Xyrinfe Shadow Project Forums
Miscellaneous => Member Works => Topic started by: AuroraDash on 20 September 2020, 07:13:27
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UPDATE 12/7/2021!!! GAME FINISH
Download game, version 1.0.3: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JtxBB8GjTB1BWM6HcFeKw69-bZjHbVhr/view?usp=sharing
Download soundtrack: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18e-OBc20tL294JZh6GhnWVb3W0Ncyl3l/view?usp=sharing
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Heya! So, yeah, Misery of Magic is still a thing. It's nearly finished, it's been "nearly finished" for nearly like 2 years now, but it's largely taken a back seat to my studies (I'm still at university, doing a PhD in economics, this is my last year, kinda), my Celeste speedrunning career (I have over 3000 hours in the game >_<), and various other hobbies. My motivation hit rock bottom several times in between and it's just been a huge slog, but lately I've been finding myself working on it reasonably well again. At the moment, the game's main campaign is more or less done, the main things left to do are:
-- Rebalancing.
-- Most of the endings.
-- Some other story-focused stuff.
-- Music.
There are also some smaller things I want to do:
-- Rework Fire Boom, as it stands it's too similar to Blood Orb.
-- Make it a bit harder to get a 2nd character immediately upon reaching the Eastern half of the overworld. It should still be possible, but not immediately obvious. If you get one right away, you won't be able to get into Energy Centre and you might accidentally choose before you understand that there is a choice at all.
-- Make Sorrow Peak puzzle optional, or rework it to make it less lame, or something.
-- Maybe there should be a late-game blue magic weapon that's accessible to all characters? At the moment, there are only three blue magic weapons, of which one requires a specific character and another is only available during the endgame sequence, so most of the time the only choice when it comes to blue magic will be Unfire.
Most recent change was to buff Needle and make it look cooler, because it felt kind of lame to use before.
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Went ahead and did the Fire Boom rework right away. You can now still use it like a slightly stronger, slightly more awkward Blood Orb if you like -- the projectile moves slower so it's harder to control. Now, however, if you hold it down past the point where it's fully charged, it has a second "mode" which is even more powerful and even harder to control, which works somewhat like Toxicity Star but not exactly.
Rebalanced Needle again: Nerfed its damage by roughly 14%, which is still 20% stronger than it was before it was buffed originally. Conversely, I buffed Heat Needle by about 27%, which puts it at the same damage regular Needle was before this latest nerf -- when I buffed Needle I forgot to buff Heat Needle too, so Needle was stronger which was a bit silly.
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So there's other campaigns?
Also, I don't really know much of Misery of Magic's blue magic weapons, but I guess an extra choice or two would be helpful. :)
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Nah, only one campaign -- As of now, it has a final boss and I guess it's technically finishable (although I still need to bugtest it, there's a VERY good chance it'll crash the game, as it stands) but most of the last three or four areas don't have much story content yet.
As for the blue weapons, I might see if I can come up with something!
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Got a great idea for a new Sorrow Peak puzzle, although I haven't implemented it yet. The old puzzle involves pushing black and white blocks around to write numbers in binary -- the numbers you're supposed to write are written on walls elsewhere in Sorrow Peak. Okay enough puzzle, but hopeless if you don't have both the clues and a bit tedious if you do have them. I'll make that one optional, move it off to the side so that it gates something less important, while the puzzle blocking the way to the end of the area won't require wandering all over the map looking for clues.
Might do something similar with the Underpath puzzle, which has an even worse "wander all over the map looking for clues" thing going on, but I haven't decided yet.
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Made most of the new Sorrow Peak puzzle tonight!
I still need to bugtest it and make a few new rooms to house the old puzzle, but that can wait until tomorrow I think.
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Started work on the new blue magic weapon! My original idea for a name was "Oceanstar", but then I thought it would be cool to name it after a real life star with some symbolic connection to the ocean. I put entirely way too much thought into which one, but I eventually decided that Upsilon Carinae would be the perfect choice.
I have this idea where it starts out as a much weaker white version of itself and can be upgraded to its full blue version by bringing it to a particular place.
I'm envisioning it as similar to the Energy Beam from Merlin's Revenge 2 -- it'll hit anything on the screen near-instantly and do crazy high damage per hit, but can only hit one target at once. Furthermore, unlike the original Energy Beam, which was considered to be severely overpowered, it'll charge slowly. I might also add a couple other things to the Upsilon Carinae to make it more interesting and more distinct from the Awe, which is already slow-charging, deals high damage per hit, and hits instantly.
