Slowly reaching the end of the dungeon...

Hi everyone!

It's been again some times since I've post something here and again a lot of exciting things happened since then.

First of all, some of you might have noticed the come-back of Tyler Olsen aka Roots, leader of the Hero of Allacrost project which is, simply put, the base project I took over to start what has become Valyria Tear since then. ;)
Roots already dropped by and offered a kind help by doing some balancing in the game and fixing some little rough edges he saw while playing. I wish him the best for his return and his will to revive Allacrost. I would have, btw, given a link to his blog post but it seems http://www.allacrost.org is down at that very moment.

Speaking of which, Roots asked me whether I could have a look at upgrading a bit the GUI skin to make it a bit different from Allacrost so that both games have clearer identities, and I did. :)
Safir-Kreuz (from Deviant Art) also gave one nice helping hand and finished the new awesome Bronann portrait!!

New GUI skin and new Bronann's portrait :)

Thanks to the unstoppable work of Zabin, the wood tileset saw new additions coming, making possible for me to use new trees within the forest. My goal will then to use them all along the forest maps in the near future.

You might notice new smaller trees around.

On my side, there have been numerous small features additions, bug fixes and overall work on the forest maps. Thus, the forest path has been upgraded up to the first cave path where new puzzles and monsters are awaiting, along with the additions of two new save points.

The first cave part, where you'll have to actually make way. ;)

Note also that the game German translation was kindly updated by NaN, which reported that the items, skills and other global scripts related strings weren't translated even when provided by the translation files. Thanks to his hint about it, I had the necessary test cases needed to fix it. :)

The game in German - with the item names correctly translated.

 As a last note, I shall tell that the dungeons is not very far from being fully done, and thanks to everyone's work around this project, I'm able to officially say that a first Valyria Tear release is planned rather soon, still this year. :)

Stay tuned!

Battle effects!

Hi everyone,

Au menu this time, quite some things happened since the last piece of new, I even had the occasion to take a break and have some vacations. ;)

Code-wise, a lot of work has happened around status effects and their appliance in battles:
Elemental, and status effects are now loaded and shown correctly in the shop mode. While on it, I also made shops actually support different price levels, so that the buy and sell pricing can vary according to your friendship with the seller.

In battles, a lot of work was made to show properly status effects and make them apply and last correctly.
For instance, you can now visually see it better when several active status effects are triggered, and the effects will take the battle time factor in account and correct their duration during fading out times, making them a bit more fair and more realistic, at least in my own eyes. ;)
(I also added a fully functional stun/paralysis effect. :])

Multiple status effect display

Another addition that won't go unnoticed ;), is battle particle effects support.
Let me explain, particle effects were already supported in all the game modes, but I had to make the particle effects be rendered at the right time so that it does overlap any sprite behind it, but doesn't overlap any other sprite in front of it.
The nice fact about this is that I was able to add support for the very first spells with visuals: Fire burst, First aid, and soon Haste, and Wave. ;)

Battle particle effects for spells.

I also rewrote the basic battle AI so that it can choose between all the currently supported types of skill, and not only the basic point based attack ones. This permitted to give them defensive, support and offensive skills and spells support also ;)

Another nice thing I wanted to do since some time now, is the addition of missing battle animations for Bronann and Kalya. I also made them whisper their spell at warm up time, and have a custom spell/support skill cast animation. I also added the quite missing Kalya victory pose :]

Last but not least, quite the best for the end in fact, thanks to the magnificent work of Zabin (from Open Game Art), a lot of improvement went into the mountain, winter and forest tilesets, permitting also to link better the mountain and the forest together. :)
All those nice additions shall be used quite extensively and shortly.

The mountain tileset, now with a cave entrance, new stone, grass, ground types, ...

Stay tuned!

Nice new video!

Hi all,

Qubodup made a nice video showing the latest progress made: Live!

A big thank to him for that :)

In the middle of the woods...

