What is going on? I'll tell you.

Well, this end of year has been quite a rush, and my world kind of went upside-down, beside it isn't over yet, hopefully will end soon, I didn't even had much time to spend on TNR project, just so you can see how much of a rush it was.

Anyway, at least right now, the project isn't dead, the Cait Sith rework is still in progress and stuff, but I really have been demotivated to continue working on the project, even more since I'm working alone, but I'm still trying to do some progress on it.

Other than that, I have nothing much to say about the project, If I get some progress on the next news, I'll tell it, just pray that I get to do more progress on the game.

On other news, I've been trying to do some progress on my Terraria mod, N Terraria, but everyday I question myself if It's really worth continuing working on it, I guess now adays there isn't any more space for stand alone mods, even more since tModLoader are quite popular latelly (beside It's mod selection doesn't impress me). But, I still tried to do some changes on a number of things on it, one of the changes involves the Quest system, which now can have multiple monsters displayed on the list, so you aren't bound to having to hunt a certain monster, when you acquire a certain quest with vague objective, like... Get something from a Bat, now almost every Bat monster will have the chance of giving the item, in other words, pick your best source of that item to complete the quest.



Anyway, that's all the news I have right now. Sorry for being vague this month about progress, anyway, Happy New Year.

Edit:. Oh yeah, I forgot, I also added Skills/Classes icons, thank Lorc's skill icons pack for this.

Revamping TNR Project

Well, slowly I'm getting back into the project, but I'll tell that in quick news, since I'm still in a busy week, and my dinner is already done, aswell as I have to go to sleep too.

Remember the Cait Sith? Aka this guy?

 

 

I decided to remake it to make it look cooler, and smaller too, and resulted into this.

The image is still not finished, I still have to get some ideas of what to do about it's boots, aswell as do some shading on it's body, and the bag.

I gave it a Rapier and a Bag, aswell as Boots too, and just because It's carrying a bag, doesn't necessarily means It's a thief.

I'll have more info about it in the future, currently, I only made the concept.

Now for the plannings, I'm planning on changing how buffs duration system is going to work, in combat they will remain the same, but out of combat, their time will still run.

Why I plan on doing that change? Because having to recast all the buffs everytime you enter a battle is quite annoying, even more when doing consecutive battles, so better cast them when possible, and only recast them when they run out. I just need to think what to do about the players who changes the monster skills just to be able to use the buffs, and then restore the skill set to normal, maybe changing the skills could cancel the buffs of the skill removed.

The quest system is under work, I just need to think about the kinds of objectives it could carry, due to the fact that is tedious to give only hunt quest and item collection quest, I'll need to add some extra objectives, some that involves either dialogue, or other things.

That's all for today's news, tell me what you think of the Cait Sith rework, maybe the other monsters in the game can pass through a rework like that, beside that rework were kind of influenced by both the Fox Slinger and Maus Bomber monsters, since they are wearing accessories.

Until next news.

Is it dead? No!

Hey guys, you may be wondering why I passed about 2 weeks without posting anything about the project, well, I'm taking a little break of programming, so I'm spending my time... Doing other stuffs.

The project didn't gained much progress latelly, but I've been trying to implement the counter attack system, which you may wonder what will do, a monster that is taking the action will attempt to attack, the other monster will dodge and then use another attack to counter it, causing the attacking monster to be hurt, while the attacked monster will gain no injury, beside that depends on the effects the skill offers.

Now that I'm talking about this, what if I talk more about how it works? Counter attacks will be dependant on the skills the monster currently have selected to use in combat, for example: The Kangaroo Mob has the Punch skill assigned to be used in combat, but that skill is also a Counter attack skill, when the monster is getting attacked by another monster, there is a chance that when the monster attack misses, the victim will counter attack using Punch.

The counter attack isn't limited to only one skill, you may end up having more than one counter attack skills disponible for your monster to pick, but during the counter attack, the monster will pick one of those skills to then use on the enemy, and the best part, is that counter attacking does not discount Stamina or SP, so your tactic isn't broken if your monster does a "unintended counter attack".

More kinds of skills are planned too, aswell as different effects on how they are triggered in combat, but I still need to think how I'll make it work.


Currently, that is all, maybe in a few weeks I'll show some good progress, with photos.
Anyway, I've been spriting a new monster, but I'm thinking, those monsters I add to the game doesn't really look like monsters, so maybe I should attempt to make them less.. Related to real world animals.

Well, until next news.

Enter the engine limitations on TNR Project.

After some time I begun implementing the new monster sprites, I've been worrying about the fact that while making sprites, there were a moment where the width of the spritesheet would pass 2048 pixels, being that the 2048, is the XNA max texture dimension for both width and height, higher than this, and the texture would have problems to load, if would load correctly at all without error.

Well, I found out a while ago after checking out the project, that I've set the game profile of the project to hi-def, so It will load textures up to 4096, so that is already a good increase in max texture size, but the problem still exists and may limit me on what I can do with the monster sprites.

Where the problem kicks in? That you ask, let's take for example the sprites of the Big Foot monster, It's sprite size is of 64x64 pixels, being that the first row of sprites is reserved for the front animations, and the second row is reserved for the back animations, due to being 64 pixels size of sprites, that means I can make up to 64 frames for the monster before It reaches the 4096 pixels cap.
That will possibly make impossible for me to add some extra animations to that monster sprite when they are necessary, leading to either short animation frames, or even missing animations at all.

But you may wonder, "Wow, 64 frames is a lot, you're exagerating a bit", not really, some monsters may have their sprites bigger, for example, one of the monsters I'm still sketching, the Kaiser Raccoon, has 64x80 pixels size animation, that not only means the height is taller than the one of the Big Foot, but also means that in the future, I may end up adding bigger and bigger monsters to the project, that's where the problem kicks in.

At least some time in the future of the project, I'll have to think how I'll solve that sprite limitation problem, and potentially lead to a good skill animation when under effect.

On other news, I've added an effect to the monsters, to make them feel more alive, their sprites will somewhat shrink and grow to look's like they are kind of... Breathing, so isn't a "stop motion" animation in combat.

I've also did some extra hud work on the battle action selection system, tell me what you think of it, if possible, and if something could be change on it.

Anyway, two videos in a day, nice :D.

The skill system may pass through another rework, to include more complicated effects, so you can torment more your foes, aswell as be tormented in case you're unlucky enough to be hit by one of the future skill effects.

After finishing the battle system, I'll move to the out battle systems, like reworking the maps, I want to make so structures actually have height, so It doesn't need to eat some of the tiles in the world to say that the structure is tall, aswell as working on some systems, like for example, giving back the functions of the npcs that offer services to the players in the towns.

I just remembered, and I changed the monster spawning system in the fields to the new system I mentioned some time ago, and filled some maps with the monsters, It still has some empty maps, or a lot of maps with just one monster on the area, but as I make new monsters, they will be populated.

Anyway, I got to go sleep, see ya, and until next news.

Cheers!

