Ye Olde Blah

I just realized that the last update I made on here is almost a year old lol.

Here's the latest demo link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-F-g-NTmRRdZWNEd3F4Qk1LQzQ/view?usp=sharing

A full changelog can be found in the readme if you want more detail on everything that's changed. Overall the game is running super smooth and is nearing feature completion. The latest demo contains the first part of the main story up through battle 2.

I also made a short single battle demo a while back testing out the laser eye, hidden units, and status effects. Nothing special but you might find it fun to check out.

Laser Eye Demo:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-F-g-NTmRRdaktCV2JIM2s1TFE/view?usp=sharing

Chris also recorded a playthrough of my latest demo which was quite fun to watch.
https://youtu.be/f8bcGt3kORs
https://youtu.be/KzTrCoExW-k

The gameplay was fun to watch! Gonna definitely download it and check it out during the weekend. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for the support! I appreciate it!
I'm currently working on a bunch of quality of life stuff for the next update. Mainly the save / load system, church and caravan menus, and getting weapons to display correctly in battle cutscenes. There's a bunch of other super small things mixed in there as well, but overall they aren't too important.

The entire church menu is complete now. Save and Load works like a charm. I also made promotion more flexible, allowing for multiple promotion tiers if one chooses. The SF2 special class promotions also work and they can also look at any statistic as well. For example, maybe a character can become a special class when they are poisoned, or if they have over X amount of kills, ect.

Should you utilize multiple promotions, you can do something like the following:
Mage -> Wizard -> GrandWizard
Mage -> Wizard -> BattleMage (with mage's dagger)
Mage -> Sorcerer (with Magic Book) -> GrandSorcerer
Mage -> Sorcerer(with Magic Book) -> Warlock (If cursed when promoting)
Essentially, you now have more creative possibilities should you wish to go down that rout.

Oh yeah and we have some more options now too.
(http://i.imgur.com/R2qS57c.png)

if Perma death is enabled, you cant resurrect fallen units. When trying to 'raise' via the church menu the priest will say "Sorry, but even I cannot resurrect the dead."

Oh right, and weapons now work correctly in battle cutscenes for the melee animations. Ranged is going to be a little more complicated... Curse you explosive AoE arrows!

That interface looks so good! Nice to hear there's an option for perma-death too, it should make for some interesting challenges.

What was the hardest part of getting the church working? It's something I've put off doing because I hate building user interfaces.

I had a few people request a perma-death feature early on. It was easy enough to add so I went for it lol. Also as you mention challenges, I plan on adding achievements down the line so... good luck lol.

I don't really think any part of the church was terribly difficult, but as you said, menus are a pain. I hate working on them myself! When you get down to it though, all the church functions work relatively the same. I think the most annoying part is adding all the different possibilities such as not enough gold, no I don't want to raise this character, oops wrong button I want to back out of the menu, ect.

Raise was the first thing I coded up because the rest are pretty copy paste and change a few things. Basically you keep an array of your team members and iterate though it. If it goes through the whole list and no one is / was dead, you show the "no one needs my help" message. If someone is dead, you ask the player if they want to rez them for X amount of gold and so on.

Cure was pretty much the same thing as raise. The only difference is you have multiple loops (one for each ailment) and you're changing the status infliction variables rather than the death state one.

Promote was a little bit of a pain, simply because you also have to work with the member list UI as well. That and I had to create a script that tells the game if you can promote a character or not, what the level requirements are, do they have a special class, ect.

Save was actually the easiest thing. Just a loop with a massive wall of variables to save to an ini file. (or whatever extension you give it) I chose not to encrypt the save files at all for modding and testing reasons so if you open it up with notepad, it's all in plain English.

