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).

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.

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

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.

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);

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.


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!

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.

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

I can always send you the fixed sound files or any other assets if you want them.

Regarding room speed, 60 is definitely much better than the default 30 as you have more flexibility for things like menu panning, animations, and dialogue speed settings. I originally started at 30 then I changed it to 60 after finding out that max dialogue print speed is capped by the room speed and 30 just wasn't fast enough.

As far as head shakes go, I didn't use surfaces for those. Basically what I do is draw the sprite in parts using draw_sprite_part() and just change the x or y of the head part in the step event. Shudder is similar though I use draw_sprite_scale() and simply change the y value slightly via step event.

Surfaces are better for things like the minimap, battle HUD, status page, and other non animating things. Basically what a surface does is it essentially creates a temporary sprite for you to use. For things like the battle HUD where you'd loop through every HP / MP 1 at a time drawing the bar, (again, this would be every step of the game) a surface allows you to run the math once, then you just draw the surface from then on. Saves having to run the for loops and all the text draws which should help prevent memory issues. It's also great because when you pan the surface, you don't have to worry about adding a "+- Pan" to the x / y values of everything in the draw function, just the surface.

The friendship system from sf3 is definitely a commonly requested feature and would be fun to see at one point. I've never played sf3 so I'm not 100% familiar with how it works, but from what people tell me I could see it being a fun implementation.

 

I figured it was just WAV that supported fading. It's a shame really that GM doesn't allow for fading with all sound formats.

I noticed that your 'select' sound has a click that plays after it. I had the same issue with some sounds early on, fixed it by opening the file with a sound editor and cutting out the blank space at the end.

Just curious, what is your gamespeed set to?

Nonetheless, everything is looking good so far!

Ah that makes sense. I actually ran into memory issues with WAV files early on so I didn't use them for BGM.

As far as studio goes, it has some nice features but there is 1 thing that drives me insane. In 8.1, if I start up the game, it loads within seconds. In GMS, I have to wait for the thing to compile for a  minute before finally giving me the loading screen. When you have to constantly reload the game (for things like HUD display layouts) it becomes painful lol.

I have a tile size variable in mine as well, though it isn't really noticeable yet.

Syro is going good. I just haven't had much time to make an update video or post anything because of how much work I've had these last few weeks. I'll see if I can make one soon.

I noticed that you got your music to fade in / out. I know GM doesn't support fades for mp3's so I was just curious what format you were using or if you found a way around the system. GM's sound functionality is quite limited so it drives me nuts lol.

And yeah, I do plan on releasing my source code when I'm finished, though I'll have to port it to the newer version of GM since 8.1 is no longer available for download. Really there's only 1 major issue with porting and that is that they changed the way maps work so my move and attack ranges don't run correctly. I'll get that sorted eventually when I focus on porting the project.

As far as the name goes, you could always think of it as some sort of ancient world modification device since the ancients were super advanced anyways lol. The Nazca ship does have a ton of unknown components to it

The map editor looks nice though a zoom feature might be nice so you can see more of the map at once.
Looking forward to more of your progress!

Oh hey another GameMaker project!
It sounds like you're off to a good start keep up the good work.

Regarding Youtube, you shouldn't have to worry about the video getting taken down. From what I can tell, that whole issue was resolved ages ago.

If you ever have any questions on how to go about implementing certain things let me know!
Looking forward to seeing your progress!