Side note: several existing Misery of Magic weapons are already close to copies of Merlin's Revenge spells:
Energy Blast (All three MR games) --> Orb
Energy Pulse (MR3) --> Toxicity Star
Energy Mines (MR3) --> Nuclear Blaze
(Not all Merlin's Revenge spells start with "Energy", but those that don't are either more like support tools than weapons or involve summoning things, and I don't think either of those would work very well as Misery of Magic weapons.)
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I like the name "Upsilon Carinae". :)
You say you might add a couple of other things to make it more interesting and distinct from the awe-inspiring (:3) Awe?
How about... a temporary water barrier around the user? Or... a very minor healing effect?
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I like the name "Upsilon Carinae". :)
You say you might add a couple of other things to make it more interesting and distinct from the awe-inspiring (:3) Awe?
How about... a temporary water barrier around the user? Or... a very minor healing effect?
Thanks :3
The weapon is mostly done now -- I eventually decided on adding a little backblast thing, which makes it a little harder to use but would add to its potential damage if it were used cleverly.
A healing effect is something I've thought of, although that might be hard to balance. I think what I'll end up doing is add more regenerators but I might reduce the mid-fight healing -- every 16th exp diamond dropped is blue, and heals you somewhat.
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Fixed some more bugs pertaining to the Sorrow Peak puzzles, I think they both work properly now.
Figured out a solution to make sure people know what they're doing before getting a second character, although I haven't implemented it yet -- Hunter and Jaye just kind of hang out in the overworld, so the idea is that, to recruit them, you need to pick up an item from elsewhere in the overworld and give it to them. The items will tell you what they do. The other characters will be unchanged, because they're in places that take a lot more effort to get to, so I expect people to explore the Eastern overworld first.
An easier and more obvious solution would be to have a menu that pops up saying something to the effect of "DO YOU WANT TO DO THIS? Y/N" but I feel like that would sort of break the "show don't tell" rule which I have mostly been adhering to ruthlessly.
As part of this, I'm adding a new sub-area to the Eastern overworld, called the Solitude Stoneway -- It won't have any enemies or puzzles, it'll just be a place to put a few things that I didn't really have a place for, and it'll make the Eastern overworld a bit bigger. Was considering adding a way to fast travel back to the Western overworld, but I decided against it.
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Solitude Stoneway is finished.
Decided to ditch the idea of having items gate getting a second character. The dialogue already made it clear that it was a permanent decision. I'll just add something unmissable which will indicate that you need to enter Energy Centre alone.
This whole "getting a second character" business has turned into quite a headache from a game design perspective.
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Fixed a bug relating to the End Tools where leaving and re-entering some of their arenas (or loading a savefile into one of their arenas) would sometimes crash the game. Was due to the End Tools in particular distinguishing between dying and being deleted for some other reason in a different way to everything else in the game, in a way that happened to be very sensitive to the order in which objects get processed.
Also, all the End Tools now take 50% more damage.
Fixed a bug where there were three copies of the player character on top of each other in one specific room. This remarkably broke very little, but did cause menus to behave oddly.
Fixed a bug where characters were likely to get horribly corrupted during the endgame. This happened because lines 16 through 21 of the save files weren't being saved properly and somehow garbage data was getting loaded instead.
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Bugtested one of the endgame bosses -- the second-to-last one -- and rebalanced its hidden "rank" mechanic, which a few bosses have (especially the Lightside Kris fight in North Edge, which this boss is very similar to and shares a lot of code with) to increase its speed and damage whenever its attack patterns loop around or it falls below particular HP thresholds. It's pretty good now, although I feel like it's a bit damage spongey, I might change that later.
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Fixed a bug where enemies with sprites where the "centre position" wasn't at the origin, or where the hitbox wasn't at the centre of the sprite, could react oddly to taking damage -- bounce in a weird direction, create particle effects in the wrong place.
Been bugtesting the most final of final bosses.
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Fixed a bug where enemies with sprites where the "centre position" wasn't at the origin, or where the hitbox wasn't at the centre of the sprite, could react oddly to taking damage -- bounce in a weird direction, create particle effects in the wrong place.
Been bugtesting the most final of final bosses.
That sounds like a lot of progress. Considering you're bugtesting what I assume is the true final boss, I take that you're in the end stages of development?
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That sounds like a lot of progress. Considering you're bugtesting what I assume is the true final boss, I take that you're in the end stages of development?
I'd say so! At the moment there's pretty much a full playable game from start to end, although there's still be a few things missing -- music, most of the endings, and some story-related stuff to fill out the world.
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I'd say so! At the moment there's pretty much a full playable game from start to end, although there's still be a few things missing -- music, most of the endings, and some story-related stuff to fill out the world.
So regarding the music, will you be composing it yourself or not? And it's good to know that your game will have multiple endings.
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So regarding the music, will you be composing it yourself or not? And it's good to know that your game will have multiple endings.
