Much appreciated that there will be a video involving this game once the battle system gets up and rolling. At the moment, though, I'm still sitting on top of the spell menu, trying to get some of the elements up and running. There's a little debate as to how the menu is supposed to actually appear, but it's all for the better.

The next thing on the list will be the item menu. That will be a pain since you're also going to be able to reequip your characters from this menu. That will be quite a bit of development, though I hope to reuse some code from the efforts spent on the spell menu to make this move along faster.

Then will come the status menu and then after that, I'll start with encounter zones and start throwing together something that'll resemble a battle menu.

Just fyi: Some of the specifics of the battle engine will be as follows.

0 : The battle screen looks a lot like Dragon Warrior with respect to how the enemy is shown on the screen. The talkative part is two lines at the bottom. Very basic animation, like flashing and screen shaking is pretty much what you'll see.

1 : You do not have a traditional experience system. It's more aligned to how often you use spells and abilities and how they will strengthen. Equipment "proficiencies" will involve how well you can use: Sword, bow, axe, staff, shield, and armor. You gain bonuses from having a higher proficiency level for each. Every so often, your base stats will improve based on probability and the stat gain associated with each piece of equipment. It'll be your job to figure out what those gains are.

2 : Enemies will have certain "ranks" so you can't just grind on low ranking enemies to reach "max level" on anything. Your base stats will only increase so much if you grind on low level enemies. You have to find higher ranking (and harder to beat) enemies to get further in the game. There are three ranks.

3 : Your max HP is 255 and Zera specified that the most you can dish out is a collective 1024 damage per attack (spread across multiple hits), though I'm just going to unhinge that depending on certain conditions. You're not likely to reach that amount of damage when you really need it anyway. The original secret boss has around 3000 HP and it's supposed to be a crapshoot when you fight it. My secret secret boss that you're never supposed to beat has 65535. Go figure.

4 : Your base stats other than HP should only max out to 99. I believe this is to allow room for equipment bonuses so that the combined total is not more than 255. The DevTeam development character does not observe this, so it's probably gonna be done in 16 bit math anyway.

5 : You have limit breaks. In-game, it's called "Quickening" which throws an attack that pierces defenses and stuff like that. I haven't read up on what contributes to that damage calculation, but I do remember that you have a chance of using it when your HP falls below (IIRC) 16% of the max, and after you use it, your HP returns to just above 16% of the max so you can't use it until your HP falls below that again. You can probably abuse this, but chances are, the enemy is gonna kill you before you get that chance. Unless you're fighting enemies you have absolutely no business (lack of benefit) fighting anyway.

6 : You've got four different status effects from what I've seen in coding. "Dead" is one of them. You've got three instant death ways to get it. Different words, same effect. Plus, the boss of the game has a spell that causes it without regard to your resistances to it. Just to make it harder. The secret secret boss will either spam that spell or just dish out a crap ton of damage. Or both. If its HP gets low enough... you'd better be feeling lucky. The other status effects is poison, enchantment (comparable to temporary partial paralysis if you're thinking Pokemon), and blindness.

7 : Your characters have "merits" that can enhance what your character can do. One of which gives you a certain chance to auto-revive if they're killed. Another allows you to use both a shield and an axe at the same time.

8 : Many pieces of equipment carry passive abilities that can become very important to how the game is played. The "Ribbon" found in many Final Fantasy games will give you a good idea as to what that entails

9 : Most importantly, none of any particular stat is written in stone. There will be plenty of room to balance the game once you can start fighting enemies. That will help ensure that the game has about 10 or so hours of game play.

10 : Robots aren't "alive" to begin with. Think about that one for a while when we start putting in a replay mode called "Full Metal".

This is just some of what's in there. The design documentation provided to me by Zera is far more comprehensive than this, but you're not going to see it immediately after the game is released. Maybe except for any beta testers that might apply once the positions come about.

Oh, and to quell any fears about save points or whatever, there will be "enough" of them to go around. Most of them are placed right before any real tough actions, like fighting bosses or whatnot, so your grinding efforts won't go to waste if you decide to do it in a dungeon where the enemy ranks are usually higher. You can also save anywhere on the overworld or in the underworld, so just use your "Exit" spell and save. Though your exit spell does cost a fair bit more than just MP, so beware.

I'll be happy to answer any further questions.

EDIT: Thank god for in-browser spell checking. Get Firefox or Chrome
Right-clicking the "misspelled" word will show possible corrections in Firefox. Maybe Chrome as well. Still won't help with a fair bit of programming jargon, tho.

Working more on the game. Fully completed the save/load pairs and added map restrictions so you can't just save anywhere. Trying to build the menu where you can view what "Magick" you have but an oversight forced me to do a character select menu, which was a cause for much strife. The remaining part is actually getting to the screen where you can select what you have and possibly use it. Each spell has some flavour text to it (description). That eats space so I went ahead and compressed all that junk. Also did it for the item descriptions. Subtract over 1000 bytes from the total ^_^

Oh, by the way, the mentioned blemishes on the screenshot is as follows, so you, too, can see what I was talking about.

