Going into the dungeon...

Hi all, :)

Among other exciting things (just like new Valyria Tear's ports), here is what has been done last month:

I worked mainly on the next two story maps, which will lead our heroes into the last Episode I dungeon entrance:

The high mountain part, just before the shrine entrance.

Lilou and I have been working on paper on the dungeon design (again and again) and agreed on something. (Believe me, that's the main point! ;])

I also added Lilou's horse into the game, and worked on adding shoulders for the new portraits that were missing those.
I also tweaked certain dialogues and added a proper battle AI to Banesore in the village now the game has support for it, making the battle a bit better tuned.
Finally, I added a new optional quest in the starting village. The well-known and venerable 'Find the chicken' quest!

Development-wise, I've been working first on something one person of my primary audience (aka my sister) was requesting since a long, long time. Something I will call edge detection or soft-edges since I was unable to find an official name for that. (might be my own fault) ;)

Briefly, our Hero was previously stopped by walls even when touching them even on edges. Now, it will slide away from them and keep on walking. On another hand, the character won't slide against people he can talk to, treasures, and other interact-able items, to preserve the gameplay.
Here is an example when walking south:

I also added a star icon in front of the currently selected language in the option menu as requested by Aapo, and finally added a missing API scripting function used to properly start an event after a dialogue without tangling the map game states! Quite obscure isn't it? But believe me, it was necessary. ;)

Last but not least, I finally got around removing the GL renderer used to display tiles in the Map Editor, and use an actual Qt Renderer instead!
This permitted to untangle the engine and editor code, remove a lot of unnecessary dependencies for the editor, and leave it out of the way on the port to SDL2. (It previously was broken in the SDL2 port).

Translation wise, I also thank dimproject who made the full game translation into Russian!

OpenDungeons:
I've also been working a lot on compiling OpenDungeons dependencies for Windows (FOSS Dungeon Keeper in the making), and if you're interested to help, feel free to drop by!


Stay tuned!

Valyria Tear 0.6.0 on Maemo5/N900

Hi everyone,

Thanks to the work of Aapo Rantalainen, Valyria Tear can now be run on N900 with quite surprisingly few
issues for a first version.
Big kudos to him!!

Here is the announcement and below a video!

0.6.0 Release!

Hi there,

Good news!

After a few good days in bugfixing, adding the missing little pieces needed to make the 0.6.0 release something polished enough for a pleasant flight, it is now DONE!!

The release is out and you can go grab it in the Downloads section!

Thanks a lot to the whole team that took the time to test and report feedback. :)

The following main parts were fixed if your interested:
- Fixed second boss skills
- Fixed the battle stats initialization that weren't proper for certain cases.
- Finally added the Crystal voicecasts.

Here is also the full changelog between the rc1 and the final release.

Enjoy!

0.6.0 Release candidate 1 out!

Hi there! :)

The new Valyria Tear intermediate release is out!



You'll find the source package and the Windows installer in the Downloads section.

Compared to the HEIR1 Release, this release is providing most notably the following things:

- Many, many, many bugfixes and performance improvements.
- The characters actual weapon is shown in battles, along with weaponless attack support.
- Custom minimap support.
- New art!
- Battle enemies scriptable AI support.
- Better scripted battle events.
- Equipment and Battle status effect support in battles.
- UI theme change support.
- Menu mode UI stats info display improvements.
- Translated into 4 languages (French, Galician Italian, and German) - Come and add your own!
- Map enemies using patrol way points.
- Scripted puzzle objects.
- and of course, more of the story :)

 This release is not only my own work but also the one of a lot of involved and noteworthy people! Thanks a lot guys and girls!

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!