Dude. Excellent feedback.
First, a question - how do you see the Dev Console in a webplayer build? When I build a PC/Mac/Linux version of the game, there’s a popup in the bottom that appears; I’ve not seen that in my webplayers, ever. Is it the F12 console that those messages are appearing in? This could be useful for me later on (even though I’m hoping it won’t be, I know otherwise. I’ve done software for too long.)
Yeah, the “Holy Shield” thing was based on vague memories of the Paladin moveset in WoW…at least I think it was Holy Shield that caused you to fling your shield a good distance. Either way, the name of the move sucks, you’re right. I was thinking something like “Shield Bash” or “Bash” or something. What sounds like a good name for Sara’s last-ditch attack to you? And, do you think it’s necessary that she even has one?
The way I’ve got Sara (the character) planned, shielding things to death is a valid, and designed-for strategy. Two of her moves that I’ve got working, but that you can’t see, are Restorum, a party-wide heal, and Thornguard, which gives temporary HP and guarantees a counterattack for 10 seconds. I might move Restorum onto another character later, though - I really want Sara to be a tanky mage who enables the party to shield things to death in interesting ways. Unlike some other characters who are far less subtle.
As for the freeze thing, I’m going to be posting in Scripting soon. I’m having issues getting a proper fade-out to work. It’s especially bad from the Cave to the World Map; see, the World Map has a metric crapton of UV skinned cubes that get combined in the Start event into a single, huge mesh that all uses the same material/texture. On my mid-range machine, I’ve noticed a significant load time that I’m not entirely sure I can do something about. So…that’s a thing, too.
I’m glad you like the direction my work is heading in, though. I love old-school JRPGs - they’re the reason I got into game development in the first place. My first three crappy projects are finally starting to pay off! This isn’t quite the uber-awesome project I originally wanted to make all those years ago, but I’m finally seeing how I’m going to be able to reach that lofty goal. I’ll post again in a couple of weeks with fixes to the stuff you said. I know that Aiursrage2k wants diagonal movement as well, so I’m probably being an antiquity-fart about that one. (Back when I was young, we didn’t have diagonal movement; if you wanted to get to a tile at an angle to you, you had to press two different buttons!…and we liked it! In fact, I still do, but the point remains not everyone does.)
More great feedback!
The screenshot you gave is going to have a larger house there at some point; I intend for the Inn to go there. That said, I think you’re right, the walls are too tall. I can slice a layer of bricks off and lower those, and add some things that prevent the player from getting hidden.
As for the Z-Buffering issues, that’s a tougher problem. Back in the sidescrolling version, the problem used to be worse, until I forced anisotropic filtering on, even on the lowest qualities. I’m not really sure how to fix it, either. See, most of the game world (world map, caves, town, etc.) are created by a bunch of UV skinned cubes that, as noted above, get fused into a single massive mesh at runtime with a common texture (thus, there’s super-mesh for sand, a super-mesh for dirt with grass on top, etc.) It’s getting away from design and into implementation, so I’ll chill for now and figure out how to ask this question later…but I’m interested in how I’d go about getting rid of those visible seams at distance from the camera.
The other things, though, I can easily solve. I’ll increase the Cave Slime ATB speed so it actually gets a turn in. I’ll add collision cells to the parts of the World Map I’ve got, so that some water causing you to plummet to your death and some water being walkable is no longer a thing.
