#voicelessJrpg

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Voiceless Theft System

You play as a ‘master’ thief, so of course we need more stealing and of the mini-game variety. More to come soon - but the prototype theft system is alive! 

I saw the tailor for ‘the thief’ in Octopath Traveler and loved the ‘steal from townspeople’ idea (for the record, we had it before their inspiration) but the simple menu with a percent chance to steal felt so... uninspired. I’m sure it will work well for Octopath, but for Voiceless - YOU are a master thief. Not 1/8th thief, 100% steal from everything all the time thief. So - thank you Octopath for the inspiration.

In Voiceless - you can steal from everybody! Enemies, town guards, the inn keeper that charged you too much, orphans. Steal from EVERYBODY. To make this interesting, and like the real world, we have added to the tried and true percent chance to steal. Before you even get that chance, you must case your target and ID potential valuables to...  ‘rescue’ from their possession. The goal is to fill the ID progress bar to 100% - hold ‘A’ to raise the bar, and it falls on its own (like more recent fishing mini-games - and yes, we have one of those, this is A Jrpg we are making). However, hidden within the bar are one or more ‘Gates’. Should you pass a gate without breaking it, the mark will be alerted to your hand in their purse... and well, that is when the morality/guilt system will come in. How does one break a gate? Simple - keep the head of the bar near it and the gate’s HP will decrease. For those normal people out there, Yellow = safe, Orange is sketchy territory, and red means the Mounties will be coming to arrest you.

Stay tuned for a more detailed write up and our Morality/Guilt system (a.k.a. How to get out of the slammer).

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Mini-Update

Voiceless - Be a peeping... Foxe? (Better Imgur link - curse you tumbler 5MB limit!)

See a window, look through it - any map, any time. How else would a thief learn patrolled routes, how to enter a house with no visible doors, what people think about him, and where the loot lives?

Finishing up the last of our Theft related systems for Voiceless, and have started using the twitter for more frequent, tiny updates.

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Voiceless - Journal System

When your core JRPG team is a programmer many hat wearer and a writer, you  end up with scrapbook type menu for collecting and reading all the lore hidden throughout the world.

The idea is to provide the player with TONS of OPTIONAL notes, letters, and other sources of lore should they seek them out. If you want to dive deep into the world of Voiceless, the high dive is open and waiting. If you don’t - well, ok then. The only downside to not collecting all the lore (aside from not knowing all the cool and hard work put into each location in the world) is no achievement for you! The light blue text will be ‘header’ items - usually a location or character name and a quick summary of it and how many child text you have found / left to find, while the white items are dedicated flavor text belonging to its blue parent.

I hope y’all enjoy prodding every nook and cranny of the world to find what we have hidden. (Some flavor texts may offer clues or valuable hints - hint hint)

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Quick Update

Chugging along at Voiceless. We are aiming for a Kickstarter/indiegogo next month, and wrapping up the two last non-combat systems. The development of Voiceless - especially as a hobby project - has often been like book writing; we have a kick A beginning and end, and have slowly discovered our characters and mechanics as they took us on a tour of their world. We started with some good ideas and along the way, some were lost, and better ones were found.

So - the last two: The first is a logbook containing musings (rather amateur poetry as well) of our protagonist Foxe, and the notes and lore he collects on his journey. It serves as a means to inject TONS of optional backstory and lore into our world, as well as a quick ‘what was I doing / What is next” reminder for players (I wish more games had these cuz... life happens sometimes). Foxe will update his journal/todo list as the story progresses, and the world will be littered with pages, scraps, and fragments of lore. This should keep those of you who love intricate and deep lore happy - while not forcing it down anyone’s throat (unless of course you want the associated achievements).

The second system - and most recently thought of / discovered - is a massive expansion of the ‘theft system’ we already have. We were on the fence with this one - perhaps making it a stretch goal for kickstarter so we can get done sooner - but when the game is about a Master Thief and his exploits - you got to have theft and heists center stage. So - the simple sneak behind a guard to steal their loot (a single item) now evolves into something more like Octopath Travelers small list of items and chance to steal it - plus a small mini-game to identify where steal-able items may be located on your target plus identification. On top of this, a minor morality system (which might involve overpriced shops and escape from jail sequences). (Yes this was inspired by Octopath traveler - you think with the budget they have they could have spruced up theft a bit more... so I guess we will have to).

So - diving into code I go!