[Global]
Gold=210
StoryState=7
ForceMembers=6
BattlePartyNumber=6
TrainNumber=5
LastSaveRoom=47

[Chest0]
Looted=1

[Character1]
ID=1
Name=JASON
Class=SDMN
Level=1
Experience=70
Health=12
MaxHealth=12
Magic=8
MaxMagic=8
Attack=8
Defense=4
...ect


Although not really part of the church menu, Loading is essentially save in reverse. Read and create all the variables and room_goto(LastSaveRoom);

I finally got the tedious Advisor Menu done. The 4 options are Talk, Join, Leave, and Help.

Talk: Have a friendly chat with your advisor based on story state. (Sometimes required to advance plot)
Join: Add force members to your active battle party.
Leave: Remove people from your active battle party.
Help: Church functions.

I also added a global "Max battle party size" variable. By default it's set to 12. Karina's portrait has also been updated.

The remaining To-Do list for Alpha 1.4 is as follows.

-Fix Egress (Currently just restarts the battle and heals all characters)
-Add "Below ship map"
-Finish rigging characters for battle weapons
-Add ranged weapons (and exploding arrows) to battle cutscenes.
-Search in battle
-Battle platforms (Because y'all keep bugging me about this! lol)
-Polish existing dialogue / cutscenes.

Aaaand Explosive arrows are officially added. With some other stuff.
https://youtu.be/7VNBXni9XBg

This game is looking fantastic! Those battle custcenes are perfect and I love the explosive arrows too. Looking forward to trying out the alpha when it's released!

it's a nice little game. Thanks for sharing it.

Wow im really impressed man. Will keep an eye out for more updates. Thanks for your work.

Okay, projectiles are now more polished. I added a speed option for the projectile pan so that other projectiles (such as Kira's dagger throw) don't fly too fast to be seen. I also officially added the explosion tag. Now there can be more than 1 explosion or post hit animation for different projectiles or none at all.

-Kira's weapon has been removed from her battle sprite. (Now I just need to rig up her melee animation)
+Kira's dagger throw animation.
+Show weapon tag.

Also, I have now finally added the battle foregrounds (platforms) to the battle cutscenes. (So everyone who has been reporting this 'bug' since the pre-alpha demo no longer has to report it!) Honestly, it took 2 seconds. The reason I never added them before is that I was more focused on AI / other important gameplay stuff. But after a year of begging, I figured you guys deserve this one. :)

==================

There's only one last thing to add to the battle cutscenes now and that is figuring out whether or not to play a melee or ranged attack animation in the case of centaurs. I'll see if I can get that implemented before work today.

Alrighty. I officially fixed egress. Now it animates properly and takes you back to the last church you visited (unless otherwise overwritten due to story state). Also going along with this, your characters will no longer rez themselves due to the addition of the Church / Advisor menus.
+Search in battle has been added.
+All characters have been rigged up for weapon displays in the battle cutscenes.

All that's left is some minor polishing work. I'll be going through the cutscene dialogues to make it flow better (still not happy with the early game stuff) and adding the below ship map (so you have somewhere to egress to during battle 2).

Wow, this looks amazing! I have wanted to see a project like this happen for a long time, and would have engaged myself in it if I had any particular skill or patience for programming...I'm a musical guy, so music is my forte! :D Is there a way to help or be involved? I would really love to do so!

Hello Edvard. As of right now the best way to help out with the project is to play the demos and report any bugs or spelling / grammatical errors, and to offer feedback on the gameplay and the story so far.

I'll probably be dealing with assets such as sound effects, music, and art at a later date once the game is closer to completion. Mainly because with work and real life stuff, I don't know how long this project is going to take me to finish and I don't want people waiting years to see their work in action. Nonetheless, if anyone wanted to offer their services in those fields, the help would be appreciated.

===================

Anyways a little update.
I'm currently halfway done with revising the prologue story. Although this wont be seen for a while yet, it will be important moving forward. After that, I'll be touching up the dialogue and cutscenes in the previous demo and adding the below ship map.

