After literally WEEKS of hype from last month's post, this time I'm going to remember to write about Ice Emblem once and for all (LEGAL NOTICE: Offy-D reserves the right to write about Ice Emblem again and for the current offering of text to not actually cover 'all' in any shape, smell, direction or indeed form).
That's right, with only minimal complaints available for the youtube channel, let me tell you about the best video game of all time (LEGAL NOTICE: Offy-D reserves the right for any video games arising from 'Project Ice Emblem' to be of non-premier quality, now or indeed ever).
Last month (or something) I released the open demo for all to see so that the denizens of the internet could give the burgeoning game a go and give some feedback. The main bit of feedback was that it would be better if it didn't randomly freeze or crash sometimes. WELL FINE FFS GAMING AUDIENCES TODAY ARE SPOILED AMIRITE?! So yes, I begrudgingly fixed that issue after using my magic debugging powers to discover it was some weird effect of capturing the place a hostile party was going to AND where it came from in quick succession.
Oh by the way if you have no idea what this 'Ice Emblem' is, (AKA Godless Tactics), here's the video.
I'm going to write as if you know what I'm talking about because that's how dev blogs work. Technically this is the first dev blog so it shouldn't be like this but I've been told by my lawyers that I have reserved the right to perform any marketing or publicity activities in the worst possible fashion, up to and including obnoxious ignorance. That guy's worth every penny I tells ya.
Other improvements made in the wake of suggestions from the demo mostly revolved around UI/UX stuff, with the game providing more info on what was happening and reducing the number of clicks/menus required to do certain things.
Once those changes were made I took to my 'wishlist', where I'd made a big list of things I thought would be cool to add into the game, and got to work! Some of them were immediately binned in a 'what the hell was I thinking?' sort of way, but otherwise we've now got exciting features like a persistent player character with character creation, fast travel, autoresolve-mop ups to get through the boring ending part of battles, a new 'Sync' system that allows you to perform special tactics moves in battle, debug tools, multi-channel sound effects... I mean, is there really any point in listing these things here?
Let's just talk about a couple of them. With the persistent player character system, you create, at the beginning of the game, a character to be 'you' in the game, and customise their stats.
As you might spot in there, this creation system comes with a new 'leadership style' system that adds some kind of ability for the player to use, unique to the campaign. The 'Micromanager' one is the boring passive one that can't do any harm, then there are some more interesting ones that I won't spoil here.
The player character will be immune to death, so if you get wiped out the new party that spawns still has your character in it, just for some continuity. That is, of course, if you are allowed to spawn a new party, as in certain conditions losing a battle means game over, and on Hard difficulty you game over if you ever lose the party, (meaning effectively your player charter isn't immortal but whatever I'm not changing the UI messages now, FAR TOO MUCH EFFORT RIGHT?).
The other most impact change (aside from not constantly crashing) is the Sync system, where you build a sync value by killing enemies in battles without losing any agents yourself. It represents the team's unity / teamwork potential, and is spent to do special teamworky type actions.
Right now there are only two: blocking mortal blows meant for allies, and swapping places with an ally. The latter is the most important one, since it opens up lots of options. For example, you can attack an enemy, then have an ally behind you swap places so that you can also attack with said ally in the same turn. Will be useful for saving injured party members and setting up essential attacks, I'm sure.
Here's a shot of some handy new debug information for working out what the AI is doing with it's crazy moves.
And here's a shot of the program I'm using to make the maps, Tiled, a very nice free program that creates .tmx files linking tile images to points on a grid. I then use a .bat program to convert these into .xml files since that is what my ice emblem engine is set up to read for data input, and it can see which tiles to put where in the scene.
There are multiple layers of images, and special tiles for marking deployment areas in battles, which makes this process more complicated than it sounds, but it's all working smoothly right now. On the world map, the thing is so big that I have made it only render parts that are near the camera, as having unity display tens of thousands of fat png images at once is not very nice. In cases where things are layered, the images are stacked behind the world-plane.
Anything interesting you wanna see? I dunno. I don't really have a dev blog to write, just wanted to write something. More features coming soon eh? Next up I need to find a way to make location battles more different from field battles (something requested by demo players), make locations be 'discoverable' i.e. you don't know info on them until you're close, and generally make more of the world map.
Here's a picture of some beautiful code!
It's all very educational I'm told. Well maybe next time I'm actually come up with a plan for the dev blog and make it good and stuff. Until then, eagerly await the next thrilling development on the best game of all time!
NOW
Time for a tiny bit of info on the channel. I was going to write here that after youtube released their update for the demonitisation bot, things have been fixed. They SEEMED to be fixed over the last week, but then today it all started getting demonitised again so I don't even know man. My spooky halloween video got demonitised - clearly the horrors of that gro'it story got to them. So please fix youtube, Please? Plz 2 fx k?
Aside from that I'm starting to come up with the shortlist for things to replace Fields of Mars. It ALMOST ended when I thought I'd finally ended the action of the campaign, but for reasons I won't go into it then resurged and promised at least a couple of episodes before things reach the natural stopping point I was looking for. Good in that I don't have to think of anything new, but bad in that OH MY GOD MORE FIELDS OF MARS PLEASE MAKE IT STOP I'M LEGITIMATELY MELTING.
At least I'm still somewhat on track to hit 15k subs this year, although all the numbers have been slowly dropping away this last month since I'm away from the start of barbarian masters now. Sad face. Slow and steady wins the race - wait, those other guys are going fast and steady, dammit!
