What's up, RMers?

[kyonides]

Do you remember the day we all thought RPG Maker Unite was dead?
Well,  we were wrong! It can be found on Epic Games store as of now!  
At the end of the official website there are several places where you can either buy it or purchase additional contents.

[DerVVulfman]

Yeah. Its also part of the "RPGMaker Beyond Expectations" Humble Bundle Package with about a dozen other properties... at least half of which by Gotcha Gotcha Games (of Kadokawa Co.) who were ALSO the producers of RM Unite itself. And they advertise the 'retail' price for a number of properties that often sell for next-to-nothing on Steam. Pixel Game Maker MV which is part of the package is presented as a $90 property, but sells for $15-$20 on average.

No wonder they're called GOTCHA Gotcha Games.

I mean, don't get me wrong. Humble Bundle is for Charity... and that is a noble thing. But GGG 'created' a bundle with some dregs.

[Remi-chan]

Good news, everyone! Recently I had a spurt of productivity, so i was able to get Pep and the second phase of his fight finished, even down to the cutscenes!

Bad news, everyone! I do not yet have a video fully presenting this, so that will have to come later. But for now, I urge you to enjoy these screenshots!

Oh, not to worry about that- though! For it hasn't only been me! You can also find the cutscenes over in my cinematic thread!

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Xiie or Rune as you may know her, finished the sprite for Lilith recently after a medical hurdle, thus the delay! Xiie is now working on Amberina's sprite. For now though, here's the finished Lilith!

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CoyoteCraft

Thanks to this madlad Svoli now has her up to date attire with her crazy apotropaic form!

[DerVVulfman]

Well, I got done with the bras.  But you can't have underwear without having the bottoms...

Again, using Venetia hair, modified for the HKBP

OR, to suggest they are swimsuit wear if you want to look at the girl above as a California Beach Bunny.

The shading isn't perfect, currently just working on the shape of the briefs/panties. However, they animate quite fine and look fabulous. Right now, my focus is that for female battlers that are left-handed. And I'm just shy of 50% done with the left-handed poses.  Sadly, action/attack poses takes longer than idle poses.  But I'm on a good clip.

[Remi-chan]

So, I been at the development again! As promised: here is the full fight and scene i teased in my post above~

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The Fell Genesis

Not many fights and scenes will be getting this much attention, this one in particular demanded some updates, though. So that is what it got!

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Koko's fight mostly got some tweaks, her healthbar is no longer the size of an ameoba and she does some actual attacks.

Next up is the fight with the Schismatic of Moscow. I will likely do a video for her two-phase badassery as well. I've already concocted the epic battle introduction, which you can see in my cinematic thread.

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For now, here's a screenshot~

JUST. KIDDING! I haven't begun working on the re-coding of that fight just yet. it is next on the to-do, though!

[DerVVulfman]

The Beach Bunny Bikini Bash continues.... And I gave her a bit of a tan.

Again, using Venetia hair, modified for the HKBP

I not only worked on the right-handed female briefs/bottoms, but finished em.  Given nearly fifty animation poses with 4 frames each for left-handed females and the same for right-handed females, that means I worked on nearly FOUR HUNDRED frames of animation combined the past two weeks.

The undies for guys, both lefties and righties is next.

[DerVVulfman]

Shoot! I almost forgot about old Baldy here!

The briefs for the left-handed male template is done. In fact, I already began working on the righty-tighties now.

[Remi-chan]

Amberina's sprite has yet to be delivered and Pjcr has been absent for a good while so I dunno what's goin' on there. But the good news is that I have been getting some hectic work done.

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The Schismatic of Moscow

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I regret almost nothing about how well this fight plays, especially now with the updated controls. While it's fairly much identical to the original otherwise, there are some small changes.

1. The 'fall off the edge' mechanic is gone, and I will be removing it in any other fights it is in as well (it's only one of them lmfao) as it's a dopey mechanic and inconsistent with the arenas we fight on.

2. Obviously, the battle introduction cinematic is new.

As for the things I regret and probably will fix in the future, the first is that when Lumi calls out the DENUI for acting bad, 'these' is misspelled. The second is that the spear prisons are a little difficult to read / understand in the heat of things. The third is that Svoli's hurt sound effects are playing consistently, which i need to make less common. That's easy to do, as all that needs to be done is increase the higher number on the variable which is run that is then checked via conditional to see what plays.

I've also made some quality of life changes and fixes to the combat that this boss fight made obvious while testing.

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How to make epic bullet hell combat even better??

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First thing I've done is update Sacreblu's skedaddle mechanic. Previously it would teleport her to a given point in the room which was passable, the problem with this method is in the need for modularity between different battle arenas and it also being just as likely to land you in trouble as get you out of it. So now instead of picking a random valid tile, it instead picks one of eight directions, sends Sacreblu in any one of them and then has her re-appear, this still gives off the idea of it being a teleport, but with far less potentially worrisome behavior and it will be much harder to break the game or get out of bounds. The added bonus is i don't now have to create fifty conditionals for each battle arena map Sacreblu could be in to set specific potential coordinates.

I also fixed a bug where after Lumi, Koko and Lilac had been exhausted, Sacreblu would come to the forefront even if Lumi or Koko had recovered. This is not supposed to happen as Sacreblu is supposed to be a final lifeline.

A change worthy of note coming in this build is that Disk 2 and forwards, Sacreblu will operate identical to all other party members and becomes one of the Angels of Hope full time. Originally this wasn't going to happen until sometime into Disk 3, but it seems against Sacreblu's ideals to just keep being such a second-wind when she can be more. She'd also have motivation to keep closer to the Angels of Hope after the events which transpire at the close of Disk One.