Here's a rough sketch of what their home continent of Verdius looks like. I figured I'd share this since you really don't get to see it at all due to the story taking place on Athalen. The player starts this game in Moorenfirch, and that cave in the back of battle 1 actually leads to Merillian City. So that being said, the main reason I never made the cave explorable is because it would likely lead people to want to explore the rest of the continent XD. Nonetheless, I WILL be adding the cave map once I figure out how I want to implement torches and tunnel vision.

Alright. I got a prototype for tunnel vision working. As per normal SF, you now get a black screen with a small hole for you to see through when in a cave. I added an option to better smooth the circle, allow for a dynamic radius (no longer limited to 1 size), and it can also allow for multiple light sources (torches on walls eventually).
Oh right. And you can set the alpha of the entire screen too, so you can create easy night settings.

It needs a lot of work yet, but for the most part, it's functional.

Okay, this turned out to be way more fun and useful than I originally thought it would be. I didn't bother making this blend correctly as this was just done to test out the new lighting system but... you get the idea.

(http://i.imgur.com/cNqHw2L.png)

Updated Historian (Damian) Minas (your advisor) and Karina's portraits. They still seem a bit off compared to those seen in SF, but that's to be expected as I'm no professional. Basically I found some free assets online, downresed them to fit in the portrait window, and traced over them.
(http://i.imgur.com/WJBQAgh.png)

If you have any pointers, let me know!

I love how the torches light up the area too! They're a fairly small change but I think they could improve dark battles significantly.

One thing I should add too is that the main light (typically following the cursor / active character) can also be removed, making it so that torches are the only light source in an area. Most of the new lighting features are done for 2 reasons.

The first is that I'd like to have the ability for you to cast blaze outside of battle to light caves and such allowing you to better explore them.

The other thing is that I have a few night / campfire scenes planned, so I'll be making use of a ton of the features then.

Anyways, down to the easy but time consuming part now. Map design and cutscene touchups. (Assuming I don't randomly decide to add something else)

When do you project that the final, completed version of this game will be available?  Also how many hours of gameplay are anticipated in the final version?

It's hard to say when the final version of the game will be completed as work and such has a tendency to get in the way. That and GameMaker likes throwing unforeseeable obstacles at me XD. I'm pretty garbage at predicting ETA's, but if I could work on this project full time, with 100% motivation, I'd say it's highly likely that I could finish the game within 3 months. (Depends how long it takes to get a better item use system working) This estimate also doesn't take into consideration the 1 final code overhaul to get everything nice and shiny for future games, but it's not really required for this one.

As far as how many hours of gameplay will it be, that too is a good question and hard for me to answer. As the game's creator, I know every little quirk and AI trigger which allows me to play through the game much faster than most. Any SF fan would also be able to play through the game much faster than those unfamiliar with the genre. (Or slower if they start searching every tile for secrets)

The plan was to have the game be somewhere around 20 battles so I'd estimate 10-20 hours for a first playthrough. Now that being said, I'll also be adding difficulty options and achievements to the game as well, so those too will increase playtime at least for completionists.

Alright I tweaked the dialogue in a few cutscenes to make it flow a bit better. I also completely re-did the town meeting cutscene. It should now be a bit more interesting and less of a boring exposition dump. The next step is to create the cave and below ship maps and add a few more searchables.

Work was quite busy over memorial day weekend but I'm back at it.

For those of you who have been bugging me since the initial alpha release to let you enter the cave, well... you finally do get your cave. On one hand, I feel like the cave map is a little too big, but eh, realistically, the Eastern Pass would be of a similar size, and the layout is too nice to shrink down.

The next step is to finish ripping all the tiles for the tileset and texture up the map. Then I finally get to fill it with goodies which leads me to my next dilemma. What goodies do I put in the cave...

