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Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


Kemix posted:

I can only hope the bosses with those "counters" are reverted back to pre-"gently caress you and your lifeshooms too" status.

Which bosses have Life Shroom counters?

Note that Kent C. Koopa will probably still steal them as a call back to his original design (which was to steal any Life Shrooms you had and then use them - the devs could never get the second part working, though.)

Note also that if a boss is advertised as having an attack that 'ignores Life Shrooms', that's just because it's a combo attack. If Mario takes any additional damage during a certain window in the revive animation, he bites it.

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Carbon dioxide
Oct 9, 2012

Hmmmmm, would it now be possible to do a low-hp strat (I mean where you never upgrade your HP with level-up), combined with these new life shrooms?

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


Carbon dioxide posted:

Hmmmmm, would it now be possible to do a low-hp strat (I mean where you never upgrade your HP with level-up), combined with these new life shrooms?

It might be tricky to not upgrade your HP through the whole game, given the SP gained from boss fights. And if you never upgrade your HP, the extra healing will be lost (it doesn't overcap). But it'd at least give you the ability to survive longer in a lot of fights with basic enemies.

JustJeff88
Jan 15, 2008

I AM
CONSISTENTLY
ANNOYING
...
JUST TERRIBLE


THIS BADGE OF SHAME IS WORTH 0.45 DOUBLE DRAGON ADVANCES

:dogout:
of SA-Mart forever
Quackles, how many/much of the changes in this next patch round, and in the mod in general, are done in the original game engine and how many are the result of devs breaking the engine in various ways (hacks, scripts etc) to get an effect? I have been curious about this for some time.

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


Dev Blog Update: Behind the Curtain

JustJeff88 posted:

Quackles, how many/much of the changes in this next patch round, and in the mod in general, are done in the original game engine and how many are the result of devs breaking the engine in various ways (hacks, scripts etc) to get an effect? I have been curious about this for some time.

I'm the one who's been programming all changes in the new version so far, and I am very proud of them, so thank you for giving me the opportunity to monologue.

OK, so a quick rundown on how Paper Mario hacking works: the original PM64 devs wrote their own scripting language and interpreter, which is stored in the ROM as bytecodes. Each enemy, battle move, and map has its own script. If a script needs capabilities beyond those of the script interpreter, it can call functions written in MIPS assembly (ASM), which is the language of the N64's CPU.
The Star Rod editor lets people edit, patch, and recompile scripts directly.


For the status stomps, all I had to do was change the status inflict probability in the DamageTarget() function call.


For Truth Stomp - there's already a check in most attacks for invisibility, but it's normally used to segue into Mario (or the enemy) doing a face fault. I just took the check and made it call a variant of the attack that does bonus damage instead.
(For those who are curious: this is how enemies with invisibility-piercing attacks work. They simply don't check to see if Mario is invisible first before attacking.)


For Multi-Smash - there's no actual such thing as piercing damage (that ignores defensive badges) in Paper Mario 64, so I ended up writing an ASM function that checks Mario's defensive badges, and recalibrates the amount of raw damage so that the amount of final damage (the recoil) is always equal to 3, the desired amount. The actual damage proc is tagged as an unblockable attack aimed at Mario, by Mario.
This one doubled as an extremely quick and bumpy tutorial on how scripts and functions interrelate with one another.


For Life Shrooms - hoo. OK, so this one, there's a story behind it.

Life Shrooms are actually activated by means of a script, same as all other items. However, there's a catch; this particular script is in the game's battle library, which Star Rod can't patch directly (a lot of functions in the game's core code use hardcoded pointers, and changing the length of anything would cause catastrophic breakages). Moreover, the Life Shroom script has a number of ASM functions in it which do some of the more fiddly bits of the process (including restoring Mario's HP, looking around in Mario's inventory and removing one Life Shroom, and handling the 'Refund' animation when a Life Shroom goes off while wearing the Refund badge).

