FFX Remake - Act 1 (Cancelled)

[feels]

(Ah man I thought I was being sneaky but Rikku stole the potions out of my supply)

I’ll be able to give more feedback later (made it to Besaid). So far I think I like the idea of non-random event battles (your trainer and cliff battles) peppered in. I didn’t really understand the goal of the cliff battle though, as it ended before I reached the goal (and Anna said I missed the sword). (Is it a blitzball reference?) Some instruction might help there.

The improvements to the random battle system are nice: the transition to a different map and getting the win jingle and gil at the end is pretty satisfying.

Party select seems pretty good so far but it feels a little spoilery to display the full roster (and saucy anna) at the start. Is there a way to access party member stats/inventory outside of battle/town?

[Vesly]

Cliff battle just has an escape tile that ends the battle. I would like to eventually add in a proper way to flee non-boss battles. Anna was actually just hoping you’d fall off the cliff and she’d get some free loot off your corpse. Lol. Nothing extra to see in that battle.

For now the party select is limited by the tools I have available. It is possible to copy paste the code a bunch of times and add in new menus for each possible set of party members you could have. (Eg. Tidus, Tidus + Auron, Tidus + Rikku, Tidus + Wakka… etc.) That would avoid spoilers, but seems like a lot of bother for said feature. I’m more likely to make the ‘manage’ feature only available once you hit Besaid village. Ideally I’d rather use a different system than that menu (eg. the preparations menu unit select) if it’s possible.

Currently no way to view party details outside of battle / town. It might be nice to add that in, or to add in some more preparations screens to allow for managing your units.

Thanks for the feedback so far.

[feels]

Ah, that makes sense~ And yeah, being able to use a preparation-like menu for Manage/PartySelect would be great.

Finished up, and overall I like the additions you’ve made and it seems like good progress. The action and overall feel of the boat battle was probably my favorite part of all of it, and Operation Mi’ihen looks like it’ll be fun once it’s fleshed out. Elemental weaknesses, skill scrolls, statModifiers, was also pretty fun to play around with.

Issues I’ve found so far:
~Both the experience and money economy don’t seem fine-tuned quite yet.

Items seemed to cost way more than what my wallet had, while I’d randomly get a high-ticket item from battles on occassion. Even though potions sold for a decent price and I had plenty, at Besaid I still had to sell most of them to get one Parallel Seal.

Tidus was pretty overleveled and could wipe out monster parties by the end, not sure if you’ll have a party EXP share or dynamic enemy leveling in the works. I think Tidus will likely be permanent in a lot of player’s parties since he’s the only one with Supply and Manage options.

~Thieves can cross rivers, not sure if this is intentional.

-Thief couldn’t pick the door lock at Kilika temple (makes sense for the puzzle, but still a bit curious to encounter).

-Cutscenes repeat both on Warp(for many things) and Enter/Exit(for Kilika Paths at least). I could farm torches by warping into the “To Kilika” repeatedly. I’m not sure if Warp is a debug feature or how else I’d backtrack to Besaid Cave with the Torch item (admittedly one Torch was only enough to explore the left half of the cave, too, and I’m not sure if I could get torches any other way).

-Auron’s portrait pops back in during the detour cutscene on the Kilika path but he’s still not available from the party select. I’m not familiar with FFX’s story so it seemed odd for him to resurface abruptly.

-Some random battles would have 5 party members, but the extra two party members would be in the middle of a lake. Still beatable but seemed a little odd.

-Yuna’s Aeon’s name is “Enemy”.

Anywho, it was a fun playthrough, really interested to see what you come up with.

[Vesly]

Thanks for playing and providing feedback!

Wall o text

Yuna’s tome, ‘Flash’ probably makes more sense to use for exploring Besaid Cave. (Fog of war is going to see some changes in the future, so I don’t want to do fuss much with it right now, but using Flash in To Kilika lets you see that Sin is only his head right now, lol. Very interested in using Huichelaar’s updating danger area, which conflicts with fog. ‘Sol’ from Luca also lights up areas, and possibly more weapons will.)

Indeed, warp chapter is a debug feature for now, but eventually it will become the lategame airship that allows you to quickly backtrack to areas. Some areas won’t be warpable to, such as Prologue or To Kilika. This means I’ll have to carefully add conditionals to events / cutscenes so they don’t trigger upon re-visiting areas. This is always a pain, but ah well. It’d be easier if I had unlimited global flags to work with.

Snakey1 has an elemental triangle coded that I might try and adapt. I wanted to use Ice - Fire, Wind - Thunder for mine, but we’ll see. It’s also problematic that enemies are restricted to a certain palette. I would have to change the sprites for ALL classes used by enemies if I want to change the enemy palette. But it would be great to have Ice Flans blue, as well as other elemental enemies their respective colour. My other idea was to use affinity to show element rather than sprites, but this is set by unit rather than class, and the random monster thing is by class. Maybe I could check the class of each random enemy that spawns and use set_status to give them a corresponding affinity… then with modular minimug box, you could easily see the elemental affinity on the map for the unit.