See, the cave has been such a long awaited addition to the game that it has to have something useful in there for either now, or later in the game. Now, although a medical herb or two would be useful for the early game, the chest in town (that currently gives 30 gold) was originally planned to contain one. (Didn't add it originally because item use wasn't working at the time). So, that being said, I spent some time figuring out what I wanted to do with this situation and, I got a pretty fun solution. I hope you guys like solving puzzles!

Here's a little teaser image for the cave map.
(http://i.imgur.com/roYRHJb.png)

+3 new items!

(http://i.imgur.com/jH9kVKG.png)

This game looks better every time I see it!

Hey man, it still shocks me how far this project has come. Hell, go check out "Update 3" on my youtube channel. Crazy stuff lol.

Anyways, I slightly changed how searching works in order to allow for "un-detectable" objects and bringing up the menu (for reasons you'll see in the demo (if/when you figure it out)). Now interactable objects have a "instant interact" variable which bypasses the need for the search menu. By default, interactions are instant.

Torches appear alive and flicker their brightness.
Followers slightly illuminate the area.
The changelog for 1.4 is now the longest as far as updates and new features go.

And I'm halfway through the last secret cutscene. It's my favorite so far and I cant wait to share it with you.
Hoping to get this update out soon!

It, is finally done.

I have finally completed the new demo. Although I didn't continue the story any in this update, much of the early game has been tweaked and fleshed out. The most notable changes being the addition of the cave and below ship maps, some secret cutscenes, weapons displaying in battle, being able to loot chests in battle, and the church/advisor menus (Finally got a way to save the game!).

Overall, the early game has a lot more exploration and some fun new cutscenes if you try searching for the renewal gem.


And here's the new demo.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-F-g-NTmRRdY2R6eHdXYXhPd3c/view?usp=sharing
As always, if you encounter any errors, let me know how you managed to break my game. Send me a screenshot of any errors and if possible, hit F5 and send me the savestate that GM creates. (Not to be confused with the ones that the church menu creates).

Cheers!

~Chaos

Edit:
Fixed issue with Medical Herbs restoring 0 HP and crashing on slots 3 and 4. Download link has been updated.

Congratulations! Looking forward to trying this out!

Am I ok to upload the demo to the download area here?

Yeah man go for it.

Managed to get some time to record an update video.
https://youtu.be/rHYgQjZfUkA

Item use has now been updated to be easier to add and work more efficiently. That being said, All consumable items from SF2 have been added. Global targeting (ie, aura 4) has also been added along with a restore mana effect. Power potions can be used during battle now, and the antidote and fairy powder can be used outside of battle.

AI has also been updated. First off, the characters were following the shortest path as opposed to the quickest one. The second issue was that they had a tendency to form a single file line when moving towards the player. Now they will avoid forming said line.

Bookshelves / inspectibles have been generalized and are now easier to add.
Oh right one more thing, spells and items can stack effects now. So a medical herb can restore health, mana, and cure you of all status ailments if you wanted to go down that rout.

Cool, when can we play!?

You can play the early part of the game now. This one is the latest demo.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-F-g-NTmRRdY2R6eHdXYXhPd3c/view?usp=sharing

I'll be finishing the rest of chapter 1 for the next demo though it might be a while before I get there as there's still lots to do.

The new character portraits are in!
(http://i.imgur.com/MgcpU66.png)

Working towards finishing up chapter 1 for the next demo. I've got 5 character portraits, and 3 maps left as far as art / design stuff goes. Then it's down to setting up the battles and cutscenes which shouldn't take more than a few days. My goal is to get it out early October, but I have a crazy work schedule this month so no promises lol.

Hey, I used to have an account on here a few years back, made a new one today as I couldn't remember my details (nor do I have access to the old email account I used anymore!)

It was great to see the demo up on the front page, just played it through and it runs really well. Felt like a true SF game and i totally forgot it was a demo until the final message popped up  ;D

Keep up the great work, looking forward to playing future versions :)

Lol, welcome back to the forums.

Glad to hear that the game ran smoothly and that you enjoyed it.