I plan to do most of it myself, yes. A musician friend who goes by Jake Jon King has been kind enough to do one of them as a guest artist though, which is pretty cool.
There will be a fair few endings, yeah. I'm planning five good endings, which will have enough in common and plug into each other enough that I can continue the story later if I like. Then there'll be a scattering of miscellaneous "short" endings where the game ends early. Finally, there will also probably be a couple of secret ones with weird conditions.
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I plan to do most of it myself, yes. A musician friend who goes by Jake Jon King has been kind enough to do one of them as a guest artist though, which is pretty cool.
There will be a fair few endings, yeah. I'm planning five good endings, which will have enough in common and plug into each other enough that I can continue the story later if I like. Then there'll be a scattering of miscellaneous "short" endings where the game ends early. Finally, there will also probably be a couple of secret ones with weird conditions.
That sounds great. (I actually like that one track you made for Astrum: The Game) Also I'm down for secret weird endings because they're always interesting.
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Been going around adding things to fill out the world and explain the story. As part of that, I added some stuff to North Edge, including a couple rudimentary puzzles -- these aren't challenging at all, but rather are designed to make you fully explore the zone the first time through, and further differentiate the two times through it. Also, added a hint as to what you're supposed to do the second time.
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Added a few minor characters and added some lore to Sorrow Peak and its main denizen Breeze Arkaia -- it used to be a place where those whose souls had become entirely full of darkness would gather. Accordingly, there's stuff explaining more fully how the light and darkness thing works. It's mostly a background lore thing, although one of the End Tool bosses uses the light and darkness system as a means of attack.
Kind of implemented the Lensar last boss fight, although I haven't tested it yet -- I kinda forgot to do this earlier. The idea is, there's a character who's normally the 2nd-to-last boss, but he's recruitable. If you have recruited him, which is fairly difficult, you fight Lensar instead. He's far, far weaker, having only a fraction of the HP, but he (a) reads your mouse input to try to avoid being hit and (b) has the Void Slash, which functions as an overpowered version of the player's Mirror Wave, and cancels out any projectile-based attacks. Despite that, he's still not supposed to be too hard.
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Got a lot done tonight: Bugtested the Lensar fight already.
Now I'm going through and adding a couple minor things to Energy Centre and Fire Hole. More story/lore type stuff.
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... what is Misery of Magic...?
Seems rather interesting...
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... what is Misery of Magic...?
Seems rather interesting...
It's a game I've been slowly putting together in Game Maker Studio for several years :3 It's an action RPG inspired by the Merlin's Revenge trilogy. You play as Emerald, a cat from Earth in the far future, who is somehow sent to a place called the Domain of Magic, where he has to find his missing brother. It's nearly done now, but it's been nearly done for a long time hahah.
I used to make a lot of games, but at some point other stuff kinda took precedence, and my ideas became bigger and more ambitious so now it takes forever to get anything done.
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Sounds quite fun... especially playing as cat.
Freeware, or not?
Big, ambitious ideas... very much familiar to me...
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Sounds quite fun... especially playing as cat.
Freeware, or not?
Big, ambitious ideas... very much familiar to me...
Yes, it'll be freeware! :D I don't think I have the skills to make something worth paying for, anyway.
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Started work on the endings, now. I'm beginning with Ending 6, which will be one of the bigger endings, albeit still not that big. This is one of the good endings, and one of the harder ones to reach, in my opinion.
I might add an auto-save feature, which creates an extra 5th save file which gets re-saved whenever certain actions take place. The manual save system is a bit old-school, it's yet another thing copied from the original Merlin's Revenge games which were made in the early 00s, where it was easy to forget to save and also easy to die and thus lose lots of progress. Misery of Magic has kinda the same problem, I think.
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Started work on the endings, now. I'm beginning with Ending 6, which will be one of the bigger endings, albeit still not that big. This is one of the good endings, and one of the harder ones to reach, in my opinion.
I might add an auto-save feature, which creates an extra 5th save file which gets re-saved whenever certain actions take place. The manual save system is a bit old-school, it's yet another thing copied from the original Merlin's Revenge games which were made in the early 00s, where it was easy to forget to save and also easy to die and thus lose lots of progress. Misery of Magic has kinda the same problem, I think.
Congratulations for sticking with the project and getting this far. I take it that you're now at the end point of development?
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More or less! Tentative release date at the moment is my birthday this year :3
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Auto-save would be very helpful... living in a country where rolling blackouts may happen without warning, it would certainly reduce the risk of losing a lot of progress due to the powers that be...
... Congratulations with all the progress you have made on this work...
... Would it be permitted if this game gets mentioned in Apocalyptic Shadow by a currently-unimplemented NPC...?