Little Q&A for how I'm handling the project

Well, people may have already questioned themselves a few things about my project, because things seems really... Unconventional, at least for the standards of "game market" now adays, and since doing a complete rework on the battle hud will take some time to do, I will try doing a little Q&A about the project, and most probably also explain why it's taking so long.

Q: Why the changes to the project is taking so long?
A: That is because I work on it when I'm alone, generally I'm alone during the morning, beside sometimes I have the bad luck of having something to make me go sleep later than should, taking away the time I spend working on the game. I also sometimes don't work on the project to not get tired of it, since as experienced on N Terraria mod, that may cause serious problems, that could impact not only the project, but also my social life, somewhat.

Q: Why are you working on the project alone?
A: My project isn't attracting much interest of the people, so there isn't even the chance of getting a new team member to help on it, so I'm pretty much doing all parts of the project all alone.

Q: Why did you decide to sprite the monsters of the game in isometric way, but the map tiles and human characters in 3 direction sprites?
A: Due to being a monster taming oriented game, the game will need quite a number of monsters in it, even more to add diversity, I found out that making them in isometric way speeds up the process of spriting them, aswell as allow me to do some work on their animations, since I will only need a front and back sprite for each animation, differently from 3 direction sprites, that needs front, side and back sprites.

Q: Why most monsters are duped mammals?
A: Spriting a different kind of monster is not that easy, since I'll have to change the method to make it, but I have some ideas of monsters that are up coming, one of them will be a Bee related monster, which will be a flying monster, another one related to a Dog with excessive fur, which is a quadruped monster, a Wolf, aswell as the Werewolf, those are some of the planned monsters I will need to sprite, not only that but also finish the sprite of the currently existing monsters in the game.

Q: The monster sprites are really different compared to the player sprites, why is that?
A: Kind of the same reason as above, the player also needed a chance on the spriting method, beside It still may pass through changes, since I feel like the sprite isn't really that fine.

Q: What is your plan for the game release?
A: I'm not sure, initially, I were planning on making it a $10 game, but I don't know anymore, I may end up following the initial plan, or maybe not, my idea would be to make the game accessible for everyone, but If I directly did that, how would I earn money from the project? That is the problem, even more since part of it would be invested on the project, since things like music, I can't make by myself.

Q: Do you plan on releasing the game on Steam?
A: That is also part of my initial plans, maybe even make use of what It's API offers to make some extra functions to the game, so not only gives the players more interactions, but also make them more unique, somewhat (That would possibly be a thing for multiplayer). But I believe I'll have to launch the game on other online stores too, due to how the pc gaming market is changing.

Q: Do you plan on releasing the game on Consoles?
A: I? Myself? No. Not only they have a lot of b******* with game launching and updating, but I probably would need a publisher to launch the games for them, and with the number of consoles existing, would be one hell of a job to keep them updated with the official version of the game, would be ignorance of my part not to think about what the publishers would have to pass to port this game.

Q: What OS will the game be released for?
A: Certainly for Windows only, the reason I'll say bellow.

Q: What kind of development programs are you using to make the game?
A: Visual Studio C# 2010 to do the coding and debugging, XNA 4.0 as the game engine, and Aseprite to make the game sprites.

Q: Why are you using such a dated engine and program to develop the game?
A: Because my pc haven't seen an upgrade has some years, the last serious upgrade it got was around 2013, some of the upgrades since then were minor pieces replacement or some others. I kind of work on a "Comodore 64", as a friend says, because currently there is no way I can upgrade my pc hardware, so I can't upgrade my development kit.

Q: You could use free engines like Unity to develop the game.
A: Actually I can't, one of the things that not upgrading the pc is causing, is the fact that several programs are starting to ditch Windows 32 Bits, meaning that even to use Unity, I need a 64 bits computer. Also, I believe Unity will limit me on what I can do on the project, beside I kind of can't stand how it deals with 2D sprites.

Q: Why you didn't made any campaign to raise funds for the project?
A: Because that would force me into investing even more on the project, instead of being a passion project, would be a pression project, since I know that the people who invested their money to see the project reach the end of the tunnel, will want to see the result in the future, and not only I don't know If I'll manage to finish the project, but also I fear that I may end up not giving to the players what they wanted, or expected of the project. Would be as worse as a betrayal, and even more if the project got cancelled while people invested their money and hopes on it. Can you see how awful that is?

Q: Then... What is the plan?
A: I'll keep working on the project, trying to make it see somewhat the light, probably I wont be able to launch the game 100% finished, there will still be things missing, but It's better than never being launched. But I'll try aswell to make the launch less disasterful than the older version of the game, aswell as make the game cool to play, and with lots of things for you guys to play with. At least that is my plan.

Q: Why you only work on the project while being alone?
A: It does not limits my creativity, I can debug and do stuff on the project without "judgemental eyes", also, I distract myself very easily, programming, as you may know, is not a really "fun" activity to do, If my brother, for example, plays a game on the pc that conveniently is right to the left of me, I may end up getting distracted watching the gameplay, and end up not doing any progress on the project.

Q: Do you have any testers or anything to check if the game content is good?
A: Not really, I sometimes asks my friends what they think of some photos I send them from my project, and gather their feedback, but on the older version of the game, I sent them a test version of the game to see what they think about it (thing I eventually did during the N Terraria mod development), and then collect feedbacks. Their reception is the reason why the project is still running today.

Q: What is the point of having a SP and Stamina bar?
A: The Stamina bar will be used for physical moves, each move uses a percentage of the bar, for example, basic attack uses 10% of Stamina, medium attacks uses 25% Stamina, and so goes on.
The Stamina bar were added to avoid simple tactics of spamming the toughest attacks to win the battle, so if you spam the toughest attacks through the battle, your monster will get tired easier, making so eventually your monster will have to use Wait command for 1 or 2 turns to charge the Stamina bar so you can use the skill again.

The SP (Special Power) bar is more oriented to magic, the magic in the game is planned to be a powerful thing to use, but not recommended to spam, so that bar will probably deplete faster than Stamina bar, but the use of Magic will be worth it.

Q: Do you plan on adding multiplayer to the game?
A: Of course, this project would be incomplete if there weren't multiplayer, even more since not only this game is playable solo, but also there may be parts you will need a party to go, and if you don't want to party up with npcs to venture through those lands, why not go with a group of friends instead?

Q: Since we're doing a Q&A, mind if I talk about the N Terraria mod? Do you plan on returning to developing it?
A: I'm not sure, modding Terraria was one of the best things I ever did, was even fun to see the result of the new mechanics I added into the game, I really wished that the current modders of it added some more mechanics to diversificate the gameplay, in my case, I would remain on Stand alone development, because with it the sky is the limit.

The problem is that at every update Terraria recieves, It gets harder to decompile and fix it's bugs to begin working on the new version of the mod, so at the time I finish decompiling and fixing it, I'm already kind of burned out, so I barelly work on porting the old features the mod has, and the new features comes unfinished.

For example, I've promissed that when 1.3.5 update came out, I'd launch N Terraria 7 on it, I couldn't fix all decompiling bugs of it because the errors were so much complex that made me stop trying.

