Aetheria: Shadows of the Past

[raynesu]

For the day/night, do you think you think the system would benefit from a dawn/sunset phase before day or night? Kind of like secret of mana style? (this is what i based mine off of)


Also the time of day changing that you were seeing was a bug and it has been fixed.


I will go and rethink the enemy leveling and see if we can't reach some common ground, because I agree I do not want the leveled enemies to be too strong especially if they are just basic ones.


To prevent double posting, let me just do the

here.


The main focus this week was Skill Trees, and chiefly the completion of them. It has been expressed by players that the skill trees in their current state are imbalanced and favor a specialization over the other. So I just went ahead and completed them, though balancing them is another story. As of right now, every character will have 24 skills to choose from in the skill trees.


Here's what they look like now:

Spoiler

Raid Magic

Raid Special

Rylus Magic

Rylus Special

Ciel Special

With the new skills 3 different skill types have emerged along with the basic ones. They are passive skills, charge skills and burst skills.


Passive Skills are just that; they are skills who's effect is always active.


Charge Skills are skills that require the player to "charge" a bar via button-mashing before time runs out as preparation for using the skill. The more the bar is charged the more the skill will do.


Burst Skills are skills where players will be asked to button mash, however instead of charging a bar, the skill will execute as many times the button is pressed, hence "Burst".


An example of what charge and burst skill look like are shown in a video below.

 

[parallax]

Watching that video I am...Very mixed feelings about it..


It is "unique", especially in an rpg maker game and even in RPGs I think, but it looks like it'd get extremely tedious real fast. Though I'd have to play it to confirm my feelings towards the mechanic. Excited to see how it does feel though.

 

[gstv87]

For the day/night, do you think you think the system would benefit from a dawn/sunset phase before day or night? Kind of like secret of mana style? (this is what i based mine off of)

highly depends on how long the day is meant to be in real time.


if you go with the minecraft style maybe, 20 minutes seems like a reasonable number.


at code level, that's just a change on a variable, or it can be as simple as a very long light fade


what you should totally do is have a higher system controlling the time, as opposed to eventing in and out of places.

 

[raynesu]

It's that time of week again,

Hello friends!


@gstv87 I agree that the time system needs to be worked on, but at the moment it's heavily interconnected with other systems so changing it will take some time. But please look forward to one in the future.


Though, to help alleviate some of the problem I have implemented a dawn/sunset phase to make it easier to determine when it's about to change between day/night. What this means, however, is that the time that is counted as day has increase, yay \o/ (because I know people don't like the night)


But now to the big update, new skill trees and abilities. I am releasing a new demo version which should have all the new skill trees and abilities available. Hopefully they should be a bit more balanced and feel a bit better to use. Also since there is no way you are going to be able to test all the skills, after the demo when you have the choice to go to Castella, at the docks of Castella there will be 2 npc's that will allow you to test all the skills. There is no way to go back so be warned going on!


With this skill update a few other things have been changed, for one, the FP generation rate from attacking has increased and the max mana characters have has been reduced. While making these new skills I noticed 2 things: I never ran out of mana despite my spamming of spells and high level FP skills felt as if they cost too much based on the current FP generation rates. So these fixes were made to address this. Additionally, I wanted to make it so there was a penalty for resurrecting a character. No its not perma-death or dragging along a coffin like in Dragon Quest, rather you will get a debuff called "Weakness" on the resurrected character for a few turns, that reduces stats. (Similar to what you would see in FFXIV) In light of the displeasure some players felt when looting the ruined tower, I have also added an exclusive armor set that drops from the tower as well as a special armament type. Happy looting. The cost of crafting materials in stores has also increased significantly. The idea behind this being crafting materials should be farmed for found rather than being bought. Buying materials should just be int he situation when you are off 1 or 2 materials to upgrade. 


One other concern I had while replaying the story is that the "climax" of the demo was, well, it was kinda meh :/ . It just involved another kill x number of monsters and was not fitting to the build up (if I can call the story leading up to it a build up ). So to make the climax more exciting I have added another boss fight for the encounter. I think that this boss exactly what the story needed at that point in the story. As a note this boss kicked my ass a few times while I was testing it, have fun .


Anyways I present to you update V 1.2. If you decide to try it out any comments, feedback, or bugs are greatly appreciated. Hopefully with this update I can now focus on moving forward extending the story and world.

 

[parallax]

Hey! You aren't dead!


I'll download the new demo version and give it a whirl tonight.

 

[raynesu]

Not dead yet. Just had to take a small break this week and sort some things out. Hope you like the update.

