. I cut down the stats on my enemies far more than I boosted NoMoshing’s, but it did help highlight that I do need to work on rethinking my approach for calculating how to determine the stats for enemies going forward, hopefully I’ll be able to work on having enemies better keep place with a player who’s at level going forward, and I will welcome feedback in regards to the difficulty on quests since I definitely lean a lot more on the ‘difficulty’ side of things (Though when it comes to Super-bosses, once tester’s have given me the okay that it’s possible I am going to be very stubborn, Super-bosses are the one place that I can ramp up the difficulty as much as I want without worrying about breaking the game. One tip for those struggling with the newest super-boss, Wiki-tan is probably the worst match-up against him and runs a risk of making him downright impossible if she’s in your active team, she can be useful for him, but just be warned that depending on what you’ve done with her she can make the fight impossible for you).
Now let’s talk about code some shall we? NoMoshing has talked to me about adding in a new little script that would run at the end of battles, it’ll take a bit of finagling but I’m hoping to have it ready for the 0.39 release and it should help add a bit more fun to some of the general ‘crawl’ that tends to take place in dungeons, so look forward to it! I promise to do my best to not break the game… This time… Speaking of breaking the game, for those of you who’ve run into various furniture or other events teleporting around in either your Eastfort condo or your Westcastle manor, I have fixed the problems and you won’t need to mess with save files or anything. It’s an issue with the events of the game, so testers and the rest of you with access that event stuff (you know who you are) please keep in mind that completely deleting events can result in this little visual bug. Now, the final script thing that I want to talk about is in regards to AoE attacks from enemies, as I’m sure many of you know enemy tanks can take hits from your AoEs but you can’t have your tanks do the same from enemy AoEs, which can often lead to AoEs making tanks a lot less useful as the most important attacks to block you have no effective means of dealing with. Well I’ve got a few ideas (and even some formulas that I’m happy with) that I think will go a long way to help give players tools to help deal with enemy AoEs without going too far. I’ve still got a lot of stuff to test and look into in regards to this so I don’t want to be making promises that I can’t keep, but I will say that I’ve heard the complaints about how AoEs don’t have an effective counter-strategy if you would, and I am looking into ways to help expand the battle system to add in some options there.
Finally, there’s one more thing I want to talk about though it’s a bit more personal. I don’t know if any of you have noticed but I haven’t exactly been as active with the blog posts, scripting, or a few other things over the past year, and I just feel that I owe a bit of an explanation for that. Lately in my life there’s been a few more things vying for my time and energy, but more importantly a lot of that’s been piling up some anxiety issues with me. I’ve worked out various ways to help keep it a lot more manageable but I’d be lying if I said it was fully under control. It gets a bit personal and goes against a lot of what I believe in to really delve too into it, so I’ll just leave it at emotions are irrational and sorry that I wasn’t really able to bring my A game for 2018, which I am hoping to change. I do intend to stick with HC though and plan to pay back the support that NoMoshing has given me so feel free to take that as you will. If you excuse me, I’ve got more code to write.