A little update:
I just finished battle 5 which took way longer than I expected due to a bunch of small additions and tweaks to the AI code. My goal for today is to get the final battle of chapter 1 finished and to code up the next cutscene.

All battles are finished and in working order. I'm currently working on playing my way through the game and adding the post battle cutscenes / linking up the maps as I go. It's not hard, but it is rather tedious.

super interested in this, with all battles finished how far out is a total release? and thanks i love homebrew games, i made a fan based beatem up off guardian heroes once.

Oh lol. By having all battles completed, I meant all battles that will be present in the next demo, ie. chapter 1. I don't have every battle for the entire game done lol. Sorry for the confusion.

As far as a total release goes, that's hard to say as that mainly depends on work schedule, motivation, and any other unseen issues that may arise in that time. First off, my main bottleneck points are art and dialogue. I'm not the best when it comes to artsy stuff so naturally that takes me a lot longer to get done. I also barely passed English class so... writing isn't really a strong point of mine either lol.

Anyways, if all art and dialogue scripts were done, I'd say I could probably bust out a chapter every month. I estimate the game to be about 4-5 chapters long which will be about 20-30 battles. That being said, the art has a tendency to triple that time as I'll spend an entire day to come up with 1 sprite.

All in all, I'd have to give a rough estimate of 1ish year yet. Shops are the only feature that's really missing at this point aside from small engine optimizations (Unless I've forgotten about something. There are too many features to keep track of in SF1 and 2 lol), so really I'm at the easy point now. :D

Thanks for your interest! I appreciate the support!

awesome. can't wait.  but i meant how long till the first chapter is done? cant wait to play it. super happy youre doing this.

btw if ever youre bored and feel like playing my fan game it requires no installation can use controllers and has branching paths. cheers brother.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/r2aeebrxzbcq7b4/GHDC.zip

Chapter 1 is down to 1 final cutscene, some portraits / overworld sprites, and some touchup work. I'm hoping to get it released within the next week or so depending on work schedule.

And I'll definitely try out your game if I can find a way to download it. Mediafire and a few other sites haven't worked for me in a few years for whatever reason. That's why I moved all my stuff over to google drive lol.

Today was a productive day. Town is now linked with the overworld / battle maps. I started work on fleshing out the town with searchables and NPCs, however the NPC's don't have any dialogue yet. I also added 8 '1 way door' objects to the game which I needed for ledges. And the final thing that was added today was the GameMaster cheat to the options menu. Essentially it allows you to control every unit on the map. I may make it so that it only becomes available if you have a save file from the end of the demo, but I'm not sure yet.

2100 lines of code into this 4 page long final cutscene. Halfway there!

Oh right, we also have a jump animation as well as overworld fireball and muddle animations.

Sounds like you're making some really good progress! Cutscenes are always a pain to build, especially once they get more complicated. Looking forward to seeing the finished result!

Chapter 1 is now available!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qA3gg_UN5AWZcL_9xkSDk3AniOnNY4Hd/view?usp=sharing

@Ty
Yeah... Cutscenes are a tedious pain lol. Especially this one (And I'm sure you'll see why when you play the demo).

Edit:
Updated the link to fix a few issues. Namely a crash if Jamie isn't with the party later on. The version is now 1.6.1

I posted about the project one the homepage: The Legend of Syro – Chapter 1 released (http://www.shiningsource.org/2017/11/the-legend-of-syro-chapter-1-released/).

I'm really impressed with everything you've managed to squeeze in so far, it really feels like a Shining Force game! The cutscenes are great, and I love the little head shakes, shrugs and animations. The battles I've played so far were fun and just the right size and difficulty. The only part that caught me out initially was throwing everything at the viking archer only to find out I had to beat everyone. But I tend to do that a lot so maybe it's just me :)

You've done an amazing job!

Thanks for the shoutout. I Appreciate it!