 

[parallax]

Not dead yet. Just had to take a small break this week and sort some things out. Hope you like the update.

Just finished up with the new demo.

1. Melee raid feels good now, I enjoyed it a lot and probably more than I did for mage raid.
   
2. The Multi abilities, the swipes you get early on for raid and ciel are nice, they do good damage and are a decent cost.
   
3. Did the tower 3 times to see the new loot, not terribly great, but not awful either. I got the mage hat, the slippers and the ornate weapon piece, however they were quickly outclassed by only one or two upgrades on equipment I already had making them kinda useless since you can't upgrade them.
   
4. Upgrades are much harder to get now, but still very doable. I bought a majority of my components still by spending most if not all my gold on copper to upgrade them all, didn't get reylus upgraded and ciel only to +3, raid got +5.
   
5. The time bomb enemy is now more of a threat, you  HAVE to kill it by focusing it 100% right away or else gg.
   
6. tornado girl wasn't too bad, like the new super mode she goes into.
   
7. aticus now..phew...that is...way too overpowered, I chugged nearly 15 potions just to keep up with his damage and he seems to be overpowered no matter when you take him on. Took me 3 tries and i beat him by the skin of my teeth. I think he has too much AoE, even the regen spell can't keep up with the damage and you are left chugging tons of potions. Was a neat boss nonetheless, made the demo way better.
   
8. For some reason I couldn't get the last skill in the middle of Raid's special tree, forget what its called, it just wouldnt let me buy it until I got to post-demo area.
   
9. The triple arrow ability on reylus, unfortunately, is still awful. There is absolutely no reason a player should ever use it, it doesn't do more damage than a basic attack and the 25% chance is still too much, i think maybe just reduce the damage it does and take away the miss chance, make it like only slightly better than a basic attack.
   
10. Got around to fighting two of the rare hunts i hadn't seen before, the bat and the rat. The bat i think is too strong while the rat is too weak. Its not that the bat does a lot of damage its just that he has twice the health of the rat and you are more likely to encounter the bat before the rat which doesn't make sense when you see how strong it is compared. The rat king is extremely weak, not just in health but damage also, he just doesn't qualify very well to be a rare hunt. The rats also are just hp sponges and don't do nearly enough damage to be a threat, they are more an annoyance or an obstacle than anything.
    
11. The button mashing is..interesting..I still dunno how i feel about it, i wouldnt remove it though.
    

 

[raynesu]

@parallax


As always thank you for the feedback mate! I'll get to revisions tomorrow. I will look into reworking the stuff you mentioned.

• The tower gear may need a little buffing, but I believe the real value is the AGI bonus they give. You can offset some of the penalties of heavy armor. Also, the have a balanced DEF and MDF!
  
• I guess Atticus is a little strong, huh >.>. Totally agree with you, he was even a difficult for me, when I know everything he does! Will look into weakening him a bit more.
  
• That skill you could't get is a bug! Will fix asap. Reason why you couldn't was because the prerequisite skill requirement was wrong.
  
• For Rylus's quick nock, I will think of a rework to make it a bit better to use, perhaps the skill will be like Ciel's heartpiercer, having a chance to add a debuff to the target.
  
• I agree the hunt system enemies do need a little love and rework after all the updates I've done, also will work on it.
  
• I think for the button mashing, the most important thing is to not overdo it(for your finger's sake). So you will not see too much more of this mechanic later on in the game.
  

Again thank you. I will try to keep you posted and work to make the game better. I guess I need to take another step backwards before I can step forward >.>... But I really do appreciate all you have done.


Edit: Okay. I lied I am uploading a new version now. Ancient Armor + Armaments have been buffed slightly. Atticus is weaker. Rylus's quick nock cannot miss now. Does a bit less damage but now has a chance to apply def down. The vampire bat's hp has been adjusted to be lower.

 

[parallax]

No problem, I enjoy helping.

 

[raynesu]

I have also made a small update reducing some of the mana costs for spells since I reduced characters mana pools.

 

[raynesu]

Hi all.


This week has mostly been laying down the groundwork for the new chapter of the game. This includes the mind numbing work creating weapons, armor, etc. This also includes more work creating and finishing the skill tree for the last planned playable character Emille. 


