Castle Paradox

msw188 · Joined: 02 Jul 2003 Posts: 1041

Okay, just announcing that I've finally gotten around to updating Hero's Journey. I said it'd be up about a week ago, but my computer was at a friend's house and I didn't get a chance to get it back till yesterday, and I hooked it up today. Anyway, here's a list of new features, if anyone's interested:

*Gameplay extension - somewhere between one and two hours added
*Pallete changes - the white sprite outlines have been removed and replaced with darker shades of the sprites clothing, etc.
*New Song - a new song has been added for enemy towns/castles
*Text reworking - a good deal of text has been added in Part 1 and the beginning of Part 2 for townsfolk
*Stat updates - all characters have increased speed, and Ma and Mo gain more defense
*Main Hero can be renamed at the beginning of Part 6
*Elemental change - all enemies who absorb an element are now also strong against it; trying to think of a good way to balance the heroes' elemental bitsets...
*Enemies unescapable - all enemies are now unescapable; see next
*Escape Ball - added an item that allows the player to escape enemy dungeons; together with the windball, this should balance out the new enemy inescapability
*More stuff - some more attacks, items, enemies, etc.
*Updated HJ_0gmD.txt - simple stuff, added the new spells, etc.

IMPORTANT: To anyone playing the game (I'm especially thinking of Iblis here, whose promising me a review), you will have to email me at msw188@psuNOSPAM.edu without the caps. I will need your .sav file, because of some of the changes made to the game. I'll fix your .sav file and then email it back to you. Thanks to anyone who has played!

Iblis · Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2003 11:52 am Post subject:

msw188 · Joined: 02 Jul 2003 Posts: 1041

Yeah, I had a post a while ago asking what anyone thought about all inescapable (is it in- or un-?), and nobody said anything so I decided to try it. The problem is that right now there is no real penalty for running; it never takes long enough so that you risk getting hurt. So theoretically a player could get through a whole dungeon without fighting a battle, but for the boss. This to me is unacceptable. A dungeon for me should be a test of stamina and, to some extent, patience. On the other hand, if a party is severely injured, it should not be tough to get away and back to town, etc. That is why I made the escape ball, which together with the wind ball can get a player back to their save point without risking death.
Still, perhaps you're right. Maybe it would be better to have just some random battles inescapable? Or maybe I should lessen the random encounter rate? Or is all this just stupid and all enemies should be escapable again? If people let me know, I could do a quick fix and re-update within a day or three.

Camdog · Joined: 08 Aug 2003 Posts: 606

I agree with msw, I hate it when dungeons are turned into an exercise in holding down the esc key. Dungeons should require planning and strategy; that's what makes them fun to play. Otherwise, the only difficulty is the boss and everything else is boring and not suspenseful at all.

The escape ball sounds like a good comprimise. If you're going to make every battle unescapable, however, I'd make them few and far between, otherwise a death at the end would force the player to do everything over again and turn a challenging dungeon into a frustrating one. Another good comprimise, as you said, would be to make only some battle unescapable. Either way, just remember to not force the player to fight too much, or you're just going to piss them off.

Iblis · Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2003 11:34 pm Post subject:

I agree that in the OHR battles are way too easy to run away from. However, in this particular game if one goes through a dungeon just running away all the time the boss is gonna kill them with no problem. You need to fight the battles or you die.
_________________
Locked
OHR Piano

msw188 · Joined: 02 Jul 2003 Posts: 1041

Does anyone know for sure what "fight formation (x)" returns if you run away? If it returns false, this could be a good way to make some random escapes fail. If it returns true, just as if you had run the battle, then I think maybe I'll ask James if it possible to have a function that returns different values depending on whether you actually defeated the enemies, or just ran away.
Then again, the sequence would look dumb, and enemy stats would be refilled. Maybe there's a better way. I guess I could just make two of every kind of enemy, maybe taking care to keep escapable/inescapable formations related by some constant factor, but that's gonna be kinda tedious, and it seems like a bad way to use up lots of enemy formations.

msw188 · Joined: 02 Jul 2003 Posts: 1041

That's a good point (battles need to be fought to be able to beat the boss), but I'd still like to make running away a bad idea in some more immediate way. I think I'm gonna end up making the two copies of every formation deal...

Me · Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2003 12:02 am Post subject:

fight formation(?) returns 1 (true) if you defeated the enemies and 0 (false) if you ran or were defeated. To check if you were defeated or ran, you could check you characters' HPs.
_________________
UP DOWN UP DOWN LEFT LEFT RIGHT RIGHT A B START

TMC · Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2003 12:09 pm Post subject:

I won't make 2 copies of everything if I were you. Just make faster enemies inescapable, and slower ones not.
_________________
"It is so great it is insanely great."

msw188 · Joined: 02 Jul 2003 Posts: 1041

Okay, I finally sat down and updated my game again; all I did was to make certain enemies escapable again, though not all. However, I didn't get any real chance to playtest this to see if it makes much difference, so hopefully I'll get some kind of feedback. If you have already sent me your .sav file for the original september update, then you don't need to send it again, but if you haven't, I will still need to fix it.