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Auto-save would be very helpful... living in a country where rolling blackouts may happen without warning, it would certainly reduce the risk of losing a lot of progress due to the powers that be...
... Congratulations with all the progress you have made on this work...
... Would it be permitted if this game gets mentioned in Apocalyptic Shadow by a currently-unimplemented NPC...?
Thank you! :3
And sure, of course! In fact, it already kinda references LSP in a few places anyway...
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Implemented that auto-save thing! :3
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Implemented that auto-save thing! :3
Awesome! I guess it's just the endings you need to do now, right?
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Awesome! I guess it's just the endings you need to do now, right?
Yep, more or less~
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For a few weeks I didn't do much unfortunately, but now the endings are coming along nicely. Misery of Magic wasn't designed for cutscenes at all, so I had to fudge together some new code to make the endings work the way I wanted.
Fixed a graphical bug in the load game menu.
Game no longer crashes when loading a game into the final boss room. This happened because doing that somehow skips the part where one phase of the final boss sets up the surface it needs for its cool effects.
Can now select weapons in the tier menu under the cats menu to see a brief description of each one. Not important, but nice to have.
If you have 3 characters, they'll now all appear correctly in the cats menu.
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So will this game have any post-game content or will it just focus on the main content?
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There is a CATS menu...?!
(Intensely looks forward to this game.)
When exactly did you begin with Misery of Magic... if I may ask...?
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So will this game have any post-game content or will it just focus on the main content?
It will just focus on the main content -- I think it's already quite big enough. There was some post-game stuff I ended up cutting which I planned on adding back in, in an update at some later point, but I don't know if I'll ever get around to that.
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There is a CATS menu...?!
(Intensely looks forward to this game.)
When exactly did you begin with Misery of Magic... if I may ask...?
It's a characters menu, basically. It lets you check weapon tiers as well.
I started way back in October of 2016 I think. Kept getting bored and/or distracted, got really busy with more important things, took heaps of many-month-long hiatuses, and pretty much lost interest in making games altogether for a long time.
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The five main good endings are pretty much done! There are now 7 implemented in total (because a couple of the short endings were already made a while ago). I'm now going to add several more short endings, which won't take much effort each. I had a document with heaps of ideas for endings, but I'm not sure how many will make it into the final game, because some of the ideas are quite weak and I don't want it to take too long. In any case, there are going to be A LOT of endings, definitely even more than SS2 has.
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The five main good endings are pretty much done! There are now 7 implemented in total (because a couple of the short endings were already made a while ago). I'm now going to add several more short endings, which won't take much effort each. I had a document with heaps of ideas for endings, but I'm not sure how many will make it into the final game, because some of the ideas are quite weak and I don't want it to take too long. In any case, there are going to be A LOT of endings, definitely even more than SS2 has.
All these multiple endings do sound quite interesting. And considering that Solar Shadow 2 had 11 endings, that means that this game may have them in a single mode or across multiple modes like in SS2/
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All these multiple endings do sound quite interesting. And considering that Solar Shadow 2 had 11 endings, that means that this game may have them in a single mode or across multiple modes like in SS2/
It'll all be in a single mode :3
Endings 8 and 9 are done now!
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Up to 11 endings now.
Eliminated the effects menu because it doesn't do anything.
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Reached 13 endings. Current plan is for 17 endings total. Will try to knock over as many as I can before FurDU later this week.
Added a little percentage completion indicator next to each save file.
Added the Luminous Cenotaph, which is like a dev room. If anyone finds it I'll be impressed.
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Reached 13 endings. Current plan is for 17 endings total. Will try to knock over as many as I can before FurDU later this week.
Added a little percentage completion indicator next to each save file.
Added the Luminous Cenotaph, which is like a dev room. If anyone finds it I'll be impressed.
This sounds great. So most of the endings are done and there's a dev room now. Sounds promising.
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All the endings are done now!
I ended up having to cut the Twain ending, because it didn't make sense as an ending, really. I left a vestige of it in -- when entering a particular room, there is a 1/64 chance that Twain will appear and, if you talk to him, tell you about his past with Ember. The number 1/64, or 0.015625, is a reference to Yume Nikki where it was the same probability of summoning Uboa. Also, returning to the West after reaching East Top Level, which would've been a requirement for the cut ending, will cause Tairi to appear at the beginning of Shade Hollow, as a reward for the player thinking of going all the way back there.
In that ending's place, I brought back the previously cut Evil Breeze ending, so that there are still 17 endings. This requires having Breeze in your party, obtaining the Upsilon Carinae, then returning to some specific room of Sorrow Peak.
