TOA: An Elven Marriage dev thread

[jack1974]

I'm working on this part-time while I have some dead moments

I mean of course I'll be working on Curse Of Mantras mainly from now on, but after you do cards balancing for hours you need to change task otherwise you go nuts

[jack1974]

So with Curse Of Mantras done, I've resumed working on this, at slower pace but making steady progress. Today finished implementing the overdrive skill:


in practice powerful skill that can be used only when the overdrive meter fills. The meter is of 3 stars, and slowly fills up as each character does or take damage. Yes I'm not including healing, since healing is very powerful and I think in past games the CPU (or even the player!) constantly healing party members was dragging the battles too long.
Now in this game there will still be the usual armor system (so as it goes down characters will take more damage) but also several mechanics to hopefully prevent heal/resurrect spamming

[jack1974]

Today I've implemented an auto-combat using AI, and a system to simulate X battles (all done by the PC on its own). Of course the AI is nowhere as good as a human player, but still it can give me an indication if the battle is balanced or not. This should speed up my usual testing/balancing phase since I can just let the PC test on itself while I do other things

[nolosk]

Today I've implemented an auto-combat using AI, and a system to simulate X battles (all done by the PC on its own). Of course the AI is nowhere as good as a human player, but still it can give me an indication if the battle is balanced or not. This should speed up my usual testing/balancing phase since I can just let the PC test on itself while I do other things

This sounds incredibly useful!!!

[jack1974]

Yes it is, I should have done it sooner lol. Anyway, it's also interesting to see how much each skill impact the game. If I simulate 10 battles, using different starting skills,I get different results. For example the healing spells were overpowered so I nerfer them already

[jack1974]

Heh today discovered another advantage, not just in balancing but also for bugs - it triggered a bug that could happen like 1 out of 100 battles in very specific conditions (charmed enemy was trying to attack someone, but was the last one remaining so didn't know what to do causing an error ). Playing normally would have taken me weeks to stumble into this again, instead with 30-40 battles played in 10-15 min was able to find it way sooner

[jack1974]

Making good progress both coding and story-wise. I've finished up to chapter 5 (the chapters are short, there are probably going to be 25-30 in final game) and added several small features to existing RPG framework like this:

you can now see the skills used by the enemy, displayed like normal skills. In none of my past RPGs you could do this, at best you had a description but as to the actual damage or effects you were in the dark. Now you can exactly see what they can do in battle.
It's more work for me but I think it's fairer this way

[jack1974]

camp talk! I'll probably remove the top texts since I don't want to have a day/turn based advancement system since people didn't like it much in Cursed Lands and SOTW. Maybe I'll add a crafting menu

[abnaxus]

Is Loren herself a party member?

And does the game assume she was not romanced previously?

[jack1974]

No she isn't, she'll be in the 2nd (as non-romance) and in the 3rd (as romance). I made a blog post a while ago with all the details: https://www.winterwolves.net/blog/2020/10/