Hello everyone! Bit of sad news.
After yesterday's beating, i've decided to remove the game temporarily. It was called janky as if it wasn't functioning properly. Turns out Parsec does make it that on the receiving side, but it's the price to pay for online multiplayer haha. Still, I'll see what I can do about improving movement, jumping and general mobility.
I'll still post test builds and I might even make a post asking for direct playtesters. For now, I'll still leave you with some improvements I'll be making.
I'll still post test builds and I might even make a post asking for direct playtesters. For now, I'll still leave you with some improvements I'll be making.
ATM-LMBS
- Limited the use of Elents. My plan was to keep your actions free, you decided how to do your combos rather than having some arbitrary limit (Think Original Tales Arte Limit, by that I mean you needed to go in a chain like Base Arte > Arcane Arte) . However, due to how the plugin and RPG Maker handle skill costs, I've decided to rather limit the amount of times a single Elent can be used in a row. For example, you can't use Pyro Geiser more than three times in a row. Doing so will make Joseph take some End lag and will be unable to use said Elent until you use a different one. This, effectively forces you to mix Elents to form a combo.
- This was done and announced before, but I've improved how controllers are handled so they will stay connected, and only players with a fighter in their corresponding slot in the Party screen will be able to fight. This means that if you disconnect Player 2's controller but leave their fighter, AI will take it's place and the game will not try to move P3's controller to P2's fighter. If you remove P2's Fighter but leave the Controller connected, it will not try to take P3's spot. That is, until you restart the game.
- Camera focus has been improved: Now the camera will try and keep all the players in the screen. This works amazingly well, sometimes, due to how battlebacks are handled and how the camera works, players will still be able to wander a bit off camera, but not that much, since battlefield sizes are reduced depending on how many players are present.
- Escape times increase depending on the amount of players present: This is mostly self explanatory, since the escape time was the same even if 4 players where present, so you could escape almost instantly. Now all players need to escape at the same time to be able to escape at normal speed.
- Bosses will be knockback resistant (Yes, all of them): This was an Issue in Tales of Arise, and I did want to avoid it, however, I see it was a mistake. What I'm gonna do is the following: All bosses will be Knockback Resistant, so you can't juggle them for a while. However, if you get lucky and manage to stun them, via Elents, they will become temporarily able to be juggled. However, after a certain damage threshold, they will become Knockback resistant again. And to top it off, they will always have a 50-75% chance to resist Stun. This, combined with the Shield Points / Iron Stance, is part one of the boss improvements. Hopefully, this will provide a more challenging experience, while not being outright hard and turning all bosses into HP Sponges that can't be combo'ed.
- General Enemies will be improved: First, the Slimes. Despite being the first enemies, everyone mostly has found them annoying. So, apart from increasing their move pool, they will not bomb you with their projectiles at the battle start. Their Elent cooldown and warmups will be randomized between some sensible values.
- General Quest Improvements: I wanted to do some worldbuilding. The quests try and give some light into other character's story and how they connect with Joseph's and why it's somewhat important to the plot to complete them. At this point, in the story, all quests give info as to who's the enemy and why is everyone that joins Joseph related to said enemy. However, I do recognize it was somewhat rushed, so I'll take some time to improve it, but the priority is the battle system for now.
- Narrative changes: My goal was to provide a bit of context as why Joseph starts where he starts without boring you with a long ass introduction. This sparked more issues but yesterday's critique gave some good pointers on how to approach this issue, while also including some better gameplay, highlighting the Multiplayer aspect of the ATM-LMBS, while not sacrificing the story, so expect a newer, revamped, and if it pleases everyone, more enjoyable intro!
- Story sections will also be trimmed. I wanted to somewhat follow the Tales narratives and how they intersect character development with the story itself, since these are not always that connected, but I think it will be better if I distance myself from that path for now.
- Visuals: I can't change the battlers for now, FOR NOW, but do expect some bigger and with higher quality battle sprites at least. For a while, the chibi battlers will take the brunt of the critics and battles hahaha.
- General Experiences: Expect more tutorials, info, and an Expanded Guide on some things. I thought some things of the system were clear enough, but it seems like it is not that way, so I'll explain a bit more of each feature and mechanic in the Guide, and will sometimes force-open it for you to review more of the terms!
- Music will be an important part, however, for now only the essential and important battle themes are covered, however, I will try to get the entire soundtrack but that will be not possible for a long time.
There will not be a TL;DR for this, thank you for reading my thoughts, and even if you haven't played the game but you've seen this wall of text, I'll await your feedback, thank you!