Oh yeah! Took 3 days to find a minor bug I introduced to lighting... that... caused the game to crash on saving and loading.... No real progress was made that week - but the bug is fixed. Gotta love code.

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Dungeon 3 A - The Chasm

I’ve been playing lots of Zelda - alttp randomizer... I think it is bleeding into Voiceless ;)

Slightly related - I love the ability to throw almost any two tiles next to each other that pixel art gives. In a super high res world - a sharp square of grass in a sea of dirt looks terrible - but in pixel land, it is totally fine (but might be an obvious secret).

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Passes and versions, not perfection first

Its time for another completely random Voiceless progress update (one day I will get these back to every other week)!

Sneaky passages beneath/in the starter town

We are working towards a feature complete demo to send to some interested affiliates as well as anyone interested in Voiceless, JRPGs, the creation process, or critiquing errors. However, progress has been a bit slower than desired. The three main culprits being my newborn, persona 5 (so much style), and my own adhd/lack of focus - the third being the most guilty. Its just too easy to do easy things - but easy things don’t make JRPGs, so, time to focus some more.

As for the title of the post, Voiceless continues to improve and develop, and often times, that means throwing something that once was ‘accepted’ out. Specifically, we have switched fonts (again) - which is good for it is now more readable to the player, but bad for it loses the pixel-y goodness of the old font (which admittedly, was too hard to read and many people told me so) and means... all our pixel perfect formatting of the... EVERYTHING with font (menus, combat, dialogue) is off.

Old status screen with old font

New font.. and everything

To explain the title, there is much more to gain from progressively improving passes at your creation than to make everything perfect once and never need to ‘do-over’ something (If you have heard the waterfall vs agile straw man argument, its coming up here in game-dev form... so... move along, nothing to see here). Simply put, you will never make something perfect... never. A ‘creative’ work is never ‘complete’ - you simply walk away from it... at some point, preferably in a state that the creator is happy with (though often simply from neglect or other newer and greener pastures). Also, when attempting to make something ‘perfect’ is a pretty high and intimidating standard (believe me, I know. Voiceless stalled for a few weeks last year because the combat system was not ‘good enough’). Instead, make a version 1 that is good enough to let you see the next biggest problem (”Now that we have combat, town 2 might be important to create...”) and then give that a pass. Keep working on/improving whatever the current biggest need* is and after enough passes, you have something better than perfect, something releasable! And that is the goal of good game dev - not just the final release, but any time you get your game into other people’s hands. Not only to get that ‘creator’ high, but more importantly to have other peoples hands and eyes on your creation (not like that guys...) - to find where it lacks and IF it lacks in that area enough for another pass (saying no / its good enough is super important... but not this post).

So what does this mean for Voiceless? Combat version 2 should be blocked out this week as well as very slight tweaks to the new font in menus ONLY IF it looks THAT BAD - I know the font is off and will get to it, but I don’t want my testers getting distracted by what I already know when there is so much unknown for them to discover. Also, the website needs a version 2 so it can be ‘the once place to rule them all’ for voiceless news.

*biggest need - I mean the most bang for the buck. If you desperately need town 2, don’t skip everything from where you are up to it (or do so if its that important, it is your creation after all), but don’t give those things too much thought. Is town 2 after a canyon and creepy forest? Ok - world map gets some mountains and trees, and two square like maps latter I am now working on town 2 - those square maps will get their own passes later.

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Your Game PR - Videos and Gifs

Recently finished up a major PR move by submitting to Square Enix Collective - you’ll be seeing us there soon (hopefully)- and yes, it makes me feel like doing donuts in an airship. It took tons of writing, editing, recording, and GIF-ing(?) to get the submission (basically a PR bundle) ready - A ton of stuff/work that is not specifically related to making the GAME (code, game-play, etc.) - but massively important to making a game (people playing it, it not sucking, etc).

So - how do you get good videos and gifs? Use tools that some incredibly smart people made, and then released for free! (FREEEE! - but seriously, the polish and work they put in deserves a donation, or support, or something).

