Final act beta! SOTW 1.0

[Troyen]

More description bugs:

The scroll of haste for mages says it increases speed by 50%. The tooltip for the actual buff icon says it was increased by 60%. One of these is wrong!

Same thing for the Potion of Minor Haste. Description says 30%, tooltip says 20%.

[Troyen]

Haste buffs override one another. If I use a Potion of Minor Haste and follow up with a Scroll of Haste, my target gets six turns at 60%. Or vice-versa if I mess up the order.

[jack1974]

Using Heavy Explosive Bomb on Deceit seems to be bugged. It's not applying the bleed like the description and the combat log says:

Yes the bleeding was removed in some update time ago (lost count!) because earlier was too powerful. It doesn't work on bosses only, so it shouldn't display that in the log since is a bit confusing

Haste buffs override one another. If I use a Potion of Minor Haste and follow up with a Scroll of Haste, my target gets six turns at 60%. Or vice-versa if I mess up the order.

Yes this is "normal", is how the engine works. For example even the bleeding are slightly different but when you do one, it extends the turns but applies the last casted one (its values).

[Troyen]

Using Heavy Explosive Bomb on Deceit seems to be bugged. It's not applying the bleed like the description and the combat log says:

Yes the bleeding was removed in some update time ago (lost count!) because earlier was too powerful. It doesn't work on bosses only, so it shouldn't display that in the log since is a bit confusing

Can you change the bomb item descriptions to say "Does 75 HP of damage to a single target in the front row and inflicts bleeding to non-boss enemies."?

Haste buffs override one another. If I use a Potion of Minor Haste and follow up with a Scroll of Haste, my target gets six turns at 60%. Or vice-versa if I mess up the order.

Yes this is "normal", is how the engine works. For example even the bleeding are slightly different but when you do one, it extends the turns but applies the last casted one (its values).

I remember bleeding did this, but it seems open to abuse for haste potions as a cheap way to get 6 turns of super haste instead of 3. Well, then again, the bosses you really need it against all have mass dispel, so maybe not.

(An alternative would be to have actual separate haste buffs, but only apply the one that provided the greatest effect. So I could have 1 turn of Haste 60% and 3 turns of Haste 20% and my haste bonus is 60% the first turn and 20% the next two. That's what the recent changes to the WoW buff engine have done. But explaining this in-game might be confusing.)

Also, please fix the descriptions or tooltips so I know whether the weak haste is 20 or 30 and the scroll of haste 50 or 60.

[jack1974]

Can you change the bomb item descriptions to say "Does 75 HP of damage to a single target in the front row and inflicts bleeding to non-boss enemies."?

Yes will do that indeed!

(An alternative would be to have actual separate haste buffs, but only apply the one that provided the greatest effect. So I could have 1 turn of Haste 60% and 3 turns of Haste 20% and my haste bonus is 60% the first turn and 20% the next two. That's what the recent changes to the WoW buff engine have done. But explaining this in-game might be confusing.)

Also, please fix the descriptions or tooltips so I know whether the weak haste is 20 or 30 and the scroll of haste 50 or 60.

Yes right now I can't change this, because having separate buffs and using only the most powerful would mean a lot of changes that I don't want to do now to the game. Will fix the descriptions though

[jack1974]

I am uploading right now 0.9.8 which will have this "hidden menu" where you can adjust the fights. You have several options, each one increases attack and speed, and decrease HP. Speed too, because a problem I've noticed in many battles is that if your party is faster, and the enemies have less HP, you can hit them first and reduce their HP by a good amount, so even reducing the HP can backfire (another case of battles turning too easy).
Of course as said elsewhere, because I'd like the game to be out next month, I cannot do BIG changes now. But leaving an optional menu, yes sure Also, if you followed me with Loren, I made several updates even after the game was out. So if enough people test the game with the "tweak-menu" and can beat it, I'm willing to implement the tweaks.

In practice I'm letting people try the game at different tweaks and give me feedback. That's all I can do right now. I've lowered the HP and increased attack a bit overall in NM, but minor change. With the menu you can even increase attack by 30%, speed by 15% and reduce HP by 30%. But that can lead to fun results

I think a problem of this combat system is also the turn order, since the initial speed / movement order can have devastating effects:
turn 1 - Jariel moves, casts Lullaby slowing down all enemies
turn 2 - because of 1, I can use Hunter and Take Aim
turn 3 - Vaelis can use Rally increasing attack power
turn 4 - Chalassa's No chances does frontrow damage
turn 5 - Rowinda does backrow damage
etc etc etc. so by turn 6 you could have almost destroyed the opponent party, even if they got time to act, the battle is definitely in your favor. I am not sure honestly what could be changed though. I don't think with this system that EACH battle should be hard, since in many quests you have to fight several battles in sequence, so is also about "endurance" (yes you won the 1st, but how is your party going to be in the 7th fight?).