Despite the large number of endings, I didn't want the player to run into weird endings all the time. So, I made all the "short endings" a bit strange and obscure, with complicated and unintuitive requirements. Nobody will ever find all the secrets without help, mark my words -- there are still secrets in Starhall 2 and Legend of Grey Moon which nobody ever found...
Music is next! Then I need to bugtest the game, then release it, then have it stand as one of my crowning achievements, and finally put it behind me.
The game's development has taken up entire chapters of my life. I was in 3rd year of undergrad when I started, now I'm finishing up my PhD. I've had like 4 or 5 different relationships live and die in the time it has taken to write this damn game. Finishing it will be the biggest relief ever.
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You have come so far, AuroraDash...
(Gives an Eternium Crown and many hugs...)
However... I have one question... any chances of a "sound test" sort of thing, for listening to the music...?
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You have come so far, AuroraDash...
(Gives an Eternium Crown and many hugs...)
However... I have one question... any chances of a "sound test" sort of thing, for listening to the music...?
Possibly, I haven't decided yet~
Thanks for the crown! :D
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All the endings are done now!
I ended up having to cut the Twain ending, because it didn't make sense as an ending, really. I left a vestige of it in -- when entering a particular room, there is a 1/64 chance that Twain will appear and, if you talk to him, tell you about his past with Ember. The number 1/64, or 0.015625, is a reference to Yume Nikki where it was the same probability of summoning Uboa. Also, returning to the West after reaching East Top Level, which would've been a requirement for the cut ending, will cause Tairi to appear at the beginning of Shade Hollow, as a reward for the player thinking of going all the way back there.
In that ending's place, I brought back the previously cut Evil Breeze ending, so that there are still 17 endings. This requires having Breeze in your party, obtaining the Upsilon Carinae, then returning to some specific room of Sorrow Peak.
Despite the large number of endings, I didn't want the player to run into weird endings all the time. So, I made all the "short endings" a bit strange and obscure, with complicated and unintuitive requirements. Nobody will ever find all the secrets without help, mark my words -- there are still secrets in Starhall 2 and Legend of Grey Moon which nobody ever found...
Music is next! Then I need to bugtest the game, then release it, then have it stand as one of my crowning achievements, and finally put it behind me.
The game's development has taken up entire chapters of my life. I was in 3rd year of undergrad when I started, now I'm finishing up my PhD. I've had like 4 or 5 different relationships live and die in the time it has taken to write this damn game. Finishing it will be the biggest relief ever.
Awesome! So the Twain ending has now been changed to an Easter Egg? OK, I imagine there are other similar Easter Eggs in this game then. Also because RKS has already asked about a Sound Test, I'd like to ask if this game will have an unlockable Boss Rush mode?
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Awesome! So the Twain ending has now been changed to an Easter Egg? OK, I imagine there are other similar Easter Eggs in this game then. Also because RKS has already asked about a Sound Test, I'd like to ask if this game will have an unlockable Boss Rush mode?
Yep, there are definitely others...
I've played around with the idea of a boss rush -- while much of the game doesn't explicitly have bosses, there are de-facto "boss demons" in each area which would work nicely for the same purpose. I could also make up new demons to go between the existing ones (I have a few unused demon sprites and some ideas kicking around I never did anything with) and I could even make boss fights for characters that you never get to fight in the main game, which I think would be really cool.
If I make something like that, it'll be in an update post-release :3
Music is happening -- made a few already. I feel like, even though I'm kind of rushing it, and I'm a bit out of practice with FL Studio, I think the results are still a bit better than SS2's soundtrack. Some of SS2's songs were okay, but a lot of them ended up murky and confused and uninteresting.
So far, the music was inspired by An Untitled Story, a metroidvania from 2007 made by the legendary Maddy Thorson, where the music isn't very sophisticated, consisting mostly of little minimalistic loops, but still succeeds in being memorable and creating a good atmosphere, so I'm trying to do the same thing.
I might leave in some of the existing placeholder songs, although I'll probably move them around. Some of them work well where they are.
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Been making one song a day this week. I'll spend maybe an hour on each one.
So far, they've all been kind of slow and atmospheric. When I get around to making the battle music, I'll bring some more intensity.
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Up to 9 songs now, in addition to the ones I already had sitting around beforehand, which, I'm uncertain exactly how many I have. Will probably end up needing about 30 songs in total, so, won't be able to get it done by Friday unfortunately >_<
Still, it's all generally going well :3
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Made about 17 of them now :3
I feel like I started off quite strong, but some of the recent ones have been kind of samey and uninspired, all grim and threatening. That can be a good thing for battle themes, but I'm going to try to change it up and be a bit more cheerful for the remaining battle themes.
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Made about 17 of them now :3
I feel like I started off quite strong, but some of the recent ones have been kind of samey and uninspired, all grim and threatening. That can be a good thing for battle themes, but I'm going to try to change it up and be a bit more cheerful for the remaining battle themes.