The Tools

Video Recording: OBS

GIFs: ScreenToGif

Video Editing: VSDC

Video to Youtube: Handbrake

Catch All: GIMP

Video Recording and GIFs

Fire up OBS and point it at your window/screen of choice (many tutorials out there for this, basically you define an ‘area’ - be it a single window, or whole screens - to capture) and then click record. You have a grace period of ~1 second (you can edit this) before the video (and audio if you want) starts recording. With Voiceless, I fire up OBS whenever I play-test (great for finding/tracking/replaying bugs) and occasionally when I’m ‘creating’ (like a new map... sometimes even just code). When in doubt - record it. Why? It is far better to have too much content and cut some crap than to not have enough and believe me, whatever you think is enough is not.

Once you have some content (even still images) fire up ScreenToGif. You can use ScreenToGif to record and make stuff from scratch - but I focus on using it for the editor - so click the editor button. In the editor you can use video, images, and other GIFs to create another GIF if ( GIF -ception!?) - we will simply drag in some video. ScreenToGif will ask for the start, end, and frames per second. Ideally - crop start and end to what you want, and the lower the FPS the smaller the resulting GIF . Import it, watch as it does math and stuff and then you have your video as a series of images. Scrub through and remove any sections/images that are not needed - or get in the way of the perfect looping GIF. To export your new GIF - click the “save as” button and choose your settings. I like - GIF , encoder 2.0, 128 colors, looping forever, detect unchanged and mark pixels - this got me the smallest size for still looking good. Give it a path to its new home and click save.

At this point, you have a GIF of your game / of you making your game - woo! You could use GIMP to place that GIF in another image or further edit it, but 98% of you are done. Yay GIFs!

Video Editing - The coveted game-play trailer.

The basic process is to use all your content (and more that you never thought to film) - pull it into the video editor of your choice (I used VSDC due to it being free and pretty good) - and make a video. I’m not going to cover the making of a video part... for there is so much to it, and even more that I don’t know / am not good at. However, we can all agree a trailer video needs to hook the player quickly - like within the first 5 seconds or they are going to click some other link and be gone. So try and start with a bang/hook and hold strong for a minute or two - A four minute video is probably unfocused/wandering and five is right out!

Anyhow, make your video and export it at a nice quality - higher is better (raw video does LOVE to eat disk space), like our video and gif content, you can easily cut later, adding more after the fact? Not fun.

Grab your massive video that looks great, and pull it into handbrake. Handbrake is king of video encoding formatting. You are less than ten clicks away from a multi-GB video being re-encoded for web and ending at tens of Megabytes. Magic. With Handbrake - pick your target platform and play with settings until you get the smallest sized video (disk) that you are happy with / still looks great.

Now put it on YouTube and watch the view counter skyrocket from nothing to five. Perhaps even twenty if you have lots of friends ;)

I hope that helped someone get the GIF fever - There can never be too many.

As for Voiceless - we took a short break after that PR mountain, but now it is time to make more content and more intricate/diabolical dungeons to challenge our players and their growing skill. We do believe we have found something worthwhile with our sneaking system in a JRPG - lots of dungeons in which you can kill everything JRPG style - or - kill nothing by sneaking thought the puzzle I created for you. Gasp - the dungeon itself is a puzzle?! but only if you care to avoid monsters / loot things? Cool, right?

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Status Ailments & Effects - part 2

Having 90% of the code and game play systems out of the way, means I have time to actually work on parts of the game that *look* good!

Here is a taste of the big heist Foxe has been planning at the start of the game (rough pass one, so expect and demand better from me). It takes much more time to orchestrate the movement of 5 individuals, but I think it is worth it for all the character it gives (and it sure beats having a line of people talk at another line... no offense nostalgic old games I wish to emulate yet improve upon).

Last week I revealed the Ailment Health Point system (AHP) that Voiceless will be using. In short recap - rather than skills with a % chance to effect the target and many bosses being outright immune - Voiceless will give each ailment its own HP to track, and each skill will deal AHP damage rather than % to miss/hit. This means ALL enemies are susceptible to status effects (though some may be more or less susceptible than others) and even a missed status attack counts towards inflicting the status (think stagger... or any status from Monster Hunter... that game is gold).

To further build upon AHP and give more depth to the combat and thus meaningful choice to the player, status ailments all belong to one of four groups - Curse, Boon, Poison, Any - and each character, friend or foe, can only have one of each group on at a time (sans Any... you can have any of those... things like Stun and Berserk). Deep explanation in the form of simple combat.