So, possibly, If I decide to return to modding Terraria, either will have passed quite a good time, or I'll have enough knowledge to deal with those issues and begin modding it right away.

Q: Is Tamers Network Reborn your current active project?
A: Somewhat yes, there are a number of other projects I have made too, one for a desktop agent, one for an auto rpg maker, and some other projects aswell, but those two mentioned are more visitted than the others. The bad is that the progress on them is really bad, even more since I'll possibly have to rescript some part of them, due to the fact that since I gained some good knowledge on programming with the years passing, the old techniques I used turned to obsolete. But those projects aren't actually impacting the TNR project, since I work them in moments I'm not working on TNR project, they are kind of side projects that takes my head off the main projects, so I don't get burned out.

I guess that's all for my made up Questions and Answers. If you manage to have any question about the project and how it is being developed, feel free to ask.

New TNR Battle HUD display.

This is a quick news about the new battle hud change.

The Hud for team monsters status and also for the commands you can pick changed.

First I'll talk about the new monster info hud, of course the text shows the monster name, gender and health, meanwhile, the frame to the left shows the monster portrait, the Red bar shows the monster health, Blue bar shows the monster Special power, the Yellow bar shows the monster Stamina, and the Orange bar shows the monster current ATB load, when the monster is casting a spell, or using a skill that requires charging, the Orange bar will start to be filled by a Green bar.
I still will need to do some work on that part of the hud, not only because I'll have to reduce the size of the text, but also make it more understandable.

To the bottom of the screen you see the actions you can order the monster to take, Fight leads you to the attack selection commands, while Run... Does nothing, for now. In the future, more actions will show up on those empty frames, one of them will be the Magic command.

This is the attack selection hud, picking an attack is really simple, just press the direction of the command and then press the confirm button to select the action.

And this is the targetting hud, the number of arrow changes if the skill is AOE. And to toggle the targets, you just need to press either Left or Right buttons. I still will need to do some tweaks on this, since depending on the team you are selecting (for example, your allied team), Right may become Left, and Left may become Right.

I will also have to think about how I'll make the currently acting monster status hud be more visible for the player, aswell as make it easy to be read when you want to do some quick action, even more since the game wont pause for too long once your monster turn comes.

Some informations I believe wont be necessary, but others I will need to think how to reduce their requirement information, so wont take much of the interface.

The arrows above the attacking and targetted monsters also will need a rescale, or I may change it to something else, like a giant circle to the attacking monster, and a giant X for the targetted monster, and both be shown on their feet, at least it's sure that it needs to be changed, since can be really confusing if there is too many monsters in the battle.

Well, that's all for today's news, If you have ideas on what I can do about the hud, just tell me in the comments, and before you ask, yes, each photo is in a different battle, that's because I got the idea of taking photo of the other hud parts after closing the game :/. So yeah, I reopened the game 2 times to take the photos.

Until next news.

Hairy Spooky Wall of Text about TNR Project

Happy late Halloween (beside here where I live that isn't celebrated...), today I'll share some of the plans for the TNR project, aswell as tell what changed latelly.

First, I'll begin with the plans:

The magic system I plan on splitting them by "schools", and differently from skills abilities monsters comes from, they will be unlocked... By some way, because I didn't thought about that, yet. Possibly, maybe there will be a secondary leveling which involves that, or another function that you will need to do something to be able to unlock a new spell on that "school".

One thing I'm unsure about, is about if the skills should or shouldn't level up with the use, potentially getting stronger, that could either make the magic system more interesting, or broken, or even unfair.

Anyway, one thing is sure, that menu you saw for the Fight command on the video, where you could pick one of the 4 abilities to use, I plan on adding another menu like that for the magics, maybe even split them by "schools", and then when you select that "school", you'll be able to pick one of the four magic spells you can use. Of course you still will need to set the magic spells that you'll use in combat.

Another change I plan to do aswell, is change how the battle action selector works, I had an idea of minimalizing the key presses to select an action, like, with a simple direction press, you can select the action you'll use, like... You press Up key, the Fight command is selected, you press Down key, the Run command is selected, you press Left key, Magic, and so goes. The same also is planned for the inner commands, like the Fight skills and the Magic spells, since you can pick only up to 4 abilities, that will speed up the selection of abilities.

A third change I want to do, is change how the monsters will spawn in the maps, and what level they will spawn, I plan on removing the level tags of the map, and making so the monsters spawned in the maps have their own individual levels, aswell as removing the level display from the monster (and possibly npcs ) name, and instead replacing by an icon, the icon will be red if the monster is going to be a challenge for your monsters, and blue if the monster is not much of a challenge.

I'm not sure if I'll be able to fully make those changes, beside, I'm doing them because most likelly, any player will want to make their own monster team before venturing in the game world, also, numbers may make the player feel restricted about what kind of challenge to face, so removing them and replacing by an icon, might give the player an idea that the monster is tough, but wont stop you from facing it, even more since the reward for beating it will be good.

I don't know if you guys remember the Werewolves and Vampires from the old version of the game, but I'm kind of trying to bring them back here, possibly with transformation and everything includded, but what kind of bonus and penalty they could afflict the monster, victim of it?

And the last plan I have, I'm going to make the game show better who is the monster going to take an action and show the targets when in the menu, I have kind of an idea of how to make that work, I just will need to add a few scripts to the monster skill data, so It also tries to get the possible targetted monsters from the skill.

Now for what changed latelly on the project...

The monsters will not only receive status boost or penalty depending on their size, the exp required to level up, aswell as exp reward also changes based on their size, bigger monsters awards more exp, and requires more exp to level up than smaller monsters do. This change has been done, because bigger monsters are already tough, even if you have a Level 1 small and big monster on your team, the big monster status is already as good as of a monster of a few levels, so you'll probably not have much problems having one in the team, so to level up faster a big monster, you need to face big or even bigger monsters to acquire good exp for it.

I've been tweaking the skill effects positioning, they were appearing at weird positions when trying to spawn from a monster action point, It's still bugged, but is less bugged than before.

Added one more monster to the game, but now It's 3 monsters I have to finish spriting.

Now multiple monsters can attack at the same time, as long as their skills attacks only 1 target, and It's target isn't using a skill or being a victim of one, that surelly has speed up the battle, but I will need to do a system to get the targets from the multi target spell, so It doesn't turn to mandatory that multi target skills should have their own spotlight.

And for the last, I've did some changes to the tutorial npc dialogue, in the future you may have the chance of seeying it in action, but right now, the tutorial is unfinished, also, I still need to think of a name change for the BattleNet company, in the game, because that possibly will lead me to problems in the future, maybe a name that starts with B and ends with Net, I still need to think, beside I'm always open to suggestions.

Anyway, sorry for the boring wall of text, the people at IndieDB possibly would have locked down my blog for posting so many news without photos, if they were the owners of blogger, what they aren't, hahaha.

Well, I'll see if I can show some visual progress on the next news, that is, if I don't talk about another monster too.

Until next news.

Critical and Miss on TNR

Hey guys, It's been a short time since I released the video showing the battle system on the project, right?