This week also included an overhaul of the time of day system. Previously the time was tracked by either entering or exiting instanced areas, which added 1 hour to the in game time. The problem with this is that time would seem inconsistent. You could stay for what would feel like hours in 1 instance of a map, then transfer to a new one and only 1 hour would have passed. Conversely, you could transfer very rapidly through many instances and time would go by very fast. This poses a problem when I made it so night closes stores, and created a weather effect. Therefore, I created a new time system. This system dynamically keeps track of time. Currently in the build I am testing day and night cycles are approximately 6 minutes, making the entire day/night cycle 12 minutes. While this is only in testing I am pleased with the results.


With this new time system, there has also been an update for some of the other older systems. The biggest ones are the weather and hunt systems. With the dynamically changing time, weather can now change while you are in an instanced map! Meaning if you are in the Mirror Forest, for example, the weather can change from wind to rain to light all while you are traversing the instance. The same works for hunts, rare hunts are able to spawn dynamically while you are in the instance. One more thing that I am working on, however, is a way of keeping track of weather going on. What I mean is, currently when you leave an instanced area the weather in that instance is reset. If it is windy in the mirror forest and you leave, you can reenter and it won't be anymore, even though no time has passed. 


That's it for this week! Sorry for the "lite" update, hopefully there will be a more beefy one next week. Thank you for reading. o/


Edit: With Christmas coming up there probably will not be an update next week :c. However, I will be look forward to sharing my progress in the new year!

 

[raynesu]

It's time for another, 

Wow it's been how long maybe 2-3 weeks since the last update?  I hope everyone's new years and holidays were good. I've taken a much needed break and now I'm back to giving weekly updates!


While I have just returned to working on the game, a few big things are currently in the works.


Updated Weather:


The first of which is of course weather. Last time, I began talking about the new weather system that has been implemented. With the new day/night cycles, the weather system needed a major overhaul. Initially the weather was determined when the player entered a map and time would be frozen until the player left the map, which would increment the time by 1. Now with the dynamic time system, time will constantly be flowing while the player is in any map, with a few exceptions such as shops. Last time, weather was only set to update every 12 hours in game, when the time would change from night to day or vise versa. Also the old problem where a player could reset the weather simply by exiting and reentering instances still existed. With the current iteration of weather, every map that could have multiple weather states are now managed independently of each other. What I mean by this is weather is now managed by a higher level system. The effects of which now make it so weather such as rain, wind, etc. now persist for a few hours at a time regardless if a player is in the map/instance. Hopefully this will make weather a bit more realistic to deal with. As a note, the hunt system will be updated in a similar fashion. 


New System: Skill Enhancement


My goal for the playable characters is to allow player to play the way they would like to play, be it spell slinging or hacking and slashing. However due to the way the skill trees are, I was limited to about 12 abilities per tree. And while unlocking all 12 will definitely take some time to do, I still want the player to feel as if they are still progressing even when they are reaching the more grindy portions of the trees. Additionally I didn't want players to stop using old skills simply because they didn't do enough damage. Thus I thought it was best to add in this enhancement system. With this system, players will be able to upgrade learned skills to either add an additional effect such as lowering DEF or increase it's damage to be more useful later in the game. While there is still a lot of work that needs to be done with this system, here is a small preview on how it will work:

Spoiler

Here is an example of what skill enhancement will look like for the skill Fire Fang. Players will be presented with something like this

They will have to choose between the 2 enhanced skills, spend a currency, and then upgrade the skill. While the player will get the enhanced skill added to their abilities, the old skill will still be usable.

Story Rewite:


These past weeks also allowed me to reflect upon where I am now in the story and where I want to go. In its current state, I find that there are a lot of holes in continuity and old concepts that I have decided were not fit for the story I wanted to tell. So, I am in the process in unifying the story and hopefully to make it better. These changes will be reflected in the next updated demo version along with updated lore. Now I do not have a release date planned for this, but please look forward to a hopefully better story.  


 That's if for this week. It's good to be back and working on this project.

 

[raynesu]

Main Story Rewrite:


So for this week I chose to focus solely on the story rewrite. My main goal is for this rewrite is to increase the coherence of the story as well as increase the immersion into the world.From my playtests and people's comments I found the story quite lacking, and looking onto the future, ie chapter 2 and etc, the current story and lore in my opinion narrows the scope of where I can go with it. While the overall story should be fairly similar gameplaywise the lore and the people of the world have been altered a fair degree. A more updated lore will be posted later, close to the next version release. I don't want to go into too many details since this is still highly susceptible to change.


Side Quest Rework:


This has been on my radar for quite sometime. There is no doubt in my mind that some of the side quests seem underdeveloped and are disjointed from the plot and world in general. For instance, there were a ton of collection quests, as they were a crutch for me to reach the quota of side quests I wanted to have. Now with a rewrite of the story in the works, some of the side quests will be changed. The major goal I hope to accomplish with this rework, is to make side quest more bearable to the player by somehow offering story, lore, or in general funner quests. These new side quests will roll out with the updated story.