It may be some time before we see Chapter 2 as I want to polish up some things and correct a bunch of minor issues that I've seen while making Chapter 1. I'm planning on taking most, if not every, remaining feature off of the checklist for the next update so hopefully the engine will be 'feature complete' soon.

My brain on cutscene.

(https://i.imgur.com/WEo8ehl.png)

-Fixed a bug with level schemes. Darn typos lol.

The enemy death trigger is now added. Now if a certain enemy (or group of enemies) is wiped out, that can cause an update in AI for other units, cause currently hidden units to instantly reveal themselves, cause units to change teams or take poison damage, and so much more. Tyadran also requested the ability for relative spawning. In other words, if a slime mob dies, it can be split into several smaller slimes around that area.

I like the relative spawning idea! Do the AI units have different goals? I noticed in the demo (the ship battle in particular) that certain enemies head to specific spots, so I'm guessing there's an SF2 style setup. In the past I've had AI just target the most powerful/most likely to die character, but that always seems a bit unnatural.

AI works as follows:

First we have a switch for battle state which is updated based on the location of the player. If the player is near the start of the map, battle state is 1, and as they progress further, it is updated to a higher number. This is useful as it allows you to change a unit's AI based on player location. In the ship battle for example, some of their AI is set to move to a specific location until the player gets close enough to that area. Once the region updater gets triggered, so does their AI.

Within that switch, we have yet another switch which tests for a specific unit (so we can give each their own AI). Each unit has an ID which tells the game what type of monster they are, and a SubID which is used to tell individual groups or instances apart from one another. And finally, we get to the bit about how AI works.

I wrote a bunch of different AI action scripts that tell the character what to do. These are 1 liners that you can call to have a unit perform that action. For example, FindAttackableTarget will cause the enemy to attack a target in range, and AI_DoNothing will end that character's turn. Now, all of these scripts are basically 'attempts' for that character. In other words, if you call 'FindAttackableTarget' you're telling the character 'try to attack a target.' If that fails, it attempts the next action in the list. Here's an example:

AIDone = FindEnemyItemTarget(Character,14,'Normal',25,AIDone);//try to use a medical herb
AIDone = FindEnemyItemTarget(Character,15,'Normal',25,AIDone);//try to use a shining ball
AIDone = FindEnemyMagicTarget(Character,1,1,'Normal',25,AIDone);//try to cast heal level 1
AIDone = FindEnemyMagicTarget(Character,2,1,'Normal',25,AIDone);//try to cast blaze level 1
AIDone = FindAttackableTarget(Character,'Normal',AIDone);//attack target (if there is one in range)
AIDone = AI_MoveTowardsAttackableTarget(Character,10,15,AIDone);//walk closer to target

So this script here would cause the character to first attempt to use a medical herb on itself or an ally. If it cant find a target, or no one is in need of healing, then it tries the next thing on the list. Again, it tries to use a shining ball, if that fails, then it continues down the list and so on until something checks out.

Now to explain the arguments. First off, AIDone is used to quickly exit a script should one succeed. If a script succeeds, AIDone is set to true and at the start of each one of those scripts, if AIDone is true, then it exits as it already found an action to perform. Character is pretty much self explanatory, it's the guy performing the action.

Items:
FindEnemyItemTarget(Character,Item,ThreatScript,MinThreat,AIDone)
Item is the ID of the item that's being used. 14 is the ID for Medical Herb, 15 for Shining Ball, ect
ThreatScript is something that gives the user more control on target selection. Right now the only script I have is the 'Normal' one which basically picks the target that can either be dealt the most damage, or one that can be killed. Should you wish to make more advanced decisions like 'always go for the healer' or 'try to stand on 30%LE tiles' you can create your own threat script.
MinThreat is the minimum amount of threat that is needed for the script to succeed. So in the case of healing for example, you don't want them to cast heal or use a medical herb on someone who is only down 1 HP.