Gil and exp aren’t balanced yet. I’m looking to have exp curve exponentially - that is, overleveled units get no exp and under leveled units get loads. I’ve been talking to Zeta about this. Although the seals and buyable skills seem to work, they likely need to be finessed. I noticed (and fixed) that swapping Lulu to a troubadour didn’t give her staff exp, for example, but now you could re-class her to troubadour and back and keep the staves, haha. These class changes also don’t adjust your stats whatsoever, so here’s hoping someone comes up with a better way. But as I’ve made them, they should at least be fun for learning some new skills… once those are being used. Erring on the side of caution for now and giving out as few skills as possible until the game is better balanced.

The action and overall feel of the boat battle was probably my favorite part of all of it

I have achieved the impossible: a fog of war survive map while being inflicted random statuses is the highlight of the game. Haha, yes, it does a good job in rising the tension without actually being too difficult, I feel.

-Thief couldn’t pick the door lock at Kilika temple (makes sense for the puzzle, but still a bit curious to encounter).

Oh. I’ll change that. I probably had put ‘Cunning’ as a personal skill for Rikku, instead of a class skill for Thieves. I don’t mind if someone ‘cheats’ the puzzle by being a thief… it might save them about 20 seconds, but is ultimately inconsequential. Dunno about thieves crossing rivers, haven’t really thought about that yet.

Random battles are supposed to have just 3 party members. The extra two in a lake means I’ve missed removing party members somewhere. I’ve started calling an event at the end of some chapters to remove all party members and rejoin the ones I specify. (Eg. after Besaid Village, your party should be Tidus, Wakka, and Yuna iirc). Using “warp chapter” to go to “To Kilika”, you could have 5 party members I think. Then starting any chapter without finishing “To Kilika” would allow you to keep the extra 2. If this happened under other circumstances, I probably missed something past the Luca area.

This release was up to “Kilika Ruins”, with some drafts past there left in. Auron is supposed to join your party in Luca, and you’re also supposed to meet Seymour there (who soon becomes the primary antagonist). I have no idea what I want to do for these cutscenes for now, so I’ll revisit it later.

I’ll rename Yuna’s Aeon.

Thanks for the help.

Edit: Looks like Skills are not actually learned when changing class with set_status, which is understandable. The icon on the class is display only, I guess. I’ll have to look into making this work as intended. If I can’t figure out anything else, I could code the parallel seals to simply teach the corresponding skills, as well.

Edit:

Cactus the smiley

Touched up a few sprites today. You can probably tell that the Cactuar is the one I drew myself. We can’t all be artists. I feel that the single shade of green allotted to me is a bit limiting.

Water / Earth / Electric flans. Using Snakey1’s Anima triangle now.
or… I will change it to be Water / Fire / Grass.

Enemies are supposed to be red, but I’ve replaced the least common colour with blue.

Added in Earth / Water treants… we’ll see what happens.

If I can figure out a way to have effective damage get an accuracy bonus, then I could use as many elements as I want… hmm. (Eg. Armorslayer getting +40 hit against Knights.)

Edit2:

Elements

Snakey1’s anima triangle with Fire / Water / Flora

Weapons

Need to add / change some icons

Idk if deciding to replace every weapon in the game was a good idea. But I think it’s shaping into something, slowly.

Editing in these little updates keep me happy.

[Vesly]

Many updates since my last post.

• Fire - Grass - Water: elemental triangle + weapons
• Enemies that are weak to these elements, eg. Treants are weak to Fire, etc.
• Many combat adjustments
• EXP managed differently now to prevent overleveling
• Boss encounters use smarter AI
• Cliffside battles (to perhaps be expanded on) knock units in any direction now

Eventually I’ll add a hard difficulty, so I want to plan for that.

If anyone’s interested in combat designing aspects of this game, hit me up. There are a number of enemy classes unique to this game. The combat system is also unusual, as battles occur on a quasi random map with units placed in random corners. I’m a bit at a loss trying to finesse the combat by myself.

Trainer now has an exclamation mark

Don’t know how I overlooked this before. Thanks Pikmin.

Edit: Bugfixes
(Thanks @Shuusuke)

• Aeon is now DISA instead of REMO (won’t linger in party after battle sometimes anymore)
• Aeon dying will no longer freeze the game. (oops)
• All chars are refreshed after moving in Besaid Village
• Buffed Kimahri a little bit.

Going to call what’s released / up to Luca as “Act 1” of the hack. Unsure of how long this game will end up being, though.

Edit2:
Aesthetics & more prepration.

Fooling around with some skill icons.

Hit + Avoid needs some identifier.

Whatever I decide on, I’ll probably batch process over the relevant skills. I feel this makes a bit of skillspam much more accessible.

Oh, also I’ve put in a new MMB.

Finally put in the title screen

Improved the smaller portraits for the main cast. Also using Kirb’s status screen except with a lighter background for portraits right now.

Better minimugs

There are still graphical glitches from halfbody (eg. trading, equipment screen), but I will no longer have to cringe every time I open up the status screen.

Not really sure how to blend this together.

Chapter intro image

Not my original artwork.

Just experimenting I guess.

[anon98251803]

Thread locked at the request of OP.