Codex Change:


Not really a change to how the codex works, it will still provide players with useful information about how to play the game. The change is that players will now be able to expand their codex by picking up pieces of lore or tips. I think that this will help in the excitement to explore and hopefully increase people's immersion into the story world. Picking up these entries will be optional though and a just for people who want more story.


New Hunt System:


As mentioned before, with the new time system the old hunt system was broken and did not work. A little insight into how the old hunt system worked: rare monsters spawned based on a random chance based on the player entering the map/instance. If the conditions were met, the monster would spawn in 1 of 3 random locations. This, again, however suffered the same problem in which players could forcibly spawn a rare monster by simply entering and exiting the map/instance over and over. After mulling it over for a bit, the new hunt system will have monsters that will spawn only under certain conditions that are met by the player rather than the map/instance. For example, one way this could work is that a rare monster could only be spawned if the player has killed X monsters during the night. Hopefully this will make hunting a lot funner to do, as the ways to spawn these monsters will be revealed to players from either exploration or doing quests... or maybe even discovered by accident!


That's it for this week, hope you guys have had a good one!


P.S. If you have made it this far...

Spoiler

Here's a dancing banana.

 

[Iceblue11]

Enjoying the game so far raynesu  however ... where did you find the monster for the battlers ? I'm using holders battlers too, but outside of a few monster from him, i cannot find any that have a similar style.

 

[raynesu]

Im glad to hear that, it really means a lot. As for the battlers unfortunately they are from a DLC pack. The pack is called the DS pack and can be found on Steam. If you are still interested, I can give you the exact name of the pack since I can't remember it off the top of my head.

 

[raynesu]

There was no update week because I was in the process of travelling and moving. Sorry! See you guys next week.

 

[raynesu]

Hey everyone it's time for another weekly update. Sorry for missing you guys last week, I hope these will make you forgive me:

Spoiler

 What are these you may ask, well actually it's pretty easy to tell that their wanted posters, but these posters are part of the new hunt system which I have been talking about for a while.


*Finished* New Hunt System:


Yes, it's finally done. Along with all that I've mentioned before in previous posts, including the unique conditions to spawn each rare monster, the new hunt system has also gotten rid of some other older features. One big feature that is now gone is the "hunt favor" system. While I did think that the hunt favor system was an interesting way to reward players for hunting, the rewards were a little outdated and incompatible with the new system. So for now the system is not included in the game but may come back later. 


Final Testing:


As of right now, and I know I say this a lot, the main story is now in a state where I am confident I can move on with and most of the side quests have been redone to hopefully be a little more entertaining to do! All that's left at this point is for me to QA test the game to make sure typos and glitches are taken care of!


Lore Time:


Aetheria?


So I call the game Aetheria: Shadows of the Past, but does anybody really know what Aetheria really is? This is one of the many "holes" I had in my last iteration of the lore and story. So the Aetheria is basically a parallel world that exists along with the "human" world. These two worlds lived in tandem with little contact with each other, until  the event known as the Celestial Equinox united the two worlds. Since the worlds have been united, spirits (as they are called by the human world) began to inhabit the human world though in a corporeal form, and it was only until being paired with special humans, aka exorcists, with sensitivity to the parallel world, that the spirits could take on a more solid form. 


Spirits and Demons?


Inherently spirits by themselves are devoid of evil and are pure. However spirits after coming to the human world discovered that they are sensitive to human emotions and are influenced by them. Because of this some spirits succumbed to the negative emotions and darkness and thus became Demons. Within the demons there varying levels of power with the top being a Lord of Chaos.


This is a little sneak peak at the new lore. A more extensive lore will be released replacing the old lore on the original post when the new version comes out, which is soon I hope >.<


That is it for this week, if you have any ideas, comments, or criticisms please tell me! I am always seeking to improve and appreciate anything feedback! See you guys next week!   

 

[masterlobo]

That's a dope Skill Tree sir.

Did you use a public script or did you code it up yourself?

Kudos!

 

[raynesu]

@masterlobo
No, in fact its a modified version of Lune's Unlimited Skill Tree if you want to make one for yourself!

 

[raynesu]

@masterlobo
No, in fact its a modified version of Lune's Unlimited Skill Tree if you want to make one for yourself!

Though the images of the skill trees themselves I made myself using some community images. Oops, i double posted.