Mountain background

Hi everyone :) Just a small update to tell that we've now got a new battle background thanks to Tamara Ramsay!

This wonderful new piece of art was partially funded thanks to the very first donation received! The donator wants to stay anonymous but I thank both this person and Tamara very warmly for the help :)

I thus opened a donation log to make clear of what is happening with the money given.

Cheers,

New NPCs portraits!

Hi all,

Thanks to Anthony44, and after a call for new characters portraits thanks to an idea of BioHazardX, two new portraits have successfully landed into the master repository:

Thanks to everyone helping to make this happen!

Summertime

Hi everyone,

First of all, I wish you all to get the time needed to relax and rest a bit before entering the second half of this year. :)

Having a break is necessary sometimes, and so I did for a few enjoyable days, hence the lack of news here!
But that doesn't mean development on Valyria Tear has ceased! Quite the reverse in fact... ;)

- Full Battle status effect support!

The characters stats and status effect systems have been greatly simplified and lifted (Almost completely been rewritten in fact), to bring full passive (read: from equipment) and active (read: from spells and hits) effects support in battles!
As a result, elemental status effects, poison and regen support is now fully working in battles!

This is leading me to introduce the elements that will be existing in Valyria Tear :
Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Life, Death, and Neutral. (Neutral being the strongest one.)

All that, along with trading support made, and spirit support started on equipment, will permit to improve the heroes' equipment and/or learn new skills through it, or thanks to spirits!

Some of you may have already seen that some ore is collectable, by the way. ;)


- UI theme change

Authenticate also added UI Theme change support in the boot option menu. Making the former Allacrostian theme available to those who fancy it. :)
This is also exciting as more themes could be added later, making the overall game a more personal experience...







- Custom minimap support

Some work was done on minimaps, first to make them use less memory when being created procedurally, but also to fix some little glitches and add custom minimap support! I still need to add the missing ones but here is an example between the procedural way (on the left), and a custom one (on the right):

- Path finding support to map enemies

The bad fellows that were striving to catch you in the dungeon maps just got smarter! Enemies will now use pathfinding to wander but also to chase after your hero. Also, as I fancied it, I added waypoint support, meaning that certain enemies will patrol on certain map points.

- Story

The two first maps of the Mt. Elbrus are as of now technically finished, with some eye candy missing. This makes the count of missing maps before the next intermediate release to 4 or 5 depending on how things will turn out.

Will your heroes escape from the dark soldiers? Time will tell... ;)



- Bug fixes, and other development hell news

As an ending note, I'll say that this project has reached something like 300% of the features I thought I would add before the Episode I Release, and the work done is far from being mine only.

Thanks a lot to Ikarus, codergreen, authenticate, endoalir, logzero, NaN and BioHazardX for their help in bug fixing and work on the uneasy technical stuff, just as adding support for MSVC2012 compilation, or precompiled headers support (helping with the compilation time.)

A lot of work is still awaiting, but we're very close from another release now.

Stay tuned!

Groundwork

Hi there!

Already a month since the last piece of news so I wanted to make a little one. ;)

New skills

As said in the title, a lot of groundwork has happened in preparation of the global game scale. In short, about 60 skills were added in the in box to support the equipment upgrade system the player will be able to later use.

On the left, you can see an example of a later spell you'll be able to cast to protect your team against Earth based attacks!

I've added the necessary items you'll need to find or buy to later improve your equipment, and add spirit slots to it! I won't spoil it all but spirits will help you obtain new spells based on how you'll combine them on your equipment.

I thus added support to earn new skills through equipment. This will likely make the game more strategical and more fun. ;)
A lot of work remains but it's already coming along nicely so far.

New skills in the debug menu

Story

The two next maps linked to the story have also been added, and the heroes will soon have to evade the bad guy's army in order to survive this. (Mwahaha!)
The pursuit maps are ready on paper and I hope to put out a new intermediate release afterwards, just before the second dungeon.


Bug fix and other improvements

The title tells it. A ton of bugfixes have happen since last month and keep on coming, making the next release more stable than ever!
Also, Ablu helped fixing the icon installation on linux distributions, hasufell helped fixing path installations, and authenticate just spotted two nasty bugs leading to crashes. :D

The bug fixes aren't all made of code though. Many graphics were slightly improved along with the addition of support for images offsets, permitting to add back its shadow to the Fenrir, and fixing the grass clumps being previously cut on their bottom edge, for instance.


Translations

A special note for translation with the ever wonderful job of BioHazardX and NaN in updating the Italian and German translations.
A special guest also came along and not only fixed certain English typos but also added the Galician (gl) translation. A big thanks to Gallaecio for that.

Knitter also started the Portuguese (pt_PT) translation so this might soon become a reality, too. :)

Stay tuned!

The Villains

Hi everyone! :)

I must say I wanted to wait a bit more before presenting what's new in Valyria Tear, but since a lot of time already flew away, I'll do a quick piece of news now!

First things first, let's start with a small teaser ;)

Let me introduce the great first Villain you'll encounter in the game. The mysterious and malevolent Country Lord Banesore.

