Phantasmaburbia

This website is no longer updating!
You can find me at Dumb and Fat dot com!

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Phanta Progress Update 5/25

I've made a number of changes to Phanta this last week and I've been sharing them around on forums, decided to collect all the info and post it to here for posterity! A lot of this has been in response to some very helpful comments by players, so I want to give a big thanks to everyone who's been giving me crits and pushing the game to improve.

-I've altered the lighting engine to create more colorful scenes, and you can see an example of the new color scheme below (from back when I still had some programming kinks to work out)
Photobucket
(Click)


-I've updated the mouse movement and made it a little more "smart," so characters will typically circle around objects if they're mistakenly guided into one.

-Battle speed has been played with a bit to make faster, more dynamic battles. What this translates to is:
1- When you're not selecting an attack, battle speed is bumped up 4x so that the turns quickly fly by. Once your selection menu is up, though, it resumes its usual speed so you have time to select attacks.
2- The fewer party members you have, the faster battles move since you have less to select for
So battles go by a good bit quicker now, without becoming more challenging.

-Enemy "death" animations now show them becoming smaller ghostly versions of themselves and rising up offscreen, something more fitting of the ghost theme.

-Made a number of edits to dialog boxes, making them better match in quality with their portraits:
Photobucket
(Click)


All those in addition to numerous little tweaks, bugfixes and housecleaning to tighten the game. I've made pretty decent progress as far as plot/cutscene stuff goes as well. A demo might be fast approaching once I have a lot time to sit down and crunch on the game again.

Here's a parting little screenshot with background art I've just done today;
Photobucket
(Click)

5 comments:

Greg said...

I played the demo and I'll definitely pick this up when you release it. I love old-school RPGs. This reminds me a lot of the Mother series (albeit creepier), but is impressive so far. Love Jason Covenant's music in the game, too.

One comment about the initial battles, I died pretty easily, but then again I might have missed a first aid kit if there was more than one.

Anyway, looking forward to the finished game!

SoraRX said...

Lookin awesome! I'll work out a why to buy this for sure.

Nathan said...

Nice! It's a cool change to speed up the battles UNLESS you're going to do a thing like in Dubloon where you have items that increase your speed in battles. Personally I thought that was a really cool part of the game, but if you'd rather not go that route the 4x faster change except in menus is a genius change :)

Josh said...

Have you improved th animation of the ghosts? There little tails shit me to tears.

Unknown said...

Hey, I played your game that you posted on GMC forums.
It was awesome, really.

I'd definitely love to buy it when it comes out. :)