Round 1

Hero 1 is fighting an Actual Cannibal enemy (yes, those will be in Voiceless).On turn one, the Cannibal (rather than eating all the bodies, or gnawing your leg) opens with a Strong  poison attack that hits 100 AHP on poison, which is enough to cause the hero to contract Strong poison and reset the AHP of poisons to 150. The player now uses his turn to remove the poison effect from themselves for nobody wants Strong Poison on them (4~10% max HP damage per turn). 

Round 2

The Cannibal continues with his Strong poison hitting the hero for 100 AHP in poisons again (hero 150 AHP for poison - 100 means we have 50 left and will probably get poisoned next turn). Though the heroes resistance to poison is increasing each time he is poisoned, our wise player does not want to waste any more turns (and more so items) on curing Strong poison - thus, the wise player uses his turn to cast weak poison on HIMSELF. This deals 60 AHP to the poisons group (50 - 60 = -10) which is enough to put weak poison on the hero (2~4% current HP damage) and reset his AHP for poison to 200.

Round 3

The Cannibal hits the hero with Strong poison... surprise. 200 AHP - 100 means the player will get hit with Strong  poison next turn... yay. Our hero and wise player use this turn to actually deal some damage.

Round 4

Yet again, the Cannibal attacks with Strong poison seeking to put the hurt on the hero. The hero takes 100 AHP for poisons and being at 0 poison AHP is about to gain Strong poison again.... ! BUT WAIT - the hero already has a weak poison effect on and so the inflicted Strong poison DOES NOT effect the hero. Yay! However, since the hero is at 0 AHP for poison, meaning - once the weak poison clears up, the next poison WILL BE CONTRACTED - better hope you time it well with another weak poison.

Round 5 +

Hero alternates between counting his AHP and applying weak poison to himself and bashing the Cannibal with righteous button mashing.

And this system applies for all grouped Ailments. Only one at a time - self buffs, poisons, bad things - only one (like the highlander of status effects). This gives the player (and enemies) the option to use positive status effects (like attack +10%) to mess up the build of enemies (versing a magic nuker enemy whose friend keeps putting +25% magic damage on him? Put your own boon of +10% attack and laugh as they waste turns). Or use negative ailments on yourself to avoid even nastier ones.

All of this works into the two remaining systems used in combat in Voiceless: Demonic Blood (which I will conveniently skip over for it is very plot/story related, and will be fun for you to discover in game) and Attacks of Opportunity / Desperation - whose damage is based on how far from death or close to it the user is.

Until next time - yay JRPGS (which is probably Xenoblade 2 at the time of this writing)

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Dec. 17th update (not a battle system post)

(WARNING - a new sarcasm approaching) A fun week of being sick and lots of work (the paying life’s bills kind) lead to not much Voiceless work and this blog post - intended to be about Voiceless’s (Voiceless’, Voiceless-i’?) branching level up system - to be a simple update/whats to come.

A WIP of our new company logo/name

Goals for next week:

- No more migraines - they seriously throw off my groove.

- Work on hero animations/visual effects in combat, or rough out the castle scenes - depending upon which I feel like doing (got to create the illusion of options to avoid burnout).

- Blog post about branching level up and why it will be awesome.

-Christmas! (For those of you that don’t celebrate Christmas, it’s pretty awesome, yet I support whatever belief you hold - as long as you hold one, don't rain on Christmas just to be negative).

Goals for next month:

- Playable demo from start to campfire scene - combat will be super unbalanced (Got to set some realistic yet crazy goals)

Next year:

- That Square-Enix Collective thing (they are the grandfather of JRPGs after all)

- Finish alpha release? Profit?

- Taxes for me and then set up a real LLC for Voiceless (gots to love all the hats you get to wear as an indie team... even if some have lice...)

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When Unknowns hit the fan

Some progress gifs:

Rough scene

Polished version

The new night/torch effect really shines (well, anti-shines?). You will also notice the quality of the gifs. Turns out recording video with OBS  then turning it into a gif yields great power without much responsibility - who knew.

Its nice to have the scene done, and though I wish I had completed more over the break - important things were learned/reaffirmed.

Two Golden adages from this random dude for Game Dev (or any project)

Life happens - Unplanned things happen - People get sick, babies get born (both happening/soon to happen to me), events come up, things happen. Of the many things that get in the way of game dev progress (looking at you Warframe), many are procrastination and/or a distraction, however, some (and some of those distractions) are life, and well, sometimes you just have to hop aboard the train of life and ride on (suplexing life trains... not a good thing for productivity).

