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Choose Your Fate... and Character


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#1 HeroOfFire

HeroOfFire

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Posted 04 August 2021 - 06:18 PM

A few months later, and more milestones reached.

First off, the second pass of areas has been completed. All 52 areas have reached their final form, with hopefully more points of interest. This brings the item total up to 767 normally and 317 for Shorter Mode.

can you tell there is one last area with 8 items left to add?

In addition, default item locations have been set again, so you don't have to play with randomized items. That said, randomized items will be forced on for Shorter Mode and the NewGame+ Weapon Shuffler.

New and Improved Minimaps! Get a better feel for the flow of the area when you pick one up.

All expanded weapons are in, choosing the expanded weapon randos will give you pools of 375 weapons to try out.


The latest requested feature: Build a Character as you Go

Sometimes you don't know what you want your character to be good at, or maybe you want to adapt to what you find. With this new option, you just need to choose your base stats and order of shield upgrades at the start, and will be given suggestions what kind of build those stats will be good for. Then when you level Skill you get empty weapon skill slots. To fill them, first go under the leveling menu.

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If you have an open slot, you can press L or R to bring up a skill learning menu. Note if you have an empty slot, the Leveling Icon in the subscreen will have an arrow over it.

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From here, select one of the weapons you have assigned to an action button. You will be shown what the weapon types for each weapon are.

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Now you can select one of the weapon types to gain that Weapon Bonus.

A few rules about this mode.

Each slot is pre-determined if it is a Cost or Damage bonus.
Cost bonuses are slots 1, 3, and 6.
Damage bonuses are slots 2, 5, and 7.

You cannot select the same weapon for multiple slots. However...

Slot 4 is an exception to the above rules. First off, you can choose any weapon, even repeats, and also won't count as a repeat for slots 5 and 6. Second, this will be your Weapon of Choice (as long as Weapons of Choice are enabled). A reminder, these get an extra cost bonus applied to them, as well as increased base damage in a few cases. Lastly, you can choose this bonus to be either a Cost bonus or a Damage bonus.

Slot 7 does not prompt you for a weapon, and instead uses whatever weapon you chose for slot 4 / Weapon of Choice.

If you have the NewGame+ option for passive abilities enabled, you can select an ability after you've filled slot 4 / chosen your weapon of choice. Several abilities apply a bonus to a select weapon type, which will be one of the weapon types of the weapon of this slot.


With this, now you can easily make a character of your own play style. And of course, maybe you want to share them...

With the general stability of weapons and passive abilities, character codes should no longer vary between demos. You can grab your character code from the starting house.

Then, in a new save, select "Random Characters". You might notice the tooltip mention loading from a code. When you select a random character and go to the confirm screen, you can press Ex1 to bring up a code entry screen. Enter the desired character code here. Just like entering a seed, L and R allow faster scrolling through characters.

A few notes about this...

Character codes are normally 21 characters long. However, passive abilities add another 3 characters. You can use the same code regardless if abilities are toggled off, but will need to ignore the last 3 characters on the end. You also could use a code without a passive with abilities toggled on, but might need to trial and error the last 3 characters.

Likewise, Expanded Weapons needs to be enabled to use codes if a character has a weapon of choice exclusive to that option. An easy check is if the item appears after row 25, after the "Demon Driver" Dark / Barrier weapon, or if the second letter in the code is after "j".

and yes, I realize code entering is abusable and could be used to manually generate a crazy character, but you know what, go right ahead

I would suggest posting a screenshot of your character sitting in front of the character code book with your weapon of choice on A if you want to share them. You can share codes for randomly generated characters too. Just make sure to specify if you played with passive abilities enabled or if you think the weapon of choice is exclusive to the expanded pool.

I am also looking into having an external file for character codes the quest can read from, this may be added in a later update...


Another new change, I've added a few more passive items to the pool.

There is now a 4th Shield Upgrade. This is basically the "block all" upgrade, letting you block all the weapon types the various Shield 3s could. This also means the order of Shield upgrades only matters for the 2nd and 3rd upgrades. You still have the ability to block Fireballs and Boomerangs regardless of which Shield 3 you get.

There are also Speed Upgrades in the pool. These permanently increase your speed by about 12.5% each. That said, this feature does come at a small cost...

Known Bug - In Alpha 92, you can sometimes move a pixel too far into a wall moving left or upward. This will be fixed in the next public build, which hopefully will be soon.


Anyway, this quest is getting closer to completion. The remaining areas to work on are either end game or bonus content. Most of the remaining development is either updating systems that have gotten a little outdated like bosses, or things that needed area development mostly finished. I am also considering splitting the quest options into a character options page, and then a new page called "Game Rules". This new page will be for the options that don't apply to any sort or random generation like enemy strength, but also for upcoming planned options, like toggling a shortcut to make the Magic Key optional in a run.

If you need a refresher on previously added features or accessing NewGame+, I suggest looking back on my previous updates for the full descriptions.

Anyways, enjoy creating your own characters and seeing the completed areas!
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