Well, I'm bringing some news, I've been able to make the system where multiple monsters can attack in the same turn works, beside It's really exquisite the fact that I had to do a slightly more different code checking to make it work, unless the pointer system I've made to find out whose monster is who is bugged, now if the monster is not using a multi target skill, and both the user and targetted monsters aren't being affected by another monster skill, the monster will attack regardless of the fact that there is another monster attacking, or not. That will speed up the battle a bit, but I feel like I'm going to rework the interface to make it more accessible and informational to the player when is requested to take an action.

The battle interface is also going to get a rework, I'll have to fit Health, Special Power and Stamina on the same hud chunk, aswell as the ATB progress, challenging, isn't?

Critical and Miss rates are also under development, I'm trying to make them not be so frequent, but still make so the base status influence greatly on their rates, so if the monster has a high AGI and DEX status, the monster will have a higher evasion rate than a monster with lower of each status.
And due to the fact that the Critical on lower levels is somewhat Overkill, I tested to lower the skills effect damage, and the game turned a bit boring due to that, I'll increase that later back to normal, or try to find a point where it is actually fair for the gameplay and still fun.

Another thing that will be coming in the future is the Lucky dodge, compared to the Miss rate, It's chance isn't affected by any other status, only by the affected one's solid Luck points, It may end up triggering when being attacked by an enemy, nullifying any effect of the ability.

Also, since I added a system of miss rate to the game, I didn't forget to add special scripts to the skill effects for the case of the skill missing, so the monster will jump away from the attack distance if the attack will miss, or dodge a bolt of skill before it's effect reaches the monster. This will make the combat equaly interesting and frustrating, depending on who called the attack.

Remember the trees that appeared in the video, well, I changed that and they look... A lot less... Weird?

I guess I'll have to take care of their "bipolarities"...

Well, that's all for today's news, until next time.

New Tamers Network Reborn Battle System Video

Finally, after so long delongings, aswell as several retries due to
some issues surging during the gameplay (at least was good for bug
bashing), I could get a video of the game in action, up and running.


Here it shows some basic battle system of the game, aswell as part of how
the party play works (even though in the future it may be possible to
npcs and other players), aswell as... Well, just watch the video.


There may be things I didn't talked about on the video, or it's description, just ask in the comments, either on Youtube or in this blog, and I'll clarify the question.


Also, if you have ideas to improve the game, or critics on something, tell me.

New player hair design and combat script changes on TNR Project.

Hey guys, another news about the TNR Project.

This week I've been working quite slowly on the project, due to the fact that I had some "side things" to do, and no, they weren't related to my other projects (beside I've been neglecting them a bit latelly, even more since I'll have to redo a number of them T.T), that resulted in me not having much time to spend on the project.

Even though I didn't had much time to spend on the project, that doesn't means I didn't do anything, one thing I did was to rework the player hair, and work a bit on the script of their drawing, so things like this can happen.

Those are the hair style for both male and female players, or at least for the first hairstyle of both, I will have to rework the male first hair because, I need to make it less a thing of the 80~90's age, maybe If I remove a bit of hair it will be ok.

Also, due to the teaser photo, I noticed a problem with the shirt logo (the one the woman is using), It seems like the pants ate part of it, anyway, I'll get to fix that.

Another thing I've worked on, is that now the portraits of monsters will show correctly on the... Portraits. For the Kangaroo Mob there is no actual change, but for bigger monsters like the Big Foot and others, their faces were kind of cutdown, and placed in a weird way on the portraits.

I've also fixed a bug related to the buffs, I've accidentally placed the script of updating buffs inside the script of checking of monsters skill were active, so if a monster had more skills than another, that monster would recieve the effects of the buff faster than the other monsters, now that bug has entered to history, since it's no longer happening, that also lead me into fixing a bug where the buff animations wouldn't work correctly if the battle ended, since their animation would freeze, due to the fact that the counter was at the battle updating script. Now the counter for the buff animation will update with the drawing system, avoiding "statue" effect.

I've also been working on making the combat less "turn by turn", so instead of one monster attacking at a time, I'm trying to make so if the next attacking monsters are attacking different monsters, and not being attacked, they will attack at the same time, that will make the combat faster, but It's still bugged, and I still have some fixing to do on it, even more since It isn't following my plan correctly and making everyone attack when they wanted.

Those are today's news, I'll have to do some bug bashing possibly before continuing the development, but right now, things are going ok on the project.

Until next time.

Edit:. I forgot to tell, but the hair sprite no longer has the 32x32 size limit, like it had on the first game, now I can make longer hairs, like the one the female character in the image is using.

New Monsters and Status on TNR Project, but no video yet...

Happy Children Day. Well, at least on Brazil, but whatever.

Halloween is coming soon, and look's like I made a few weeks ago a monster for the season without even thinking about it, beside when the game comes out, halloween will have passed...

Anyway, meet the Bat Creature.

This guy is a bat, so you may wonder what kind of attacks it will be able to do, beside more attacks will be sprited for him in the future, anyway, I'll have to rework it's walking animation, aswell as do some work on it's animations for when looking on the oposite direction (to the direction against the player), because It's wings aren't connected to the body right now.

A flight animations is also planned, I'll get to work on it sometime soon too.

I've sprited also two new monsters, but I just did their basic sprites only (stopped front and back sprites), one is a Fox Slinger, which is a fox... That uses a slinger, of course,  and the Maus Bomber (Or Bombermaus, I guess look's better this way), which is a fat mouse that attacks other monsters by tossing bombs.

Differently from the other monsters in the project, the Fox Slinger and Bombermaus (I'm starting to like the name) has some extra sprites for some of their, let's call attacking acessories, for example, the Fox Slinger has a Slinger, aswell as a pouch where the stones are placed, and the Bombermaus has a kind of backpack, where behind has the bombs it will toss in the field. Now you may wonder, how the Bombermaus will light the bombs? Easy, It uses the fire that comes from it's tail, It's tail tip is like a never ending bomb fuse, so It will be used to light the bombs, anyway, I'm avoiding thinking about how I'll animate that for now.

Beside there is a little dillema, the Fox Slinger sprite is about nearly 64 pixels tall, compared to the Kangaroo Mob which is 48 pixels tall, It was not intended of me to make the monster that big, but the sprite of it is quite alright, and I don't need to mind about a few facts like the size is not proportional and stuff, because I'm actually spriting monsters, so I'm wondering, should I scale down the Fox Slinger or not? If I do, I'll have to rework on the entire sprite just to remove about 16 pixels, if not, the monster will remain the same in-game.

On other news, the Status System is now working, yay!!
Two debuffs were added to the game, the classic Bleeding and Stun (or Confusion, due to how it works). I don't remember if the old version of the game worked like this, but damage overtime debuffs will not wait for the monster turn to come to inflict damage, instead, it will wait until a few seconds pass in battle to then hurt the monster, the seconds are related to the ATB bar filling, so if your monster ATB bar is filling, that means the debuff effect is also running.

The Debuffs also can have multiple casters, aswell as stacks, each time a different monster inflicts that debuff, the stack increases, the bad is that right now it has no effect, other than increasing the duration of the debuff, I still need to think how that will work.