Magic:
FindEnemyMagicTarget(Character,SpellSlot,SpellLevel,ThreatScript,MinThreat,AIDone)
Magic works the same way as items. The only difference here is 'SpellSlot' which determines what spell slot they are casting from, and SpellLevel which determines what level it should be cast at.

Generic:
AI_MoveTowardsAttackableTarget(Character,Speed,MaxSearchDistance,AIDone)
In the case of NOT being able to act on a target, you have 2 other variables to worry about.
Speed is how fast you want that unit to move towards their destination. (in tiles)
MaxSearchDistance is how far from the unit are they going to search for a target. In other words, if this value is set to 15 and all targets are 16 or more spaces away, this script wont run.

===================

And this just scratches the surface with what you can do with AI. AI is one of those things that most people are concerned about when it comes to how it works and how flexible it is since that's the main part of any SF game. As such, I put in as much work as I could towards it to make it as easy to use and as flexible as possible.

So to answer your question, yes. AI units can have different goals.  ;)

Wow, thanks for the detailed answer! There's a lot of things there I hadn't considered before, so it's given me a lot to think about.

Merry Christmas everyone!
I added a nightmare challenge battle to the game which puts you up against all 66 enemies from chapter 1 all in a single battle royale. You can play this battle by setting 'Challenge Mode' to true in the options menu before starting a new game.

Best of luck! (You're going to need it)

(Version 1.6.2)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gJQsh2xI_R8HwE_QMU-tunq1SyP4e76H/view?usp=sharing

Hey guys it's been a while since I posted an update. I've been working on code cleanup lately so I don't have too many new features to share. The main menu was re-done to give challenges, cheats, and game settings their own tabs to avoid clutter. There is also a placeholder for achievements as well.

Regarding Cheats:
Using them will disable achievements (when those are added) and challenges wont be marked as 'completed' if you beat them while using cheats.

Regarding Challenges:
These wont have anything to do with the main story and are there to give the hardcore players a true challenge. Your team, items, and levels are pre-determined and based on the challenge you face. Egressing cannot be used to farm for Exp and will simply restart the challenge.

There's also been a ton of elemental damages and resistances added to the game as well as the buff and debuff spells. Debuff effects also have individual resistance variables, so if you wanted to make someone immune to sleep, but not muddle, you can do so. Oh right, and as per usual, weapons, items, and character stats all have access to these variables :D

I also re-did the camera system as GameMaker's default camera was giving me all kinds of problems. But on the bright side, we now have an option for both SF1 (Player is always on the center of the screen) and SF2 (Player can walk around a bit before the camera starts following) camera types. Oh and screen shake. That's working now too!

Characters now have an independent variable for the sprite they are using, so that's no longer tied to their ID and class. In other words, Max can now have that chicken form from SF1 lol.

Spells got an override script. So if a certain spell requires some custom tomfoolery, you can add that without breaking the main script.

AI controlled units now have an additional AI Trigger variable which can be manually set throughout the battle. Now they can look at both battle state (what region the player is in) and this variable as well. This makes things like 'oh, my friend died, I should probably run away now, or avenge his death' possible.

'Hit Chance' variable was added in anticipation for the addition of the muddle spell. (Muddle will be coming soonish...)

Movement Type can now be overwritten by weapons or items. Ever wanted a ring that switches your movement type to flying? :D

Counter attack damage was fixed. You now do 50% damage as opposed to the 25% that it was set to prior.

================

Much more stuff to come though. I've got a few more things left on the To-do list yet, but hopefully I'll be feature complete within the next month or two.

================

Oh and if anyone's interested, a few of us who are working on fan games and rom hacks have set up a discord channel to chat, share our work, and bounce ideas back and forth. If you want to swing by and say hi, you're more than welcome to!

Discord: https://discord.gg/cHFzAed

Fantastic work as always! Want me to put a link to the discord on the sidebar?

Yeah you can put the discord link on the sidebar if you want.

