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[kurt91]

(Free cookie for whoever gets the reference!)

So, originally I had planned on putting off this update until I could provide a clear 60 FPS video to show off what I wanted everyone to see for this update. Unfortunately, YouTube doesn't seem to have that particular feature available yet, and it's been long enough that I'm tired of waiting.

The first thing that I want to bring up is the Expo that's coming up. Will there be a new demo to show? Possibly. No promises, though. Why is that, you may be asking? Well, I decided to finally fix my palette issues. You can't tell from the older screenshots, but the old palette was a real pain to work with, and broke some features that I had my heart set on such as dark rooms that use the candle to light up. Unfortunately, fixing the palette had the side-effect of breaking every single tile used in the game!

So far, I've repaired the Sunken Ship, Central Fields, Misty Forest, and Forest Ruins areas. While going through the process, I changed some colors and shades so that everything looks much nicer than it did before, with a much smoother gradient. Some graphics were redrawn entirely, and look much better in my opinion.

However, I feel that a demo needs to have a substantial amount of content to warrant being made. The previous Expo's demo, I watched every Let's Play and stream, as well as followed the Expo discussion religiously, taking very careful notes of every single complaint, bug report, and opinion made. I took a lot of time and care to address every single one of those issues in the following months, and it shows. The Giant Squid boss that everybody seemed to dislike has now become one of my absolute favorite bosses in the game so far. While I should be able to get back to the same amount of playable content as the previous demo, with many new features and tweaks done to improve it, the end result wouldn't so much be a playable demo for you all to enjoy as much as free bug-testing for me, and that's not what the Expo should be about. If I can't add at least a small amount of entirely new content, I would rather not include a demo at all.

This doesn't mean that I won't be submitting anything, however. I took the time to start a small side-project upon realizing that I may not be able to produce anything presentable at the Expo. It's not related to Balance of Power in any way, but there's enough there for a decent overworld to explore and a single full dungeon, both with some added scripted features. (Not my own scripts, but taken from the database.) Since this is a Quest Project Feed for Balance of Power and not that quest, that's all I'm going to go into the matter. Just be aware that there should be at least one, possibly two, entries from me at the Expo.

Back to the topic at hand, there are some more features completed that I wanted to mention. First of all, the animated fog now scrolls across the screen in the Forest area. This may seem like a rather pointless feature, but there is a practical reason for this. Like what was mentioned a lot during the Expo, and mentioned as having already been addressed in the previous update, the Forest's mist layer was originally very difficult to see through. Animated dithering to fake an added dose of transparency fixed the problem somewhat, but I found that the animation irritated the eyes in a different way. It got me wondering why the effect worked so well when used in the Sonic games, and not in my quest, and the answer hit me. Movement hides the dithering animation enough that it makes it look even more transparent and creates the illusion of it being done smoothly. This is why I wanted the video, and why pictures or even an animated GIF wouldn't have helped. Currently, it's slightly bugged, and disappears briefly whenever the screen scrolls, but I already have a way to fix it (I need to turn the FFC into a global script), so it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Regarding my issue regarding content, I've been expanding the Forest Ruins. There's now working dark areas (Hooray!), and a massive area to explore beyond the initial four screens you went through before leaving. This area includes a four-part boss battle (Think of the Stalfos Warrior from Link's Awakening, who you had to fight in four separate rooms), an alternate Bomb refill area, and added space for me to continue expanding for later return trips. Unfortunately, the boss battle in its current state is very much overpowered, and unless you're wanting to level grind up to the max level for the beginning areas, you're probably not going to be able to take this thing down. I suppose that I could consider it a Bonus Boss for now, considering that it's completely optional, but the final version uses it for foreshadowing the method needed to defeat a later boss.

Existing bosses have been tweaked as well. The Twin Scorpions boss has had their HP nerfed down to about half of their original amount, and been weakened so they don't kill you in two or three hits. In exchange, I fixed the glitch preventing them from shooting at you, so you aren't going to be able to get them into a position where you can exploit their movement and knockback into a no-effort fight. Unfortunately, I may have de-fanged them too badly as I've found that Link can easily abuse the same strategy, eat the damage taken from their shots, and win a straight-out war of attrition. I may have to tweak the damage done by their shots to make them more dangerous again.

Other than that, I've added some additional scripts to give it a more professional appearance. Bosses now each have their own HP meters in-battle, so you can see how well you're faring against them. The multi-phase boss that concluded the previous demo actually has a multi-layered HP meter that works identically to the boss meters in Kingdom Hearts. (No additional scripting trickery there, just different graphics for each screen that the boss uses.) Some other tweaks were made, and I even went and downloaded Audacity so that I can fix some audio clips that I'm not happy with.


So, that's pretty much it for this update. Next time you see this, it should hopefully be at the Expo. My goal is to at least get enough new areas built that I can give a new round of backstory and world-building for this quest. If not, there's at least my side-quest that I'm putting together, and if I get that done, I have a new proof-of-concept idea that I'd like to share if I can get it working. More on that later, though. I'm still working out the obvious kinks in the planning phase. Just keep in mind that even this quest started as a proof-of-concept two or three Expos ago.

[anikom15]

Nice to see some good progress on this quest.