Basic attacks like Scratch or Bite will still have the chance of inflicting Bleeding debuff.

The Confusion debuff causes the monster ATB bar to occasionally not load, It works quite like the bleeding debuff, each time the debuff is triggered, it will check if the atb bar will or will not be loaded at that moment. Differently from the debuff on the first versions of the game, now the stars effects works, since on the older version they were bugged, and stacked in the same place.

Basic attacks like Punch and Hug can inflict the Confusion debuff.

What's the point of the attacks inflicting debuffs right away? That's to increase the diversity of attacks, if you like to make a team that makes the foes feel helpless, use Confusion inflicting attacks, If you want to make monster lose health overtime, use Bleeding inflicting attacks.

That also means I'll have to rebalance the skills inflicting those status in the future, aswell as adding new effects to inflict on the foes (or allies, since not every debuff should be about causing problems to other monsters ;).

I was going to try posting today a video with the gameplay of the game, but due to bugs popping up during the video recording, I'll have to fix them before actually making the video.

Well, until next news. And sorry for the disappointment.

Some changes on the project and a look at the Dog Monster

Latelly I've had some solid updates on the project, but first, I'll talk about someone I promissed I should talk about, but been delaying for long.

First, I'll talk about the changes on the project.

I've made the structure of drawing on the game be more diverse for me, I can separate in layers what should be in front or in the back of the monster sprites in combat, and also added some new animations for some monsters, for you to see them, I would need to make a video, something I still need to take the initative into making.

The project now has some sound effects that most likelly will be played during the battle, when a skill needs it.

Added 2 new magic spells, the Frost and Lightning spells.

About the magic spells, I'm trying to make them make sense, so doesn't actually happen that, for example, a frost spell would be actually blocks of ice falling from the sky and crushing the monster, that actually sounds like as the monster got hurt because were crushed, not because were hurt by the low temperature.

Currently, the three magic spells in the game does:

• Fireball
• Shots a fireball that hurts the foe, exploding on impact.
• Frost
• Launches artic cold wind at the foe.

• Thunder
•  A cloud spawns above the monster and strikes the monster with a thunder bolt.

They require quite an amount of mana, but I'll need to tweak them and think how to make them fitting, and worth using in combat, and not be just another attack, or the kind of thing you may forget that exists. Beside their usefulness will come when I get the new Status system working, since they will be somewhat related to buffs and debuffs.

I also tested the new Sub Effects system that some skills may have, the current existing sub effect that a skill can have is Absorb, and as you can wonder, It absorbs part of the health (or stamina/mana) removed from the target monster, and converts into health (read the parenthesis above) to the caster. This can lead to some vampire like skills, or to skills that restores some monster health at the expense of the caster health.

And now, as promissed, let's talk about the monster I forgot to talk about, the Dog Monster.

This guy here, you should not be deceived by It's "cute" look, or innocent face, because It's one dangerous predator in the game, It just needs to open it's mouth and boom! It's victim turns into it's meal.

In case you manage to befriend one, you'll have the best friend ever as your ally, and a dangerous creature to use in combat, or at least saying to the foe.

Both the Dog Monster and the Big Foot monsters contains the same size, so both have the same status boost in combat.

 And for now, that's all, the Dog Monster still needs a number of other attacks, since currently it has 2 (beside some other monsters also needs more attack animations, like the Cait Sith and the Dog Mage monsters), one of the attacks I plan on adding is a Tackle (or Body Slam? Better saying), It will jump and bump on the target monster, hurting by hitting the target monster with it's weight, now for the other attack... No idea yet, I still need to think, maybe shot laser from the eyes? Ok, that is ridiculous.

Anyway, I wonder what monster I'll talk to next time, either the Dog Mage or the Big Foot, beside based on the monster database, the Dog Mage comes before the Big Foot, so probably I'll talk about that guy.

Meanwhile, there is a new monster being sprited, wait some more time and you'll find out what kind of monster I'm creating.

Until next news. And let's hope in the future news I bring a new video of the project. Beside I still need to work on the rpg part of the game...

Tamers Network Reborn, now in 2K

Yes, as you read, now the game sprites are in 2K... Wait, 2K? No, I mean 2X, or better saying 0,5X? No idea, anyway, there has been sprite changes on some map sprites, aswell as the player.

Not only that, but a number of sprites got also reworked, you can check in the image bellow.

Too small, right? Don't look for too long to the image without zooming it up, who knows, maybe it can develop eye cancer or something, anyway, the grass sprites got changed, and that's how the player look right now, I'll have to add a zoom function to the game, so the map, player and npc sprites are scaled twice during the gameplay, so It's less painful to look at.

The character sprites are also currently quite small, compared to Kangaroo Mob, the player sprite is quite small.

I think it's too small compared to the monster, beside I had a opinion that said that It actually look's ok.

Anyway, that's all for today's news, until next time, and remember, keep your eyes healthy and don't look for too long at those images, without at least zooming twice.

Edit:. Tested with a bigger monster.

Multiple combat animations and animation tweaks on TNR Project.

And then, some more news on TNR Project.

This last weeks I've been working on some spriting jobs for the monsters, removed the weird shader on the back part of some of the monsters, and finished a good part of the new monsters sprites.

Alongside the sprite changes, some monsters has gained different attacks, the Kangaroo Mob for example, now can Punch, Double Punch, Kick, and do a UpperCut (beside it still needs some debugging).

I've also been working some more on some of the game mechanics, I'm trying to individualize how the monsters animations will be handled, so If I say, a monster is in a battle, and is also shown in the field, the Battle instance the monster is in will handle It's battle animation, while the Npc drawing system will handle It's field animation. This may be useful in the future, even more if there be something else implemented in the game that requires to use a custom animation for it.

I believe a few code cleaning will be necessary on the project, at least related to animations, aswell as give accessibility to some other things, like skills animations. I'll also need to move the codes related to monster positioning to the Battle system in the future, so reduces the data that will be stored in the monster data, possibly also reducing the memory usage of the game, beside right now, It's not really that big, I guess, but is always good to save, right?

That's all for today's news, until the next time. Maybe the next time I'll show some photos and gifs of the changes, beside something I wanted to do was display a video of the battle under action...

The winds of changes may be coming to the blog

Look's like some time in the future I'll have to change where I'll place the news on my projects, since Blogger is getting more bugged and bugged as the days passed.

Not only I'm unable to answer comments, but there are also several other issues that are surging with it.

Anyway, don't worry, I'll keep you up to date when I'm about to change, aswell as bring a new link to the new site/blog/whatever.

IdleWorld news after a long time, and TNR Project display and changes report

Well, today the TNR Project gained a major change on the status system of it, but before I talk about it, better I talk first about the changes on the IdleWorld project, which I've done while I passed a period of 2 days offline.

On IdleWorld, I tried to add a few more customization to it, so in the end you can create a fully customized idle world, to let the pc play it while you leave it opened, I've even added a option to change the World Name, aswell as change the Maximum Level of the game, so if you want to leave the characters leveling for long, you can.