Sacreblu will also no longer shit out a cloud of orbs and her attacks will function similarly to those the other angels of hope use. While the AOE capability had its uses, with mouse aim its largely become redundant and with some exceptions, most bosses are single foe encounters anyway. It also drastically lowered the reach on her attacks which won't be ideal for various fights going forward.

So for the most part, the attacks have become homogenized across the board, however the skedaddles still remain largely unique. With Lumi being the simple five-step forward (Her aesthetic is one who leaps forward to meet with the future), Koko the more tricky five-step back (She's intimidated by the future), Lilac being the corner crawler by going 3 steps forward and then 2 steps to her left or right (she's sort of like a knight in chess), and now with Sacreblu going five steps in one of eight directions (basically like the queen in chess).

I also want to tone down the size and spectacle of the animations and visuals a little for sake of player's ability to read the fight. Koko's books and Lilac's bats are especially notorious for creating a lot of visual bloat.

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The invisible optimizations that make my life fifty times fucking easier.

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Having all of this now set in common events rather than events on map makes it so much easier to universally alter the battle system. Let me show you just how much less events clutter up a map with a huge amount of them now being no longer needed.

You see here a map back when I had all the battle events tied to it.

But now is different.

Here, you will see that several events are no longer there, now granted the arena area also appears trimmer due to getting rid of the 'over the edge' mechanic events.

So now all we have is the events unique to an encounter, don't even need a BossHUD manager anymore because I have tech that does that for me, it just has to be initialized when combat starts.

This optimization has the added bonus of meaning I don't have to copy paste every mechanical update I make to over 50 different maps. The game editor has ab tendency to crash from constant map load especially given just how massive the project is, so this will be better for everything even if the player would never have had a clue if i wasn't transparent about my development process as I am.

You might have noticed that the health bar counters / multiple bars are gone. It's all just one uniform bar now, and I can easily set the max HP, current HP and run a HUD based on those. I can even have a boss start at a smaller amount of HP than their maximum, which can be handy for certain phase transitions. Svoli has 3000 health in total, 1,000 in her first phase, and 2000 in her second. I could easily make that more or less and you wouldn't be able to tell outside of how quickly the bar was able to be chipped away at. A good example of this is in a video i posted earlier with the insidious architect's boss fight, who has 4,000 HP, and the players is doing around 5-8 damage at most, making her appear VERY TANKY and like this is a fight you aren't supposed to be able to beat. Essentially you have to do 4 damage for her health-bar to drop a single pixel of width.

Yes, this tech is very useful and will make endgame fights where a boss having 10,000+ HP is much easier to manage. The healthbar counter system had its own line of issues such as wasted damage if you were very geared, as only 1000 could be given per counter, so if you did say 480 damage three times, your final hit was only doing 40 damage because the switch to the next healthbar refreshed and hard-capped the damage output back to zero after it exceeded the 1000 limit.

Granted, it's unlikely you'll be able to do that much damage anymore.

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Nerfs to all Trait Charms and acquisition of the power stats.

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Damage scaling was a bit too busted when you got good gear, and I didn't want to alter the overall system that calculated damage, so the easiest solution was simply to more or less half all potential forms of the raw power stats. These are Justice (Lumi), Fear (Koko), Pride Lilac) and Love (Sacreblu). Potency (the multiplier for these which is then turned into the final result of damage) is unchanged. Keeping in mind while this was less work than an overhaul of a system that works fine, it was still a fair bit of work. I had to more or less update every item informational in a PSD, save it out as a PNG and implement it. This was easily over fifty assets that had to be updated.

As for what the stats will look like, well here's the charts! There's 10 tiers of charms. The order used to go like so.

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Tier 01: Power Stat +1
Tier 02: Power Stat +3
Tier 03: Power Stat +5
Tier 04: Power Stat +10
Tier 05: Power Stat +15
Tier 06: Power Stat +20
Tier 07: Power Stat +25
Tier 08: Power Stat +30
Tier 09: Power Stat +40
Tier 10: Power Stat +50

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Now it's this.

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Tier 01: Power Stat +1
Tier 02: Power Stat +2
Tier 03: Power Stat +3
Tier 04: Power Stat +4
Tier 05: Power Stat +5
Tier 06: Power Stat +7
Tier 07: Power Stat +10
Tier 08: Power Stat +15
Tier 09: Power Stat +20
Tier 10: Power Stat +25

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Tier 10 is the children of calamity exclusive Charms, only one of which is presently obtainable, as the other three superbosses aren't coming until Disk 3.

All delicacies have also gone from giving +10 to a power stat to +5. For a total of +20 instead of +40 when you've gathered all four for a certain character. In addition, most Ribbons that uniquely gave a bonus to power stats no longer do that.

The reason for these nerfs to damage was that it made it far too easy to trivialize encounters and I had started designing main story boss fights based on the expectation you would be geared as I am when you get up to them, which not all people will be. But then if i base them on the leats possible gear they felt too trivial at better gear tiers. The height between floor and ceiling was too far where gear was concerned, simply put.

Don't get the wrong idea, you will still feel like it is a huge upgrade when you claim a power stat item. Your number will increase and you'll feel that difference. it just won't be as bipolar as it was before where balance was starting to become a matter of gear rather than player skill.

Well, I think that's enough blithering for me for one day! I didn't have time to get this in for the weekly gazette, as making the video presentation was something I didn't allot enough time for. So, it can be showcased next week~