1 : The sprite is loaded too soon after the menu exits back to the mapper. The sprite appears before the map is rerendered.

2 : The water edge tiles upon loading the game isn't filled in until another game cycle or two later so you see some strange junk in that area.

So...

I've implemented enough of the system to allow for loading and saving a game. I've attached a screenshot that demonstrates this in the following manner:

The game is started and you see "Loading..." shortly followed by the title screen and stuff you all know and love. Except this time around, when you select the "Continue" option, you are greeted to the load game menu instead of an apology regarding its absence. Selecting an empty file amounts to starting a new game, so you see the prologue. The prologue is sped up because no one likes waiting forever. Events were not made yet, so you get dumped next to the bed in some underground area. You walk around and exit the town, where the menu is opened (for the second time) to go and save the game. The game exits and then restarts shortly after with a noticeably longer load time. The demonstration there is that you can actually load the game from its previous spot.

tl;dr: Shot at 9fps, this screenshot cycles twice to demonstrate that it can load a previously saved game.

In those rather blank areas are supposed to go 16x16 portraits in the save/load menu and 32x32 portraits in the pause menu. Didn't get those in yet, as I consider them a lower priority than getting the thing to work at all.



If you have a keen eye, you can notice certain blemishes in the system. I can spot two in the screenshot.

Interesting, how many save slots will there be btw?

There will be two save slots. I wanted three, but the design documentation calls for two slots due to the size of the screen and what is to be represented there. You can always do something like use Celtic III to change the appvar to a program so you can back up its contents, put the appvar in a group, or send the appvar to the computer or another calc. A hassle, yeah, but there's no better way to share save files if you do the latter

Yay!  I love saved games in archive!

You're talking weeks now.  If only that was how long till I got to play it. *sigh*

Saved games in archive to not only keep the thing safe, but in the event that the game crashes at some random point, you've got a backup somewhere in FlashROM if you did not garbage collect yet. If you ever find yourself in that situation, http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/411/41120.html can help with that.

As far as estimating in weeks, I'm actually overshooting this a little, but I also don't have a clue how difficult coding in the various parameters is going to be. I'm not even sure *where* the majority of the routines are going to go in the app. My hope is that it won't take more than a week, but I'm not sure.

I'm making the assumption that you're viewing the page using Firefox, or maybe Opera. IE and Google chrome will not show the animated .gif file at any framerate higher than 10fps (the ones attached are always shot at around 30fps).

If you *are* viewing it and still aren't satisfied with the speed, I'm not sure what to say. It isn't possible to make the game run any faster than it is, and will in most cases actually run slower on the real calc due to grayscale considerations.

The mode dedicated for "airship" is faster simply because the mapper moves two pixels at a time and doesn't bother drawing the one in between. I will not have this for normal walking speed, since that just looks way too fast.

The next post I make will be a small screen shot of a few additional effects I threw in. I cheat in the vid and use the "airship mode" to enter places I'm not supposed to enter from ground-level. You know, the mode used for debugging.

EDIT: Image attached. Shows that the water edge tiles are also animated. If you look closely, the clouds tile in the higher floors of the Arcanian Ruins are animated, and the warp tile as well. The stars in the Celestial Sphere are also "animated", and are not a side effect of the grayscale, though the effect was achieved through layer swapping, which was achievable only because there is grayscale.

This one demonstrates (briefly) moving water (of sorts), a transition effect (still in the works), and area titles corresponding to a select few warp points. I had only a few selected simply because no one really wants to be bombarded with messages when you already know where you are. These messages are supposed to be attached to the areas where you'll first enter the area, or when the reminder is a little more important.

Discuss (preferably the transition effect).

A "ROM" in this instance is pretty much all the code and data needed by the emulator to run it as a calculator. Since providing such ROM is "legally questionable", you can obtain your own if you have a TI-83 Plus or Ti-83 Plus SE graphing calculator and some linking software that'll let you do a "ROM dump". TiLP is a good PC program to use for that purpose (if you can get it to work). Please don't ask for ROMs here, as I believe it's against the TOS to do so (among other things), but I believe it's okay to say how you can get your own copy legitimately.

That's pretty cool. I assume you're using the DevBlock for the character? If you're using Netham45, that would be a pretty impressive feat.

I'm glad people are getting some entertainment value out of the CaDan demo

EDIT: I would find it a little easier, since I'm the guy that made all these crazy patterns... but yeah. Beating the game on Lunatic mode using Netham45 gave ME a run for my money. So I'd love to hear stories about how you used that joke character in some serious run