It was a design choice of not having the party regain full HP/SP after each fight (like in most fights of Loren), but I didn't expect to have such consequences. Anyway at least the boss battles seems tough enough and in general people seems to have fun with the game, so that's something

[jack1974]

OK I've added the new build. In general, Easy is OK. Normal I think is OK too, because it's just above Easy. So I don't think I'll touch those levels. If people find the game too easy on normal they should just move to Hard/Nightmare
I'm looking for feedback in those two difficulties in particular if you try to tweak the fights with the new menu. The main goal is not much to change the difficulty since I think is fine, but shorten the battle times, while still providing a good challenge. Thanks

[fabulaparva]

Nice new BG!

Spoiler:

love the flatlined doll on the ground

Loretexts for the new items work, also new loretexts for the twinStaff and twinShield, but the following rewards still have the old placeholders: twinSword, BleedingHEart and Will'o'wisp.

Also, I had one random save loading crash, but now I can't find the save that caused it (I was trying to find a save where the shops would reload and the twin get their items, so I moved around a lot, this was just one crash upon loading tens of other saves, as I was trying to find the right ones ) as I have " a few saves" over 500 at this point. If I'll run into that again, I'll send the save to you.

That's the tracback, anyway.

Spoiler:

I'm sorry, but an uncaught exception occurred.

While running game code:
File "game/plot/map.rpy", line 1341, in script call
File "renpy/common/00start.rpy", line 67, in script
label _after_load:
File "renpy/common/000window.rpy", line 76, in _window_auto_callback
if not store._window_auto:
NameError: global name 'store' is not defined

-- Full Traceback ------------------------------------------------------------

Full traceback:
File "D:\Games\SOTW-0.9.8.1-all\SOTW-0.9.8.1-all\renpy\bootstrap.py", line 289, in bootstrap
renpy.main.main()
File "D:\Games\SOTW-0.9.8.1-all\SOTW-0.9.8.1-all\renpy\main.py", line 357, in main
run(restart)
File "D:\Games\SOTW-0.9.8.1-all\SOTW-0.9.8.1-all\renpy\main.py", line 77, in run
renpy.execution.run_context(True)
File "D:\Games\SOTW-0.9.8.1-all\SOTW-0.9.8.1-all\renpy\execution.py", line 598, in run_context
context.run()
File "game/plot/map.rpy", line 1341, in script call
File "renpy/common/00start.rpy", line 67, in script
label _after_load:
File "D:\Games\SOTW-0.9.8.1-all\SOTW-0.9.8.1-all\renpy\ast.py", line 728, in execute
statement_name("label")
File "D:\Games\SOTW-0.9.8.1-all\SOTW-0.9.8.1-all\renpy\ast.py", line 41, in statement_name
i(name)
File "renpy/common/000window.rpy", line 76, in _window_auto_callback
if not store._window_auto:
NameError: global name 'store' is not defined

Windows-7-6.1.7601-SP1
Ren'Py 6.18.3.761
Seasons Of The Wolf 0.9.8

Long ago there was the minor glitch of a sticky tooltip that remained on the screen. This actually happens everytime if you have your mouse over a buff or debuff in a fight, and if at that time there's an interruption to the fight (eg fight ends into a cutscene (Rowinda case) or Chalassa goes into or out of fight. In most cases the situation corrects itself and the tooltip will clear from the screen after the following "conclusion" fight to whatever interrupted it. In the case of Rowinda, that tooltip got stuck, because the exit is not immediately followed by the rest of the fight. Typing this just FYI, clearly not a big problem.

Haven't touched the difficulty tweak yet. I'll probably get to that closer to the weekend.

[jack1974]

Loretexts for the new items work, also new loretexts for the twinStaff and twinShield, but the following rewards still have the old placeholders: twinSword, BleedingHEart and Will'o'wisp.

Ah and you had them in the file you sent? I probably forgot to copy it
The crash save might be because you loaded several times, it's a Renpy bug anyway, but is weird since store MUST exist so I think was just caused by the constant reloading, in any case not something to worry about.

Long ago there was the minor glitch of a sticky tooltip that remained on the screen. This actually happens everytime if you have your mouse over a buff or debuff in a fight, and if at that time there's an interruption to the fight (eg fight ends into a cutscene (Rowinda case) or Chalassa goes into or out of fight. In most cases the situation corrects itself and the tooltip will clear from the screen after the following "conclusion" fight to whatever interrupted it. In the case of Rowinda, that tooltip got stuck, because the exit is not immediately followed by the rest of the fight. Typing this just FYI, clearly not a big problem.

Yes I found that one too, I forgot about it but can be easily fixed, will do that.

Haven't touched the difficulty tweak yet. I'll probably get to that closer to the weekend.

Great, this Friday I'll probably launch the game in "soft release mode", which means I'll officially list it on my website even if I won't promote/spread the word too much yet

[outist]

2 minor things (both are not really bugs):

1. It would be good to have a confirmation button with the total sum before "sell all items in this category"

2. In Season 1, chapter 3 (yes I am not really far yet) it is said that from now on we should sell all our pelts to the grand mogul, because they pay more. But there is no real price difference between the grand mogul and the normal tanner.

But so far good game.