So, I made a copy of the Life Shroom script, and created custom ASM functions to hook into it. There were a total of three ASM functions to start: one that looked through Mario's inventory and ate up to 5 Life Shrooms, returning the number of Life Shrooms consumed; one that adds to the Refund amount; and one that does the work of healing Mario by a variable amount, to replace the original function. There was also a script addition that created extra Life Shroom animations if more than one Shroom was consumed.

To actually get the game to use my script instead of the original Life Shroom script, I had to tell Star Rod to patch the rom's raw data directly:



This code overwrites the bytecodes at the start of the original Life Shroom script to reroute to the updated one instead.


While this was being tested, a new problem arose. When only one Life Shroom was being used, everything would go OK. When more were used, the extended animation would lead to the Life Shroom script being called more than once. (I still don't know why this is. I think the event dispatcher was waiting for something specific and the Life Shroom script didn't get there fast enough.)

The fix was: make one extra ASM function. The function that consumes life shrooms is modified to consume all of Mario's life shrooms at once. The Life Shroom script stores the number of extra shrooms (over 5) that were consumed. Then, the new ASM function adds the extras back into Mario's inventory after the revive animation is done playing.

This made it so that, when the Life Shroom script was called more than once, the extra versions of the script would see there were no Life Shrooms in Mario's inventory (because they hadn't been added back yet) and end early (I added a check to make them bail out).

And with that, it worked.

heehee
Sep 5, 2012

haha wow i cant believe how lucky we got to win :D
if u can figure out how to make it work on everdrive that'd be sweet.

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


heeheex2 posted:

if u can figure out how to make it work on everdrive that'd be sweet.

That one's up to clover, creator of Star Rod. Maybe someday.

gourdcaptain
Nov 16, 2012

Quackles posted:

That one's up to clover, creator of Star Rod. Maybe someday.

Huh. Any idea what causes it specifically? I'm curious, and your technical explanations above were neat.

Carbon dioxide
Oct 9, 2012

Yeah if you do more bit fiddling I'd love to hear about it.

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


gourdcaptain posted:

Huh. Any idea what causes it specifically? I'm curious, and your technical explanations above were neat.

I'm told that current versions of Star Rod-made mods allocate a lot more memory than the original Paper Mario 64, and do it in such a way that the console refuses to continue. A future version of Star Rod is planned to be Everdrive compatible.

Explopyro
Mar 18, 2018

By the way, do you know if/when an updated version is going to be publicly available? The link you have in the OP still goes to 1.3.0.2 and says it was last updated on 14 November.

I'm not trying to rush you, but at some point I'll probably want to replay this :)

Sorites
Sep 10, 2012

Will the Let's Play continue or are the changes too drastic/retroactive to make that viable?

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


Explopyro posted:

By the way, do you know if/when an updated version is going to be publicly available? The link you have in the OP still goes to 1.3.0.2 and says it was last updated on 14 November.

Expect a long wait. We can't publish a new version until clover releases a new version of Star Rod, due to the 'cake skip' bug. Additionally, a large amount of work - notably, EX boss reworks - remains to be done before the final version is ready.


Sorites posted:

Will the Let's Play continue or are the changes too drastic/retroactive to make that viable?

The Let's Play will definitely continue, but it'll take me some work to figure out how to transfer my save file over. The simplest way might be to carefully fake the transfer using the dev tools.

As for when it'll continue - probably once the new version is out, though I might do one or two installments before then.

However, I'm thinking of starting a new Let's Play in the meantime...

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


Dev Blog Update: The Case of the Misdirected Train



This was an interesting one. At a certain hidden place in Master Quest exists an item known as the Traveler's Parasol. It allows free teleportation to any area you've been.

Something strange was happening with it, though.




If you warped to Shy Guy's Toy Box and immediately took the train...



You'd find yourself looping back around to Blue Station, instead of your destination! After that, the train would work properly. What could be going on?