Unplanned things happen with your project. A coworker introduced me to the 5 orders of ignorance (link) a while back - long read short - I’m moving y’all from the 4th order of ignorance to the 3rd, which is: “ I don’t know of a suitably efficient way to find out that I don’t know that I don’t know something….“ A theoretical game dev (and Voiceless specifically) example - You are going to be super productive with Task A. However, after a few good hours with task A, you find that Tasks B, C, and D are required to finish A, so task B it is. Mid way through task B, tasks E, F, G, and K pop up. Long story short, and a few days later, task A is still unfinished, but you now have a new transition engine, lighting system, and priority event manager. The holy grail of project management is assigning a time frame to a task with unknowns... and that is unknowable...

So, what does this mean for Voiceless and you my awesome reader? It means that predefined goals are good and all, but not the only thing to measure your progress by - there are too many unknowns in the future and they HAVE to be conquered when they come up. Something about the journey is more important than the destination (or when we want to finish and ship a game, both are equally important).

End ramblings of 2017

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Encouraging Epic Moments - JRPG Combat Mechanics Part 3

I FORGOT - we have a website for Voiceless! (click)

I’ve been rambling about JRPG combat mechanics and how Voiceless will be breaking the mold a bit. Status effects are a huge part of JRPGs, yet often pigeonholed as to be too random for normal enemies and too ineffective on bosses - Part 1  and 2 of my rambles seek to remedy that.

Now, status effects are fun and cool and all (who doesn’t enjoy stacking everything negative in the book on a foe and then defending until they kill their friends and self?) - but status effects are just one tool in the team’s kit, and depending on the player, might never be utilized. How to remedy that? Make more combat mechanics that encourage meaningful choices and risk-reward. I’m talking about attacks of OPPORTUNITY and DESPERATION.

In Voiceless (as with anything calling itself a JRPG) damage comes from two formulas - one for physical, one for magic (I might delve into those main formulas later, but for now... no one cares, right?). Skills/Magic follow said formulas, with a multiplier on it (fireball deals 1.5x magic damage, a good deal for a few MPs). So far a decent, though generic JRPG combat - skills deal more damage at the cost of MP, which makes MP equal more damage, so you save/conserve it for the boss at the end of the dungeon - but with Voiceless, we want every choice (except for mashing A to slaughter mobs way under your level) to matter.  Attacks of OPPORTUNITY ([OPP] on the skill) and DESPERATION ([DES]) will increase or decrease the effectiveness (the modifier) of the skills they are on. Heroes with nay a scratch on them, no status effects, and fresh to the fight will see increases from OPP attacks, while those on death’s doorstep will see massive boosts from DESP attacks - and remember, these options are available to enemies as well.

Here is where we see this system shine - an case example of the Invoker (think black mage) and the Lunar Night (FF4′s dark night Cecil, but on self damaging roids). The Invoker is a glass cannon magic nuker - pretty much a requirement of all JRPGs. You hide him in the back and conserve mana to blow away challenging enemies. Bestowing attacks if Opportunity on him makes his very typical (and often dull) archetype now more interesting. The Invoker deals more damage with a higher HP and MP percentage - which makes him a super glass cannon, but not the kind that dies quickly. If your invoker gets hit, poisoned, or even looked at incorrectly - his damage output drops and won’t recover until his ills have been treated. Our hope is to change up the single character glass cannon so that he requires a team to do more than be a meat shield. While the Solar Knight can cover for him, when he DOES take damage, the other classes can shine by patching him up and letting him get back to nuking at 150% strength.

The Lunar Knight gets a bag of fun and nasty tricks - most with the DESPeration label (as he gets closer to death, his skills will do WAY more damage, like 300% more - that’s three turns for the cost of one!). The flow for the Lunar Knight will be: Cast status ailments on everyone (friend and foe, its the price of power); Takes some self damage to boost defense and flirt with death; Bash heads in with 300% DESPeration power. Sounds awesome, right? If you can set this man up to deal this damage each turn WITHOUT his single digit HP dropping to 0 - you are a JRPG pro (or simply the kind of player we want to delight).

In both cases, OPP and DESP attacks permit the supporting crew (healers, tanks, etc.) to shine a bit more. They also require the player to pick one extreme (full life or no life) and run with it. Well, you could take the save (and lazy) middle ground, but they perks of living life to the extreme won’t apply to you. And lets be honest - killing the boss with a party of 100% or all near death heroes feels pretty bad ass.