I can understand the feeling, well kind of. I suppose these samey battle themes don't really fit the tone of the fights you're using them for? For my mod, some of the songs are created from sampling other songs to create a new track; suffice to say, I've been having difficulties trying to create a fitting battle theme but seem to have little problem with stage themes.
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More or less done with the music I guess! I have 33 in total -- 26 of them made in the past several weeks, and a few more left over from the demo which I've decided to keep.
Now I just need to bugtest the damn thing :D
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So we will get to listen to music from the demo...?
That sounds great...
Progress is awesome...
(Hugs a lot...)
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So we will get to listen to music from the demo...?
That sounds great...
Progress is awesome...
(Hugs a lot...)
Yep! *hugs back tight*
The first demo -- Phase One or 0.1.0 -- which contained only Poison's Lair and which I gave to like 2 people, didn't have any music at all.
The 0.2.0 demo, which included everything up to Backwoods, had random music stolen from various sources. I only gave that version to a few people as well.
The Phase Three demo contained everything up to Underpath. Because that version is public, I took out all the copyrighted music and replaced it with music I have the rights to -- SS2 music, random cover/remixes I made years ago which I had lying around, and a couple of original ones.
I decided that I would replace all the SS2 music (although there will be a couple of new versions of SS2 songs -- I made a new version of "FQ3", although I'm not particularly happy with it, and a really cool new version of "Destiny Defeated Dreams" which is going to be awesome), but would keep most of the rest of the music from 0.3.0.
It turned out that I didn't have enough music, and needed to make at least five more. Out of those five, I've already done three, bringing the total up to 36 out of 38. I hope to finish the other two tonight.
Coincidentally, 38 is one of the numbers with a special meaning in the Misery of Magic universe, so, that's a good number to have~
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All the music is in the project file now, and should work!
I've built a simple debug feature, where I can enter a 16-digit code, and the game will crack open a save file and overwrite a small piece of it with whatever number I like. Should be able to do a lot of cool bugtesting with that, but also very easily destroy my save files. Good thing I don't care about any of my save files >;3
Also gave the title screen a nice looking background.
(https://i.imgur.com/0WHswFK.jpg)
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Can now turn on fullscreen mode if you like!
I kinda forgot to add this until just now...
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Lot of progress tonight! Went from version 0.4.2 all the way to version 0.4.5.
-- Updated the credits.
-- Fixed bug where Ending 15 couldn't be triggered at all and you'd just get Ending 1 instead.
-- Fixed separate bug where the credits would scroll 8 times as fast as normal in Ending 15.
-- Fixed at least one cause of what I call the "antechamber bug", which is actually a string of related bugs where some properties of one area could sometimes carry over into a different one. This is like the third time I've had to squash this thing, wouldn't be surprised if there were yet another version of it out there.
-- Fixed bug where entering the room where Ending 7 happens would crash the game.
-- Made the Ending 7 object's "softspeaker" into a generic "speaker" and made it visible -- I've mostly phased out "softspeakers" because they're a nuisance and if I make them visible they break.
-- Fixed two minor bugs relating to a minor character -- one associated with having more subimages than strictly necessary, another associated with having more than 16 textboxes.
-- Completion percentage of a save file now updates immediately when the file is saved over -- it would only previously update after going to the title screen, because for whatever reason the percentage was being written to the file immediately after being calculated without being stored internally in the proper place, so it wouldn't be visible in the game until it been read from the savefile at a later point.
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Version 0.4.6 changelog:
-- Fixed minor text-related oversight with the yellow box the Toxicity Star comes in.
-- Fixed a very serious "roomflag" crash in Backwoods which somehow went undetected since 2017. There was one room where I just flat out forgot to make the walls solid... -_-
-- Fixed a minor graphical glitch which affected both the eyes thing and Hunter in one of his appearances. I think this happened because I changed the behaviour of generic "interactables" slightly at some point which caused certain complex objects with unique sprite-drawing behaviour to subtly break.
-- Subtle change to a certain thing happening in Backwoods -- now it always happens. Previously it was tied to a weird feature I got rid of years ago but which still affects a few unimportant things in the first half of the game.
-- Made Demon 21 a bit easier. Previously, its core had a bit too much regeneration and it was kind of a difficulty spike.
-- Removed an old debug feature which automatically turns off the sound by default every time the game starts up. This was initially added because, before the music was added, the game would crash if it tried to play music in areas where no music had been specified.
-- Fixed "Uneventer" bug where random encounters could appear in areas where they weren't supposed to. Some "Antechamber" bugs could also cause that to happen, but this is something else entirely. Several disparate methods are used to suppress random encounters and they're used kind of haphazardly.