I added also a "Start World" button, which enables the leveling, in the future I'll add a "Pause World" button, so you can use that moment to edit a few things in it, like adding/removing content, or doing some tweaks.

In the future, I'll also have to make it possible to save the progress of the characters in the game, or else everytime you close the program, your progress is lost, forever. And that's not cool.

The Window above shows the Race customization system, It's very simple though, I've made it using the experience I've acquired while developing another project, which in the future I may talk about, when I get a good result, you may actually change the name of the initial weapon of the race, aswell as the status, you will know that the status are fair if you see "All Status are balanced" on the label bellow. You may also delete races from the game, but the game wont allow you to delete the last race, since It's required to define the base status of the character, also, removing a race from the game in the future while It has already members of it in the game, will make so their race actually is rare, since no one will be able to spawn with it anymore.

Another of the tabs that are working are the Class and Spells tabs, the Spells tab allows you to create spells, obviously, and also select It's effects (If it will hurt someone, will heal someone, etc.), meanwhile, the Classes tab actually makes use of those spells, in the future, the characters may spawn, or even change to those classes during the gameplay, they will have 1/3 of chance in combat of using any possible spell on their list.

And to finish, I've buffed a bit the visibility of the Adventurers tab.

I just need to figure out now how to make changes on the list without causing the entire adventurer list to colapse.

That's all for IdleWorld, the update for it will come in the future, when is it? No idea, I still has to work, and there are a number of things I need to work on it before I launch the update.

Now talking about the Tamers Network Reborn project, meet the two new monsters that are being sketched.

The Dog Mage (beside on the sprite file It's called "Beagle Mage", even though It doesn't look like a Beagle, also, only has Standing and Walking animations right now)

And the Big Foot (No walking animation for this guy right now, also, the shading job is poor right now)

Those two guys above may help me work on the size status changes on monsters, since the Dog Mage is small and the Big Foot is big, they possibly will have different status bonus/penalties due to that.

The Dog Mage as you may wonder, will be a Mage, but of course there will be some melee attacks it can use, even more since if there weren't, the race would be entirelly role based, what I don't want to happen in the game.

I've even made some sketches on his robe from his Caster outfit, you can check it out right now.

The opening in the back of the robe was added so the Tail has is able to be shown out of the robe without looking like it pops up from inside it, without showing it coming out of nowhere.

The outfits may come in handy on the future, maybe certain region monsters will have it, aswell as being able to find them in some places so you can give it to your monsters, they are only for visual, so there is no status effect or anything else related to them, you may choose if your monster will use it or not, and the outfits will have different colors for each part, so the robe will have a different color from the hat, and is planned to be customizable, so yeah, you can change the colors of the outfits.

Another thing I've changed on the game, was the Status system of the monsters, I've changed how much status their base status gives to the monsters, aswell as did changes to the defense system.
Now the defense system operates by a percentage, based on the base value of defense the monster has, It has been a headache to make this work, but now, even If I place the monster level to 99999, the defense rate percentage wont even get near 90%, so there is no "always 1 damage" cap.

You may even ask, "Why did you test the monsters status up to 99999? Possibly one wont be able to reach it playing the game normally", and you're quite right, but who knows, maybe in the future there may be a change in teh game that will make the monsters to gain absurd numbered levels, or have infinite monster leveling, remember that the game has a temporary variable for level, It can lower your character level and status, but also can increase.

But my work with the status system is not done, I'll have to work aswell on how the Critical rate will work, aswell as how much damage bonus it will cause, since the last time I tested with a high level number, the critical rates were very frequent and always overkill (because one attack passed way more the monster health). The Critical Rate isn't the one status that is going to be revamped, others will too, beside now I remembered that the Accuracy got a revamp too.

In case you know not yet, the Accuracy status handles how much near to the maximum damage your character may hit in combat, let's say, If your monster has 70% accuracy, during an attack, your monster will have the chance to inflict between 70% to 100% of the maximum damage, but do notice that having the Accuracy status over 100% inverts this frame, since if your monster for example has 120% Accuracy, it will either inflict 100%~120% of damage during attack. Insane, isn't?

I've also made the maps a bit more pacific, so I can debug them on peace, beside I've been thinking, maybe the agressivity should be a characteristic from the monster, right? Maybe each monster could have that as their own behavior, instead of the map telling if they are either passive or agressive, who knows.

Anyway, that's all for today's news.

Turning the old version of Tamers Network Reborn disponible for download again.

I've decided to disponibilize again the old version of the game, so you can play it the way you want without issues, but since the new version of the game is under development, I'd like to recieve some feedbacks about the game, even though a number of stuff has changed from the old version to the new one, it would be cool to know what I should aim for, what you liked most in the old version of the game, and what feedback, suggestions and critics you have about the game. That may help the project more than you imagine.

Well, enjoy. Just please avoid a certain Piatuba stupid quest that is in-game, neither mention it, I tried to make a quest about a topic I had no knowledge about, and made a stupid nonsense quest instead, at least it made use of the Mail system, haha.

Mega - https://mega.nz/#!R053iJga!5SlZQOK6JQVJbBOCR0eEV5DN3AwiLBvCdF59URqOCCU

Before you begin, just a few things to be aware of.

1. The game has auto save which happens occasionally.
2. The game may freeze when you try to close the window.
3. When a textbox appear on a chat box, you may have to press Enter instead of clicking the Enter button to make the dialogue move.
4.  The hud is almost entirelly operated by the mouse, with the exception of the dialogues.
5. Multiplayer is not finished, do not expect much interaction with other people online, I guess even battle is broken, the least you can get from battling while in a party is sharing the exp and loot, I guess.
6. The game has a live market, things prices may lower and rise depending on demand or time.

Original post can be found here.

And then battles can be finished on TNR project.

Well'p, look's like I wont be able to do a progress report every 2 weeks, so better I say that I'll do the update reports at around 2 weeks, but that may change if something cool happens on the way.

And yes, the changes are related to battle system, but first, I'm going to talk about the part of the battle system that involves the game dialogues.

So, I've partially adapted the dialogues system of the game to the new battle system, so the game not only calls battle from npcs when asked for, but also will wait until the battle ends before continuing the script, it also allows the game to tell who has won the battle, but currently, the system only checks if either the caller of the script(the npc) or the one the script is being executed to (the player) has monsters capable of fighting in the party before beggining the fight, later I'll have to change that, because partially of what is to come.

I've also tried to place a secondary npc to join the battle I start, and it worked, the npc and my character, both had a Level 1 Kangaroo Mob, we were able to take down together a Level 2 Kangaroo Mob, that's some teamwork, right? And the best part, is that I've added a temporary script to make so the battle actually can end, so the player doesn't get stuck in battle, neither the monsters.

Beside those news are quite cool, I also noticed that I'll need to do some extra work, I'll have to make so the Healer Npc I've added for testing check if I have npcs following me, so the healing also affect them, but for that, I'll need to make them be recognized somewhat as being members of the same team, which means a Party system will have to be added in the future. Another thing I've noticed, is that the health, special and stamina regeneration are not working, I believe that may have been broken while I were adapting the scripts, I just will need to do It's linking again.