So for this, we'll need a rundown on how the Toy Train works, as well as how Mario normally moves through rooms. When you board the Train, it sets your destination in what's known as an area byte, which is a value storage slot shared among maps that belong to the same Area group (in this case, the group encompasses the Toy Box.) The area byte is read at each of the track rooms and station stops, to figure out whether the train should keep going or start slowing down.


Normally, when the player moves between rooms, the game checks if an area transition has occurred, and clears area bytes if this is the case. However, there's a catch (actually two catches), and they both have to do with the Traveler's Parasol.

[1] The Traveler's Parasol doesn't use the normal room entry script. It puts the address of the destination room and area into the correct places in memory, then triggers a quick room exit. The check for whether the area has changed is skipped!
Now, leaving the area flags 'dirty' - with whatever data the previous area left in them - is a problem to fix with the Parasol, but it wouldn't explain the issue with the train. The destination is set when Mario boards the train, so it'd overwrite whatever was already there. But the second catch with the parasol is what made the bug come to light.

[2] The game stores the current area in two places in memory, not just one. However, the Traveler's Parasol only set one of those places. What was happening was: the first time Mario left a room after warping to his destination, the game noticed the two area coordinates didn't match up. It took this to mean that Mario was moving between areas, and would clear all the area bytes, so the new area could use them.
(Fortunately, the game stored both versions of the 'current area' number right next to one another - the second copy wasn't known about until I spotted it changing while debugging.)


With this information, everything now makes sense. Here's what was going wrong.

[1] Mario warps to the Toy Box. Area flags are not cleared, and the old area address remains in the second area coordinate.

[2] Mario boards the train. The 'destination' area byte is set to 1, 2, or 3 depending on the target station.

[3] When Mario leaves Blue Station, the game loads the next room (the train tracks). The game sees the area coordinate mismatch, and clears all the area bytes - including the one used to store the destination.
This sets the destination to 0, AKA Blue Station.

[4] The train faithfully carries Mario to Blue Station.

[5] While Mario remains in the Toy Box, even if he warps back to Blue Station with the parasol, the game sees that he hasn't changed areas, so the bug doesn't reappear. Similarly, if he enters the Toy Box the normal way, the game notices the area change and clears the flags before he boards the train, as intended.


The fix is pretty straightforward.

First off, the Parasol now sets both area coordinates.
Second, it also calls the game's own functions that clear area bytes on warp - it's only good form to clean up after Mario!



And with that, a seemingly simple bug proves surprisingly subtle.

Next Time on Master Quest: The greatest, most debate-inducing nerfs in the history of mankind.

I dont know
Aug 9, 2003

That Guy here...
I can't wait for the hotly debated nerf arguments. I mean that sincerely. Balance arguments are interesting to me, since oftentimes everyone raises good points, but are operating on slightly different visions of what the gameplay should look like in the end.

KeiraWalker
Sep 5, 2011

Me? Don't worry about me...
Grimey Drawer

I dont know posted:

I can't wait for the hotly debated nerf arguments. I mean that sincerely. Balance arguments are interesting to me, since oftentimes everyone raises good points, but are operating on slightly different visions of what the gameplay should look like in the end.

I'm also intensely curious to see if it's enemy nerfs or player nerfs.

Considering the game in question, I think we can reasonably guess the answer. Though perhaps Quackles will surprise us!

DACK FAYDEN
Feb 25, 2013

Bear Witness
Why is the Parasol hidden? Beats the sewers by far. Give it to the player right away imo.

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


DACK FAYDEN posted:

Why is the Parasol hidden?

Because it's at the bottom of the Pit of 100 Trials. Why, I dunno.

Jack-Off Lantern
Mar 2, 2012

This is the Tiger King of Let's plays, in a way the game is now the least interesting part while other stuff steals the limelight

Alxprit
Feb 7, 2015

<click> <click> What is it with this dancing?! Bouncing around like fools... I would have thought my own kind at least would understand the seriousness of our Adventurer's Guild!

The final reward for a massive difficult gauntlet in the game being an element of convenience sounds incredibly backwards. Sure, TTYD had the double item space at halfway, but that was halfway, and it's reasonable you'd get there before the end of the game.

