February Update

Spankers and Spankees,

No Etrian Odyssey episode for you guys today, sorry. I’ve got most of it written, but I still need to write the fallout, and edit it, and all of that’s not happening tonight.

I would have had it written (though possibly not edited) by now, except rather than spending the morning working on it, I spent the morning tweaking the latest version of Potion Wars so that I could get it to my beta testers today. I’ll shoot for having the next Etrian Odyssey episode ready for next Sunday. Again, sorry about the delay, but I’m busier these days than I was for most of January.

Anyway, I’ve made big progress on Potion Wars in the past few weeks. All that’s left to be written for the first act of Episode 2 are a scene by Emily involving a subplot with Carrie, and a scene with Ildri that Jeffrey is writing. My plan for this week is to run my translate script through the content I have now, and make sure the translation works on non-trivial input. Since it certainly doesn’t (code never works the first time you run it on non-trivial input), I predict a week of very frustrating bug fixing ahead of me. But suck is life.

I’m hoping to get a new version of Potion Wars out complete with new content by the end of February unless my writers are too busy to write and don’t tell me (*cough* Jeffrey I haven’t heard anything from you *cough*) or we run into a lot of problems during beta testing. It’d be awesome if we could get something out sooner, but this is software. Software always takes longer than you plan. Always.

I’ve also made a lot of changes to the level up mechanics of the game to make them much less deterministic. I’ll post a big-ass blogpost describing the new mechanics in a few weeks (I want to give my beta testers a chance to run through the first episode a few times, so that we can tweak things as necessary). Hopefully between the new more deterministic level up mechanics, and the elimination of random encounters, the first episode will be much more balanced.

Oh did I mention? I’ve also eliminated random encounters and replaced them with static battles. Most of the static battles are invisible on the map, but they have a fixed number, type and gender of enemies, and once you win them, they don’t refresh. Note that you will still have the enemy-generating squares however, in case you find yourself in need of some grinding. I’m going to try to balance the game so that that isn’t necessary, but I am also trying to make the game challenging. So you might find yourself needing to grind if you’re not much of an RPG player, but you don’t want to lose all the boss fights. Plus, some of you may just enjoy being ridiculously overpowered.

One final thing: I’ve ditched the whole dinosaurs thing. I do still think that the Jurassic period makes a perfect setting for a fantasy game, but alas dinosaurs make things more fantastical, which clashes with the more grounded tone of the main story. There are enough tonal clashes as it is between the story and the spankings. I don’t need any more. Perhaps a future, more lighthearted game will be set in a Jurassic period with people.

4 thoughts on “February Update

  1. I’ll be waiting for Episode 2 with bated breath! But quick question: Will both episodes be put together on the same download, or will you have to do them separately?

    1. They’ll both be in the same download. In fact, in order to play episode 2, you just load your save game from the end of episode 1 (any save where you’re currently off stage), and you’ll automatically start episode 2. When everything is said and done, I want to have a single game you play from beginning to end, just like any other RPG.

      Note that because of some changes I’m making, you may or may not get a few notices or decisions when loading the game. For example, I’m elimating the armor pieces of equipment, such as the leather armor you get for defeating the Episode 1 boss. So if you defeated that boss, when you load a save game where you have the leather, you’ll get a notice telling you that the leather armor has been replaced with 20 gold, which is enough to buy anything you want from the clothing store. Similarly, the quality dagger will be replaced with a gem that you will (eventually, it hasn’t been implemented yet) be able to fuse with your weapon or armor for a bonus. If you have the quality dagger, and no longer have the family weapon, then you’ll be informed that the quality dagger is being removed, and you will be asked to select which of the family spear, sword, or dagger you’d like to have.

    1. Yeah, the whole dinosaurs thing started because I figured it’d be a good opportunity to learn a little bit more about them. I was a big fan of dinosaurs growing up, and I figured this would be a good excuse to reconnect with that. Unfortunately, it really messed up the slang (“Stegasaur shit” doesn’t sound half bad, but “ride you like a Bellasaur” just doesn’t have the same ring as “ride you like a pony”), and it just wasn’t working in general.

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