Now onto the battle system, beside being able to finish battles, I've also added a script to give the wining team the exp and loot rewards upon the battle end, and also while debugging that, I've been able to fix a bug that were causing the game to add to the monsters loot table non existing items, which I found out that was caused because of the map bound loot table, which adds map specific loots to the monsters that spawns on the map.

Even though those are really great changes, there are also a sum of bugs that are still on the game, most specifically on the battle system, one of them makes so the enemy monster ocasionally selects a null monster as target, I still need to investigate that, and there are several other bugs I'll have to fix aswell, but one thing that is not a bug, but I'll have to check anyway, is how I'll make the monsters drop bits (game currency), what tax they give and how much more related to level, or that or just leave the loot give you the bits currency by selling to a npc.

Now for the changes ideas, soon enough I'll try to implement something I've planned for quite some time, add a system where the monster gets increased loot rates on items based on the level, so let's say, If a monster has 51% chance of dropping a certain item at level 1, It will have 100% chance of dropping something at level 50, but there is a downside, If the monster is actually level 51, the loot rate will drop to 1%, If is level 55, goes to 5% and etc, that makes so rarer loots are more frequent to appear depending on the higher the level of the monster is, but also lowers the drop rate of common loot. I believe I'll have to test those percentage values when making the system to see if it's not too insane for balance, so the idea might change in the end, at least you wont need to pass day and night to grind for an item whose drop rate is really low.

Another idea, is that I thought about adding some minor physics system to the game, so when a monster gets knocked back or gets tossed in the air, It will reach the floor and then return to it's formation place, this is quite hardcore, so I'll have to work sometime in the future.

And to finish, I'm having real troubles to do the player sprites, most likelly because I get not much idea of how to do it, you may notice by the photos posted latelly, that comparing the monster sprites and the player sprites, the monster sprites are quite of better done, while the player sprites are quite poor, I guess I'll have to look at some character sprites on the web to have ideas on how to make the character sprites on the game, and then rework the outfits, beside I'll have to rework aswell all tiles in the game, and possibly make the game have a 2x zoom on the image.

Also I still have to make more monster sprites on the game, but I didn't got any good time to work on them latelly, but I guess I'll eventually have a good moment for me and the spriting to work.

Well, that's all for today's news, and I'll finish this news by leaving a photo of my character and a npc facing a wild monster, good luck trying to guess which of the monsters is the one I'm controlling. And yes, that's also something else I'll have to do in the game, beside also making the battle be less confusing.

Edit:. I've also added a scaling to the battle system based on the window size, the only cheat is that on the world map you can see more than other players on lower resolutions can, but I'll fix that in the future.

And also added the arrows telling the teams, so now you have an idea of what monster I'm currently controlling in the game. Right click the image and click View Image to see it in full screen, if you want to have a better dimension of the changes.
Ps:. Their coloring is bad, and the eye colors is a mistake right now, I'm going to remove in the future.

Wall of text and changes on TNR

Heh, I took less long to post those news, eh? Beside I remember I have promissed that would showcase the Dog Head monster sprites and tell more about it, but not going to do that right now.

Well, I guess you guys are tired of so much battle news, but I'm nearly finishing the core of it, the rest I can see while working on something else. One of the things I wanna show off today is the spell casting, beside based on the last news I launched, the game haven't got any hud news either, so better I tell you what changed since the last screenshots spoiled, but for that, better I show you the image of the game current progress in battle so I can talk better about it.

 Beside It look's quite ugly, the image above depicts both teams, not only you know which team the monster belongs to by their name colors, but there is also a ring under the monster that carries the monster team color, being that the monster names above their head wont stay on the final game, since I were using it to debug the battle status, there is also the old hud area on the top left that shows the time until the next turn in a yellow bar (not visible in the image), aswell as a few monster infos, like name and health. The bar also gained an extra functionality, when a monster is casting or preparing a skill, It will load a green bar, which when filled and is possible for the monster to attack, the monster will make use of it's ability. Let's say for example...

The Kangaroo Monster uses the Punch skill, It will be on the preparing to attack animation while the Green bar loads over the Yellow bar, when the bar is loaded and the action scheduled is for the monster, the monster will then use the ability It has been preparing, of course that also happens for the spell casting.

Talking about spell casting, the spell casting skills are also in, aswell as spell casting animation, you can see that the Dog Monster and the Cait Sith are casting a magic spell, aswell as have a circle with some moons on their feet (had no better idea for cast circle), they got animation for casting, which they are seen casting it, even looking like they are saying something, and when the spell is ready, it is casted, the only downside of casting right now, is that the spell damage is low compared to the melee damage, but that depends on the monster, since the INT status is quite low for some of them, that lead me into thinking that I should kind of shrink the status of the monsters, to make so they have less disadvantage when casting spells, even more due to the idea I had to it.

Spells are supposed to be powerful, but shouldn't be spammable, instead of what happens to the skills, they wont use Stamina to attack, but instead will use SP, the SP has solid numbers compared to the Stamina (which is a percentage), beside they increase with the level and status, the number is still limited, but that will allow you to cast x number of a spell before running out of mana, right? Then I thought about something, what if the mana cost of the spell rises by 25% each time you use spells consecutivelly? Spells will still be dangerous and skill usage wont be devalued, but only testing to find out how it will work, possibly that might be another thing I should look for in the future.

Returning to the news, I've also added menus to the battle, so one no longer need to watch the character auto attack because there were no way of selecting action, as you can see on the image bellow, the menu is like the one from the old version of the game.

That also brings a difference though, the way the hud script works changed, aswell a few things, like being able to see an arrow above the head of the one currently taking an action, aswell as an arrow above the head of the one being targetted (beside you'll have a hard time finding it because of the monster names...).

Also, the following photo isn't actually in the game right now, because due to an accident with ctrl+z overflow, I ended up breaking the battle script and losing 3 hours of work, but no worry, I reimplemented most of the hud work back, beside I didn't liked the result of the hud, I have added a victory hud before the grief, It looked like this:

On the original planning, there would be a frame for the tamer information aswell, but what kind of tamer information would need that one huge box?

Anyway, so many ideas, so much to work on, so much to implement, but whatever, the results are surprising, I even added a battle zooming system, which may be useful in the future.

Now on the monster side, I've got to say that making up monsters isn't that easy, I've been playing some games latelly to give me some light on how to make unique, cool and fearsome monsters, and part of it lead me into thinking about adding monster outfits feature to the game, the outfits could be used for a monster variant, or to add an extra customization to it, so each monster look less like one another, or help in the matter of regional monsters, that'll add a bit more of work, but is something I may look for in the future.

Another ideas related to monsters, was of making portraits, beside I believe that will be very painful for me, at least that will make their face images more cool looking. And the last idea related to monster, is adding quotes, when they do or suffer an action, the monsters say something during the combat, or maybe even out of combat aswell, that idea look cool, I got to see how it will look when I add it.

