Tuesday 17 March 2015

[SPEE] Ignis Volcano

In 0.75, which will be out before the end of the month- you'll enter a dungeon called the "Ignis Volcano"

As it's name suggests, it's a very... firely place. Wild slugma, torkoak and magmars can be battled here.

 In addition to that, you'll fight the first Corrupted Legendary Pokemon: Moltres. But unlike normal corrupted Pokemon, you will not be able to use legendaries on your team.

Instead you summon them into battle to deal massive damage (Final Fantasy style!)



Saturday 7 March 2015

[SPEE] Battle Speed Options

I quite like SPEE's battle system it's very final fantasy inspired and definitely gives the game a unique feeling compared to other Pokemon games. 

BUT, one problem I always had with it is that it would sometimes feel slow if the enemy team were high leveled. A lot of the time you were just waiting for bars to fill up. It was an engine limitation i could not get around. 

But i've recently had a breakthrough in the form of dynaRPG patcher by Cherry. Now because of this, in 0.75 you can change the battle speed!
You can change the speed from the computer in your house, there are 4 options.
 

SLOW- being the current battle speed of 0.74.
NORMAL- being 2x as fast, and the default battle speed for 0.75.
FAST- being 4x as fast as slow.
VERY FAST- being 6x as fast as slow.

The days of slow battles are over!


Tuesday 3 March 2015

[SPEE] West Beach

Here is another new area you visit in 0.75; West Beach. (name pending)

This new map is a unique beach-like terrain, on the west side of Ignis Island, where pokemon like Krabby, and Tropius are found.

In addition to that, a special person named the "Surf Master" lives here.

After spending a lot of the last year doing mainly background systems work, it's nice to get back into mapping. Beach locales are a little hard to do, since you want it to appear natural, but you also want there to be tall grass for wild pokemon to be, so I had to look for a bit of balance. I quite like the end result, it feels and looks a lot different than other maps, the mixture of yellow, blue, brown and green is strangely pleasing.

Only downside; no footprints on the sand :O


Sunday 1 March 2015

[SPEE] Route 6 & Conn. Caves Redesign

In addition to designing new areas (more which i'll show soon), i've been working on redesigning some of the old maps.

Route 6/Connecting Caves I've always felt unsatisfied about. It's a route that requires an axe, and has a cave which you need to traverse to pass it. 

This started causing backtracking problems because there's a hypervisor battle right after it. If someone didn't want to face the hypervisor yet, they would have to backtrack through the caves to go back to Arbor City.
In addition to that after you beat the first hypervisor, you get warped back to Arbor City, meaning you're gonna be going through Route 6 again.


Now, the caves are a bunch of interconnected tunnels rather than the isolated tunnels they were before. The cracked rocks will break after you defeat the Corrupted Diglett that is at the end of the tunnel; that allows you take a direct route to the start/end of Route 6, cutting down on a bit of backtracking.

Route 6 has had minor modifications, including removal of ledges which I noticed were confusing players who didn't realise they were going backwards by jumping over them.