FFT: Wiegraf fight... aka a few weeks of my life

Coming out of this fight with any more than one living party member - complete success in my book.

Next week/time - the classes of Voiceless and how each character’s skills and stats make them feel unique. Or perhaps, I will ramble about our choose your level level up system... or maybe an entire essay on why our white mage is the party tank.

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The Small Things

Life has been busy (spoiler, it always is...), so I have been attacking little tasks that I have noted down but never got to. Its better than doing nothing, and it exposed and fixed a larger issue.

So, what happened in Voiceless this week? Our writer has been busy adding details, filling out towns with people, and correcting my typos (got to keep him busy, don’t I?). Meanwhile, I have given the level up screen some more attention and cleaned up the code enough (see: cutting crap out) to dig in and make it so you can see your stats based on your choice BEFORE you choose it - Small but nice feature.

This code cleanup provides more screen space for descriptions and skills on the level up menu (rather than more numbers... next to those numbers). It also moved all my level up data to one place, which means VX ace’s level up stuff is 100% out and all the data lives in a TSV file. This means I have COMPLETE CONTROL over level up stats Mwah ha ha ha! (but seriously, now it means I can give you +1 Attack per level.... OR - 1 to 3 attack at random. (I think that is cool)).

Now to create a feedback Doc for a beta beta test... and then.. beta test? (real progress is scary)

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Thoughts on JRPG combat: 1 Status Effects

Two year olds severely limit JRPG time - or any productive time... anyhow - A few weeks back I sent around my thoughts on what makes JRPG combat great and how to do so with Voiceless. After a few weeks of back and forth, I now share with y’all what we hope to be the mechanics of Voiceless (made much better by the input of others).

As the title suggests (states?) I will be breaking these posts into more digestible and focused segments - the first being status effects in JRPGs. I love having and using all the nasty status effects JRPG monsters are so willing to bestow upon the party. They really throw a wrench into my plans when questing to save the world - and that is a great thing - any quest to save the world should be wrought with unexpected and difficult things to overcome. However, while poison and silence throw off my party’s attack patterns, all too often those nasty effects seem to do absolutely nothing to the monsters... The effect doesn't do enough for its cost, is too random to count on, or all too often, the enemies (i.e. all bosses) is immune to it. And lets be honest, using a Phoenix Down on the Phantom train is one of the best parts of FF6 (suplexing it or the opera are THE best).

JRPG Combat

JRPG combat has one goal - Kill the things as efficiently as possible, and good JRPG combat has many viable options to achieve this. Status effects that don’t do enough (or are too random / immune) break both of theses goals. If every boss is immune to poison and/or it deals far less damage than a string of normal attacks (assuming it ever procs on the enemy) then why would the player ever use it at all? Chancy effects are nor viable nor efficient.

chancy_chansey_by_glitterizer 

How to deal with chancy status effects?

There are games that do this well (I think of FFT - where everything was chancy), but for the most part, I find myself avoiding status effects in JRPGs, they just are not worth it.  The people over at zeboyd games seem to be amount the few that have realized this and tried a new solution - What if status ailments had hp? Stun is no longer a 50% ability that seems to only effect trash mobs, but rather a 50 stun hp ability that will see any enemy (even bosses) stunned in two shots. 

I like this approach. Ailments are now predictable and less random to the player - and if you give things varying status HPs, you can still let bosses be effected without making it too easy (unless the gimmick is the boss being super weak to poison, or insta-death)

Voiceless?

Voiceless will see the heroic party and the evil monsters using status effects that deal Ailment HP (AHP) damage. This will give the player many meaningful and viable options in combat to run the enemy HP to zero (our goal). When the AHP for that ailment hits zero, you gain the ailment. Now to change it up, here with Voiceless, negative AND positive statuses have AHP. So, if you want buff strength on the warrior, you need to stack enough potency of the buff to decrease the hero’s AHP for that buff to zero. To make things even more interesting, upon hitting zero, the resistance AHP for that state resets to 1.5x its strength, so proc-ing the same state on a boss for a cheese win is not as viable (you can still try it and it will proc, but at 100, then 150, 200, etc... at some point its not worth it... but by then you probably lost the fight). And last but not the end of Voiceless’ juicy mechanics - ailments all belong to one of four groups, and you can’t get a new ailement if you already have one of its group on (but your AHP won’t reset until you do) - but more on that next time.