In other news...

New Spells not seen in Shining Force before...
https://youtu.be/SVc8xFH3tMk

And NPC circuits have been added to the game.
https://youtu.be/yvopi1coh8Y

Enjoy!

Monster summoning reminds me of Papetts from Shining Force III. There's a lot of possibilities there, and I'm looking forward to seeing more!

One down. 3 to go...
(https://i.imgur.com/OU9Rh72.png)

You got the wires (or maybe it's string, I don't really know) right and everything :D

Chapter 1 is now working again. Took a while to play through it and fix up all the bugs caused by re-coding half of the core code lol.

Oh right, the shop menu is completely done now too. Buy, sell, repair, deals, they all work. Items can also become damaged by using them in battle, break if you use them too much, drop from enemies, and get transferred to deals if a rare item drops that you don't have room for.

New update for LoS: (Beta 1.0)
This was a huge quality of life update and much of the core code has been changed. If I could get a few people to test it out, that would be great! As always, let me know if you find any bugs.

This update contains all of Chapter 1, a 'Control Enemies' cheat, the 6vs66 challege map (Good luck! you're going to need it!), and my Debug Test room which contains some new spells for you to mess with (Quake and Summon). Chapter 1 aside, all other features are accessed via the 'Options' portion of the main menu.

Download:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UrdyOMg7MBHjv6LWFSKB4Y1xax8Xv688/view?usp=sharing

Updated version with bug fixes.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1quNaKUIEHS6oNatBAcOAGodpDBU-FreQ/view?usp=sharing

Alright, I have 2 announcements today.

First off, I have a beta build available of the engine for anyone who has GameMaker 8.1 or GameMaker Studio. From what I hear, GameMaker Studio 2 comes with GameMaker Studio 1, so theoretically GMS2 users should be able to use it as well, but as I don't have it myself, I can't confirm that.

Some things to note before downloading the engine:
1. This is a beta build. Expect bugs, especially in the GMS version as I mainly use 8.1.
2. I don't have a tutorial or anything yet. This build is mainly for those with experience using GM so that I can get feedback on how to better optimize the codebase, and find bugs.
3. Both the 8.1 and GMS versions contain Chapter 1 of my game so you can reverse engineer it and see how it's done.
4. The GMS version has a small issue with Background Music that I haven't bothered fixing yet. 8.1 automatically stops the current BGM from playing if you start playing another. GMS requires you to manually shut off the current BGM before playing the next. Otherwise it starts playing both at the same time. I've yet to go through Chapter 1 and fix all the sound issues, but just be aware that they exist.
5. Map transitions need to be completely re-done for the GMS version as they removed the built in functions. The game still works as you'd expect, but the overworld transitions are instant rather than the SF2 style pan to the next room. I'll be updating those functions at a later date.

If you have access to GM 8.1 or GMS and want to take a look at the project file, shoot me a PM with your version of GameMaker and I'll send you the link.

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Anywho,
I officially started working on Chapter 2.

I created a rough draft of the world map as well as some other smaller maps seen in chapter 2. The scripts for the first 2 cutscenes have also been written, though they still need a bit of a polish.

World Map:
(https://i.imgur.com/pafMfVY.png)

Looking good! Definitely getting a strong SF2 vibe from the map and it looks like it'll be fun to explore.

I don't have GameMaker, but I've put a post on the homepage to see if anyone can help out.

Last I checked, there's a free version of GameMaker Studio 2 available on their website. As I mentioned earlier, it SHOULD contain GMS1 as well, but I'm not 100% sure as I haven't tested it myself.

Sometimes their free versions are the same thing, just with a "made with GameMaker" screen, other times there are resource limits. It usually depends on the version they are currently trying to promote lol.

Updated Download link for LoS. This version fixes an issue that appears early on in the game.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lTfG94tKUFQEdyBUaJq2bkSERu293eEE/view?usp=sharing