-- Fixed a really nasty bug where puzzles with push blocks or moving walls could ruin save files, by causing you to load a game directly inside a block or otherwise to a state where the puzzle is inescapable. Now, the game checks for the presence of a number of specific badly behaved objects when saving, and if any are found, it will instead save the game at whatever coordinates you entered the room at, which are assumed to always be safe, rather than your actual coordinates.
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Version 0.4.7:
-- Fixed bug where the game would crash in room (23,5) which is somewhere in Remnant. I'm pretty sure that never used to happen, maybe I changed something at some point.
-- Demon 38 now targets you accurately, instead of a point approximately 14 pixels right and 16 pixels down from where you are.
-- Demon 45 no longer jumps a short distance whenever it regenerates from its core.
-- Fixed one of the "autospeakers" in Awakening, which had some glitchy text due to "autospeakers" erroneously borrowing too much code from generic "speakers".
-- Fixed an oversight where the Upsilon Carinae's box in Sorrow Peak wouldn't appear and a bug where the box would instead contain Throw Sparkles for whatever reason.
-- There was also another box which displayed the wrong subimage in the message that appears when opening it, but that was purely graphical.
-- Fixed the "interactables" graphical glitch from yesterday in a more general sense: the code which was causing it (which shouldn't have been running at all, I am perplexed) now belongs to only "speakers" rather than the even more generic "interactables", so it can't screw up complex and unique forms of "interactable".
-- Fixed bug where cats menu would display broken if there were exactly two characters in the party.
-- Moved the sub-menu which displays descriptions of weapons 107 pixels to the right, so the descriptions no longer go off the screen.
-- Removed bogus extra copy of Emerald from some room.
-- Fixed Ending 17 -- it had some very similar bugs to what Ending 15 used to have for whatever reason.
-- Gave the Needle its own sound effect. (The Heat Needle gets one too).
-- Fixed bug where one of the Sorrow Peak puzzles would sometimes be already solved before you got to it. I think this might've happened due to me accidentally re-using its event flag elsewhere in the game -- I forgot which event flags I use for what purposes many years ago.
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Aurora's literally nightly version, number 0.4.8:
-- Re-fixed "interactable" draw bug because the previous fix re-broke some other things. If I weren't right at the end of the project, I'd reorganise my hierarchy of technical objects to fix it comprehensively, but instead I just slapped a bandaid on it, yay.
-- Fixed Steelman dialogue.
-- Random encounters can no longer rarely happen on Floor 4 of Fire Hole. This was due to a moderate-severity form of antechamber bug.
-- Fixed the flying pyramid in ending 12, then decided to add it back in as an easter egg because it's hilarious.
-- Fixed bug where knockback calculations would use an incorrect centre of most sprites.
-- Can no longer warp from the end of Fire Hole directly to the middle of Energy Centre (!!?!?!?!??)
-- Endings 3 through 5 no longer crash at the end.
-- Buffed charge speed of the Upsilon Carinae and its broken white version.
-- Demon 72's head now has a larger hitbox -- previously, it was so small that it would enjoy hanging out in the margin between the edge of the screen and the barrier just beyond it which stops demons from going offscreen.
-- Can no longer simply walk past the penultimate boss. Like, wow.
-- Buffed said penultimate boss slightly, by making him heavier. Was way too easy to throw around and heavily stun with strong late-game weapons.
-- FINALLY fixed the bug where Breeze occasionally displays as a white block in certain menus. This had me stumped for ages but turned out to be something really obvious >_<
-- Picking up the Nuclear Blaze no longer causes the small puzzles in North Edge to disappear. Taking the Nuclear Blaze was supposed to get rid of the colour fences which make up the Radioactive Hall puzzle so you can just walk out after grabbing it, but it turned out it was getting rid of all the colour fences in the entire game.
-- Fixed some of the text in Breeze's epilogue area.
-- Fixed bug where Nuclear Blaze's weak initial hit would deal red damage instead of yellow damage.
-- Fixed a few minor menu bugs associated with the endgame sequence.
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To do for 0.4.9:
-- A certain weapon breaks when given to Max because I didn't think anybody would ever decide to do that. Will need to come up with something to fill the gap.
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Done for 0.4.9:
-- Made that one weapon work for Max like I mentioned. It has a different effect for each character, which is why it broke. Like the other Max-exclusive attacks, the new version works on the End Tools, and is in fact very effective against them...
-- Also generally buffed that weapon's damage by a significant amount but made one of its limitations a bit harsher.
-- Fixed an assortment of bugs related to some of the remaining endings.
-- Fixed bug where trying to open the menu during certain epilogue rooms would cause the game to softlock.