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Hosting a website (or www hosting magics)

Just a short and somewhat random post to rant about setting up custom domains (curse you A vs CNAME!!!!! rant over) and to share how I did it so y’all can save some time.

What this means for Voiceless?

Our website(link) is live!!!

It is a github project page hosted at ‘https://bryantk.github.io/Voiceless/’ but y’all see it as www.voicelessjrpg.com (www is optional).

What YOU need:

Your Website

github account

A domain (yourGame.com)

The magic

Website (you made)

You have to figure out how it should look and how to make it, so assuming you already have one and it is mostly static (no need for a database backend... or at least not a traditional one) and tame (not 1 million images, all gifs, or other things that would make you need a legit server and $$$) - you can use github.com to host your page!

Domain

Buy a domain - I use google domains (12$ a year) - we will call ours ‘GGgame.com’. Follow Github’s instructions to set up forwarding... or - Go the the DNS settings and set the ‘A’ record to ‘192.30.252.153′, enter, then click the ‘+’ to add ‘192.30.252.154′ as well. Then add a ‘CNAME’ entry of name ‘www’ that points to the data of ‘YOUR_GIT_USER_NAME.github.io.’

NOTE - we will be using a github project to host the website, but we still use the USERNAME.github.io. target. (this took me 2 days to figure out and inspired this blog post)

Github

Make an account at github

Make a new repository (we will call ours ‘GitGame’)

Go to settings, scroll to “GitHub Pages”

Set your source as master (we are lazy)

choose a random theme so git can setup all the stuff.

Set your ‘Custom domain’ to your purchased domain (’GGgame.com’ for this example)

Delete the stuff Git made for your theme that we are not using (unless you are) except for the CNAME file

Dump your website (the thing with the index.html) into the repo.

Verify that you have a ‘CNAME’ file (make one if not) and in it put two lines (which will help github to redirect your user level page to this project page):

your_domain.com (GGgame.com)

www.your_domain.com (www.GGgame.com)

Done

Enjoy the website for 12$ a year (I dare you to find cheaper with a custom URL... and if you do, let me know how you did it.. legally of course).

[bkbgames]

“Happy Little Mistakes”

Yeah... probably broke something - or everything in Voiceless is possessed by demons!

Anyhow - breaking things is fun (assuming you figure out the fix soon and learn from it). Here is what it is supposed to look like.

I love small details!

[bkbgames]

Back in the saddle again!

So - some random guy played the Voiceless demo and streamed the whole thing! Freaking awesome! He (she, it, cat?) even sent a detailed bug report to me. Critical awesome! That was the motivation I needed to stop staring at the beauties of a unity based engine and painted art.... and at least 6 months extra dev time - and to get back to work with Voiceless. 

That random streamer presented a long known bug (animations on heroes in combat not showing up / being at the left of the screen) and showed it in a new light. Three hours later (and a trip to Smiths for chocolate milk) and the three month TODO item is now DONE. I give you - the completed Voiceless combat experience. A little dragon quest with some lufia 2, and a bit of our own. I might steal some more from Lufia and have the heroes face the enemies after given a command, but I could ship it as is and be happy.

Voiceless progress this week:

Got back to work.

Fixed hero naming window bug that would let you overflow with ‘more’ characters...

Fixed 3 month standing combat animation bug

Made a animation for impale/bit hit (yay dev art!)

cleaned up terrible code written by a terrible programmer (three months ago me)

Trying for smaller more frequent progress updates (again)

Takeaway:

For you game devs out there - getting your game into other peoples hands to play is AMAZING. Even when things go bad (or crash... which it did) - the euphoria of someone else liking it... addicting stuff. Go! Get some random people that are willing to tell you if it sucks (friends and family are too kind) and play test that sucker. You’ll either get some good constructive feedback, or some fans and euphoria (or a soul crushing realization that your ‘game’ needs a face lift/defibrillator... but those odds are.... small... I hope.)

Also... Sometimes you get burnt out trying to solve a problem for so long with no solution. Its tough, but stop working on it and put it on the backlog. Seriously, STOP working on it... don’t even thing about it for a week. Then reevaluate - if it is still important, give it a new start (a fresh one, from a different angle preferably). If it isn’t important, defer it again, or kill it (if you defer it twice, it means it inst important and should die, or you have a serious problem you need to face).