In the development version, the story goes to the point where Bronann meets that bad guy. As it was the heaviest thing so far I had to script/prepare sprites for, I'm quite happy it's more or less done. :D

I'll now be able to focus on adding the next part of the story, which is a bit lighter in term of scripting and should also be more interesting for the people in need of action! ;)

- Passive Status effect and elements

But this is not only what happened last month, IkarusDowned added support for passive equipment effects in battles, meaning that you will now be able to use (future) upgraded swords and other equipment pieces, giving bonus in attack, or defense.

The status/party, the shop mode, and the menu equipment windows have been upgraded to properly show different equipment effects in a common fashion, and with icons, which will tell the link between stats and effects:

The omni-sword, a piece of equipment used to test the extreme display case.

- Other improvements

The game will now remember which repeatable dialogues you have seen and show a bubble only on new npc dialogues. This will be a great help to get to know whom you talked with.

Common game data are now loaded once instead of loading them each time a game mode was loaded, which leads to less audio crashes and better overall performance!

I also took the time to properly try and fix joystick support. Valyria Tear should now be fully playable using your favourite pad!

- Save data and OSX ports

Valyria Tear will now use standard paths for settings and save files, for both Windows and Linux, and auto-copy the data which was in the old location.

Also, thanks to Socapex's work, OSX support for Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion has been upgraded and improved, and test builds are available in the downloads section! :D

Small Bugfix release

Hi all,

Following a nice reminder by Ablu, I uploaded a bugfix release of the Half-Episode I release aka 0.5.1.
You will find it in the download section.

The only change is a fix in the shop mode, preventing a crash when buying in certain cases.

Be sure to get this version if you're in the middle of it :)

Best Regards,

Return to the village

Hi everyone, :)

Here is a little summary of what has been done last month in Valyria Tear:

First of all, let me thank Brian Callahan for porting Valyria Tear to OpenBSD (See the download page) and helping me to adapt back my own code for that. :)

Now, let's start with the two major features developed by IkarusDowned and Codergreen which are basically finished and have been merged in the master branch. This means Valyria Tear now has minimap and trade support! :D

The minimaps are auto-generated from map data, making them seamless when designing maps (yeah), additional features, like displaying map exits, or interesting spots will likely happen a bit later but it's already very great to see it in full use. So, I thank again very warmly Ikarus for this feature. :)

at night at the forest entrance, with a minimap ;)

Trading support will also help the gaming experience as a key point, since it will permit me to propose improvement to equipment against special materials, sell rare wares with special conditions, among other things, so that the player will later be able to tune up his/her equipment for the next dungeon!

Trading support, with the additional required items to get the stuff!

You may have noticed the forest entrance is displayed at night, as I indeed added the story part where the characters goes back to the village while night falls dynamically on your return. I intentionally stopped the game before the actual arrival to the village as the village content is sill WIP at the moment. More in the next piece of news! (Sorry Shirish ;]). Still, here is a small teaser:

Soldiers!

- Other little things

You might have noticed that I added a nameplate under the name of character, which should help with the name readability. The idea isn't mine as it was simply disabled code from Allacrost missing the needed graphics but still this is refreshing. :)

The battles also have a new stamina bar (seen on the right when fighting) and several other small tweaks have been made in the same trend.

- Contextual and c-format strings translation support

In the other area of the game, I added contextual translation support and c-formatted strings (i.e.: "Paul has %u Drunes."), both permitting to help translators in their hard work, based on their requests.

- Balancing

McMic and BioHazardX also requested to get the first new skills a little bit earlier in game and talked about the enemy experience points rewards in general, leading to a global rescale of enemy XP, and Drunes (gold). In order to stay relevant and fair, I made a spreadsheet giving me hints on how much XP and drunes a monster was worth based on its stats, weakness, items and skills, and used that as a base to rescale everything.
The result isn't a spectacular change as it only led to tweaks here and there to those values. The most noticeable change was a fix to the mistake in the HP of the Fenrir second encounter.
I thank everyone for their polite and sensible feedback on those points.

- Performance

The fading system was also simplified to no longer apply a color on each and every image on every draw calls and use an overlay instead. This has simplified the draw code for the images and other elements of this kind and should lead to a slight but welcome increase in performance. I, myself, have no longer slow downs in the shop mode (why not?) and while fading in and out. :)

- Map data format

Another key work was also done on map data :
The map tile data and the map scripts are now two separate files. This has several advantages:
- The map load time has decreased in general.
- The map data is reusable and is reused when returning to the village without the need to twist the village center script even more.
- This permits also to remove the max length cap the scripts could have as the map editor would then no longer load the map file after reaching that cap.

This move has also got another goal. I'm currently planning to remove the use of a setenv() function in the map data script and simply use a normal table, and drop context switching support, as this (even strong) feature is only used once and isn't very friendly in term of data handling. This can later be readded  with the support of loading several map data files at the same time, but I'll sincerely go without, for now, if at all.

Why all that? Because I'll then be able to start working on creating a tiled plugin and use Tiled as the Valyria Tear map editor, and this, for obvious reasons due to the fantastic maturity of this open source tool. :)

Thanks a lot for reading!