-- Slowed down the extra part of the credits which appears in the good endings.
To do for 0.4.10:
-- Rebalance all the music so different songs don't wildly vary in volume quite as much.
-- Test endings 13 and 16, which are the only ones which haven't been tested yet. Both of them have secret requirements.
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Been doing this all morning, I'm really tired, here's 0.4.10:
-- Rebalanced the audio somewhat, kinda.
-- Bugtested endings 13 and 16.
-- Reduced Fire Hole encounter rate from 4.0 to 3.4.
-- Fixed bug where Meteom would deal yellow damage.
-- Added a decoration to Bad Space.
-- Even more re-fixes for the interactable draw bug thing which I'm sick of dealing with by now.
-- Added a feature where, if demons revive from a core too many times, they will eventually just die outright, to prevent them from ever getting stuck in an unreachable place and becoming impossible to kill.
-- Fixed bug where demons 72 and 73 would sometimes absorb projectile-based attacks without being affected at all.
-- Buffed Nuclear Blaze.
-- Added extra regenerators to Sorrow Peak, Backwoods and Underpath.
-- Being unawakened no longer skips the bosses in Energy Centre. This is a relic of the idea that solo unawakened Emerald would turn evil and have a different endgame, but that idea was instead made into one of the endings.
-- Fixed a really bizarre crash in Luminous Cenotaph -- there was a small chance whenever a room in there was loaded that the game would get stuck in a non-terminating loop for some reason. (There was a run-of-the-mill roomflag crash in there as well as the weird crash)
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Because of how completion percentage is calculated, 105% completion is possible... o_o
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Because of how completion percentage is calculated, 105% completion is possible... o_o
That reminds me of how Donkey Kong Country 3 allows you to get 105% completion. I wonder what you'll do with Misery of Magic's 105% completion?
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Some other games also have over 100% completion... whether intentional or not...
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That reminds me of how Donkey Kong Country 3 allows you to get 105% completion. I wonder what you'll do with Misery of Magic's 105% completion?
As a kind of last-minute addition, I might make a little award for that and a few other things, which is stored in the extra data file and appears in the title screen, kind of like the stars from SS1.
Some other games also have over 100% completion... whether intentional or not...
It arose, basically, because there are a heap of rooms which technically count towards completion but which weren't accounted for in the calculation, and that, under certain conditions, it's possible to get one more weapon than the usual maximum, which also counts towards completion.
For 0.4.11, all I did was fix some of the stuff associated with ending 7 -- for whatever reason it was handling textboxes in a completely different way to everything else.
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Fixed bug where some stuff could occasionally already be complete before you got to it. My fear was that this was some sort of savefile corruption caused by something screwing up when a file is saved or loaded. However, if that were the case, I'd expect it to cause creeping, progressive weirdness affecting the entire game, whereas all the damage was mysteriously confined to Sorrow Peak.
As it so happens, some of the flags used in Radioactive Hall were being inadvertently reused for various things in Sorrow Peak.
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Fixed a rather rare bug where, due to an oversight, if you had two characters but one of them was at 0HP, there was a possibility that Demon 66E could become unkillable.
This is a demon which only appears in about 11% of random encounters in Fire Hole, so, I'm surprised I even ran into this bug.
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Release candidate changelog -- 0.4.12 --> 0.4.13 --> 1.0.0
-- Added a bit of lore to North Edge.
-- Rearranged a few rooms of Backwoods, to add a normal room between the Water Room and the Frustrating Maze Room.
-- Fixed yet another iteration of the interactable draw bug.
-- Fixed bug where game would crash if a safe file is ever empty. I never noticed this until now because there's no way to delete old savefiles, only overwrite them.
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1.0.2 changelog:
-- Copied the "overflow charge" feature from Fire Boom onto both Needles, to make them a bit comfier to use. Basically, now you can hold down the mouse to keep firing it. Not really important but I wanted to do it.
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Oh hey this is finished! *glomps*
That's great, congrats! :3
I'll be sure to try it out... whenever my smartphone can get data again, haha... ^^;;;
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Oh hey this is finished! *glomps*
That's great, congrats! :3
I'll be sure to try it out... whenever my smartphone can get data again, haha... ^^;;;
Yep! Finally done! *attempts to dodge and counter-glomp, but falls over instead*
Sounds good :D
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Wiki is up to 68 pages now -- just today, I added the pages for the End Tools, Arcazya Infinity and Sorrow Peak.
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1.0.3:
-- Max's "small" HP bar that appears under him during combat now has a unique appearance -- previously he used the same one as white demons for whatever reason.
-- Fixed bug where End Ankh could not deal damage at all.
-- Fixed bug where the End Ankh's "light/darkness" bar would continue to be visible while the player character is dead.