Hi everyone,

A lot of time has flown since the last update and here is what has been done since then:

A lot of work has been done to the forest area and related features, and the forest has been enlarged by two new maps, tree variations to make it more colourful, and a new event (Beware of that one!).

New tree variations and new maps.

The map monsters will be also a bit smarter as they will now try to catch your character even out of their wandering area, as long as they can see you.

As for battles, the forest has gained a new shiny battle background thanks to Tamara Ramsay (vectorgurl.com), and a lot of work has been done in improving the battle logic, with the addition of three battle types (wait, semi-active and active ones) making the enemy wait for you to execute actions for your characters... or not. ;)
I also started to work on the very first boss sprite... (Please don't laugh, it's a draft ;]).

Aww, a boss...

More likely now because of this particular monster, I worked on battle character defeats and the battles can now also be lost without forcing you to restart the whole game...

Oops, let's try again...

I also took time to work on updating/upgrading the font used within the whole game to make them a bit more readable, for instance:

New font above, old one below...

 Now as for the invisible coding part, some profiling was done on the code, and I personally made optimizations in the OpenGL draw calls and in the font cache iterations to gain ~20% fps at draw time (according to the two computers I tried so far.)
A warm thanks to 4144 (author of Manaplus) for that.

I would like also to thank Jetrel (Frogatto & friends) for the nice work done on the desert tileset :), Shirish for all the testing and reports, and Nemesis for his willingness in joining the development effort.

Stay tuned! :)

While in the making of the 'dungeon'...

Hi all! :)

As told in the title, while in the making of the first 'dungeon' which will be the layna forest, I worked and polished several things that are, IMHO, already improving the map scenes.

Here is a patchwork of several small things added recently:

Emotes, particle effects, and more...

And the change list:
Most notably, I finished the addition of Emote support which makes all the character speeches much more lively. :D
Using all that, I finished the introduction in the forest entrance map. Now, what happens there is much more logical.

Based on feed-back and personal bad experiments ;), I also Polished at bit the battle command logic to prevent most severely to block a player with sometimes a never-ending command at the end of a battle
I also made Kalya's arbalest arrow visible in battles when firing.

 I brought fixes in the shop mode to make it remember the right and sell prices. Better that way, isn't it?

I spent some time also in refactoring the particle engine code to avoid memleaks and permit to stop and restart particle effects, making the save points much better looking for instance.
And finally, I did some code cleanups or style fixes, still on going , btw...

Stay tuned! ;)

Very first battle...

Hi everyone,

This week, I've been doing quite some efforts in bringing a few key features in game:

First of all, music fade in and fade out are properly working again, and are used in the most dramatic areas of the introduction story.

I also completed the forest entrance map, and finally, after some effort on putting the required infrastructure in shape, added Map particle objects, and used them to improve the look of save points.
(You can also watch a particle effect when healing at the spring, btw.)
This is a key point as it will permit me to go further in using them for better map and battle effects, for instance.

Trees, squirrels, butterflies, and particle effects!

Also, another key thing that finally went in game, is the addition of the very first game map enemy, thus permitting the very first battle to happen:

First battle, Kalya will help you with the basics.

Note that the forest background is WIP, any improvement on it is welcome, btw. ;)
To avoid high-level grinders, I also a level cap system (currently set to lvl 6) telling the players when they have reached the current maximum level. this will prevent people from going too far, before the rest of the content has reached the repository.

Fighting on level 1 should not be easy at all, and you'll have to find a way to at least reach lvl 2 before being ready to deeper in the forest. (once I've added it ;])

I also made a slight change on the collision computation in the map editor. Now, the map editor will consider a collision area passable if a passable tile is put over an unpassable one on the ground level. This will permit the addition of bridges, for instance, without the need to tweak collisions out of the editor scope.

Stay tuned ;)

A nice video!

Hi everyone,

I took all the guts I could have and asked qudobup to make a video, ... and he accepted!

Enjoy!

 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2xNr9bCN1E