Well, that's all for today's news, sorry for not bringing here the informations about the Dog Monster, but maybe in a future update I'll talk about it, beside I have aswell some status rebalancing to do, and aswell finish the core parts of the battle system, since skills like Defend and Wait aren't implemented, can't make the battle tactical if the players and npcs can keep spamming their strong attacks, anyway, until the next news.

Diving in bugs and glitches on TNR project.

Well, not sure how to begin this news, there wont be any spoiler photo right now, because I prefer to show it at works when It's actually somewhat working.

I've been working on the skill system of the game, trying to implement skill casting, aswell as trying to implement animations to the project, right now, both are heavily bugged, for some reason the monsters decides to say "s**** spell casting" and launches the skill right away, on other side, the skill animation positioning is a bit glitchy, because of the way the positioning works when drawing on the map, and to finish the sum, the animations right now have a frame of delay before playing it entirelly, because If I change the way It plays the animation, bugs will happen, even more if the drawing frames per second is higher than the updating frames per second.

Anyway, the Kangaroo Monster and the Cait Sith has gained already their Casting and Launching animations, the Dog head monster will recieve it in the future.

On other news, I'm thinking about beggining to work on a new monster to the project, but I'm still trying to get ideas about it, maybe I should check out the old text only monsters the project used to have for ideas. I know I could try to make the monster sprites using as base the images the old spriter has made for the project, but I don't think that it's really ethical to do something like that without his permission, even more since he hardworked to make the sprites, I know that.

I also am thinking about animations I could do for the existing monsters, so the number of different attacks exists somewhat, I've made an animation of a double punch for the Kangaroo Monster, some animations I plan on doing are a Upper Cut and a Tail Smash attack, maybe even a Body Slam attack animation aswell, even more since the Body Slam attack surelly would need only 1 frame.

Anyway, this was all for today's news. Let's hope the bugs will be squished on the next news, hehe.

Until next time.

Attack Vs DPS

 This post is unrelated to TNR project, but if you're an aspiring developer, I recommend you to read.

People usually makes a formula to determinate what is the dps of a weapon when attacking, generally getting the weapon speed, pass it to seconds and then multiply by the base damage of the weapon, but what If one wants to make the weapon deal the exact dps damage per hit?

Having the damage being discounted before checking the defense of the enemy, or if it's a critical hit, may cause devaluation of the equipment, causing the weapon itself to feel really not worth using compared to a one second attacking weapon, so what you have to do is leave that calculation of dps to after you have the final value of the damage to inflict.

Let's say that I have a weapon that inflicts 40 damage, the enemy has 10 of defense, but it's dps is of 0,8 seconds, that's when I build the formula:

Damage * Dps - Defense

If I do the calculation on that formula, the damage inflicted will be 22.

40 * 0.8 - 10 =  22

Ps:. In this case I didn't needed to round the result, since 40 * 0.8 results in 32, but if your game health status isn't a decimal variable, you'll have to convert it to integer when placing the value, or rounding it.

But If I do the calculation:

 (Damage - Defense) * Dps

The damage actually will actually be:

 (40 - 10) * 0.8 = 24

Do you notice the difference? It's small but very significant, that little difference of 2 numbers may end up defining if the equipment is worth using or not, aswell as cause frustration on the players, a player may find a dagger that inflicts damage every 0,33 seconds of use, is actually better at damage dealing than a hammer that takes 1,5 seconds to use, the players may avoid using it due to the low damage dealt per second, compared to a weapon that has the damage near 1 second of use, so when you attempt to make a game where the inflicted damage of the weapon is actually the dps, do not discount the damage before the defense calculation, do the damage minus defense calculation first, and then apply the DPS mod.

That's all for my developer blog post.

Well, I just did it. TNR Spriting and minor skills progress.

Hey guys, remember the two monsters I spoiled a few posts ago? Well, I finished a number of their animation sprites.

I made the Dog Slime sprite be less detailed, because that would give me one hell of a job to do all the other frames sprites coloring, aswell as made the Attacking, Hurt and Defeated animation, here a look on how the Dog Slime look right now.

Don't be tricked by it's eyes and silly face, that may be one of the most dangerous monsters in the game, at least right now.

For now I'm going to neglect the Dog Slime monster,  in the future I may post a news talking more about it's animations, because right now the spotlight goes to Cait Sith. Ps:. If I forget to place a spotlight on the Dog Slime, please remember me.

Another monster that also got some more sprites is the Cait Sith, It has gained a proper tail animation for when walking, aswell as attack sprites, check out the animation:

You wont believe, or maybe will believe, but the tail was the hardest part of the animation, If the image weren't blurry, you would see that I have done some extra work on the tail to make the animation look more fluid, and not need me to make the tail move in weird ways during movement.

But the best part of the day was doing the attack animation, I did it right, I'd say, because even I am impressed with how the animation look, but I'll not show that yet, to keep the drama. *evil face*

Alongside the Tail animation while in movement, aswell as the attack animation, I also made an preparing to attack animation... Which actually doesn't seems really cool?

Well, I'm using the main menu to see how the monsters are looking while in battle, so that explains... What you see. (Ps:. Don't mind the fact that the eyes of the Dog Monster is transparent, I'm still studying how to add eye colors on the game, so they have no retina right now, beside saying this makes the monster sounds way more creepy.)

That was intended to be the preparing to do an action animation of the Cait Siths, I did that animation before making the attack animation, but after I did the attack animation and were doing some basic shading on it, I found out that one of the frames from the animation is actually good enough to be the preparing to do an action animation, and so I changed the animation above to:

I got really impressed at how I did that sprite, I guess I could even use that sprite as avatar somewhere in the web, but still, that sprite animation called my atention, most likelly the one where the monster is facing the screen, If I keep doing cool sprites for the monsters, soon you guys will have one interesting looking combat, beside the sprites...

Anyway, about the sprite is my opnion, maybe someone will dislike the sprite, and that person may probably be you.

On other hand, I've also made a change on how the skills will handle the attack animation, when the monster is created in the database, It will bind the animation id of the monster that will be used on the skill, so when the skill goes on effect, the animation will be used when necessary, the animation itself wont have impact on the skill effect, like damage and etc, but at least will make the skills more livelly, I  guess that is how it is said?

In the battle planning, I still have a number of things to do, includding adding a proper interface to the battle, aswell as making so the battle isn't confusing to find out whose team is which, or whose monster is from who, because right now, I wonder if you can distinguish from which team is each monster, beside thanks to the Kangaroo Mob that wont be too hard to find out, sigh...

Well, until next news.

Oh, anyway, as a kind of extra, I'm not really the kind of guy who'd spend more time spriting than programming, but in my case, I used a technique that is actually working, involves listening to some radio, aswell as when procastination tries to attack when you're doing something, just think of that ad motto, "Just do it!", you'll feel like continuing what you were doing, and when you notice, you already did a lot.

I've been able to do wonders due to that phrase, because seriously, just do it, don't think.

Edit:. Talking about the avatar, here it goes.

 Hehe, I still can do a few tricks with Paintm beside the shadow on the center of the body is weirdly placed :/, gotta check that out later.