Blaze Dragon
Aug 28, 2013
LOWTAX'S SPINE FUND

Alxprit posted:

The final reward for a massive difficult gauntlet in the game being an element of convenience sounds incredibly backwards. Sure, TTYD had the double item space at halfway, but that was halfway, and it's reasonable you'd get there before the end of the game.

I'll second this. This is just really bad design and heavily missing the point of a convenience item. It's like Pokemon giving you Fly after the Elite Four, when even Game Freak realized after over two decades the player should have that immediately.

Explopyro
Mar 18, 2018

I agree with that, but at the same time, it also means that there's less reason to feel bad if you somehow can't get through the last 10 floors (which, I must admit, I only did with heavy use of savestates and by abusing some bugs in the last version, which seem to have been fixed now; I don't know if I'll be able to get through it after the update).

Also, there was something vaguely clever about it, in that there's actually no way to leave the Pit on the 100th floor, so the Parasol functions as the only way you can leave, and ends up functioning almost as a kind of puzzle. I thought that was cute.

Incidentally, does this fix to the Parasol mean you can no longer use it in the Forbidden Forest to bring the wolf noises with you to any zone? ;)

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


Explopyro posted:

Incidentally, does this fix to the Parasol mean you can no longer use it in the Forbidden Forest to bring the wolf noises with you to any zone? ;)

I also found that while testing the Parasol, and fixed it too.

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


Dev Blog Update: Nerf Day

In my last update, I promised information on large balance changes that would affect the balance of the entire game. Now, here they are.

1. No More Hustle-Repel



Hustle Drinks are a dummied-out item in the code of the original Paper Mario. They give Mario two extra actions the next turn. The problem is, a degenerate strategy grew up around them.

The strategy looked like this:



A. Get into Peril.

While wearing Mega Rush, to gain the +4 attack boost.




B. With Double Dip, use a Hustle Drink and a Repel Gel, in that order.

This will give Mario the Hustle acceleration effect and invisibility at the same time. Note that having Bow use Outta Sight will result in the Hustle effect being removed, and using the items in reverse order would result in the invisibility being removed.




C. Next turn, unleash twin Peril-boosted attacks!

'nuff said! Multi-Smash was particularly valued for this, because the boost from Mega Rush would apply to each hit of each Multi-Smash.



D. Hide with Outta Sight to give a Mario chance to heal - or do it all over again.

And there we have it.


Balancing around this proved a problem. If the dev team balanced bosses to be a challenge to people who didn't use Hustle-Repel, Hustle-Repel users would have a free ride. If bosses were balanced around Hustle-Repel instead, people who weren't using it got beaten up.

As such, from now on, using a Repel Gel will remove the acceleration effect of Hustle Drinks. It was fun while it lasted.


2. Last Stand's Last Stand



Last Stand is a badge that halves incoming damage when Mario is in Danger. In the original Paper Mario, Last Stand halves damage after the effect of most defensive badges (Defend Plus and similar), but before the effect of Damage Dodge.

This meant that while Last Stand was active, each Damage Dodge badge (along with Mario's natural block) would effectively block two points of damage. This gave Mario a great amount of extra survivability while in Danger or Peril - Assuming Mario was wearing Hold Fast, both of the game's Defend Plus badges and both Damage Dodges, any incoming attack of 9 damage or less would have no effect.

This range could be extended with Water Block, casting Chill Out on the enemies, and the P-Down, D-Up badges, for a theoretical defensive maximum of no damage if an attack did 14 damage or less.

Suddenly, the crazy damage numbers in MQ start making more sense... but it was bad for game balance, for the same reason as Hustle-Repel: using it gave a huge advantage if it wasn't balanced around, and if it was, people who weren't using it got beaten up.

As such, Last Stand will act after every other means of defense - including Mario's natural guard - in the upcoming version. ( This change makes it behave exactly as it does in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.) Crazy damage numbers may no longer be needed! And Last Stand can hopefully see greater favor as a defensive badge in dire circumstances rather than a means to stay in Danger indefinitely.


3. The Great Status Overhaul

What's the purpose of RNG in a game that's supposed to be about difficulty and strategy? It just introduces confounding factors that can make strategies fail for reasons outside of the player's control.

In the upcoming version, the MQ dev team is going to remove most randomness from the game. Today, let's talk about status effects.



As things currently stand, enemies have percentage chances to be affected by status effects. Elite enemies and bosses may have very low weakness chances - even down to 20%!

This is going to change in the upcoming version. Put simply...



Enemies will either be weak to a status, or immune to it. If an enemy is weak, they will have a 100% chance to be affected with it. But, there's a catch!



Or rather, a cap. Each enemy may be afflicted by a status effect - any status effect - up to twice in a battle. In the case of bosses, this cap drops to a single time. After this, further infliction attempts will simply fail.

Each enemy's status weaknesses will be redesigned so that formations are partially susceptible to a mix of status effects. Shrink will last longer than stunning statuses, and single-target hits will last longer than AoE effects. Fewer enemies will have duration resistances to status effects, and those duration resistances will be less than before.

In short: status effects are being reintroduced as a true, viable strategy.


Next Time on Master Quest: "Can Spin Smash do more splash damage if Mario has a better hammer?" Sure, how hard could it be?

Quackles fucked around with this message at 11:44 on May 6, 2020

KeiraWalker
Sep 5, 2011

Me? Don't worry about me...
Grimey Drawer
Ooh, so I was half right. A lot of player nerfs, but for the express purpose of being able to balance enemy damage output more fairly and consistently. Cool!

I like where you guys are trying to take status effects to make them more useful, too. Good stuff. I hope Clover manages to get that updated version of Star Rod out sooner rather than later. I'm really looking forward to this.

Explopyro
Mar 18, 2018

These seem like good changes overall, I think.

I'm not certain about the Hustle-Repel thing (mostly because I think this has a dramatic impact on the effectiveness of both items, are either of them worth using outside this paradigm?), but I understand that being removed. It's a bit annoying because I thought that strategy was a cute bit of strategic cleverness, but the impact it had on balancing makes perfect sense and hopefully everything will end up in a better place without it. (What will this mean for the Anti-Squad though?)

Last Stand is not a badge I ever really used, so I wasn't familiar with how busted it could be. That change makes sense, though again, I question whether this just makes the badge useless. (That isn't necessarily the worst thing, but I do think it's a nontrivial concern.)

As for the status changes, I wholeheartedly approve of those. This seems like a similar solution to what Bug Fables ended up using (in that game, enemies' resistance to status increases every time they're successfully inflicted with it, eventually becoming immune) but I think this is a better way to add strategic depth for the purposes of this hack.

It's getting to the point where I'm looking forward to playing this again.

(Since I mentioned it earlier, I should mention that I finally got around to playing Bug Fables on the strength of recommendations earlier in this thread, and definitely want to second those recommendations. That game is excellent.)

Grapplejack
Nov 27, 2007

Removing the hustle repel thing is stupid because the only time it's actually possible is at the endgame when you're doing the bonus bosses, though with how much the devs love ONLY ONE SOLUTION ALLOWED I'm not surprised they went out of their way to stop it.

I'd love to see a video of the devs beating the bonus bosses because I want to see what degenerate strategy they think is the right one, as compared to those other, WRONG strategies.

Most enemies also have anti-peril strats built in so I genuinely don't see the point of the last stand need unless those are also being reworked but lol

Grapplejack fucked around with this message at 19:00 on May 6, 2020

CountryMatters
Apr 8, 2009

IT KEEPS HAPPENING
This LP is going to have a really weird dynamic now that Quackles is actually on the dev team, so the constant complaints about every element of the mod being unfair bullshit moron jerk one-solution-only bad game design etc etc etc are going to be directed at the OP

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


CountryMatters posted:

This LP is going to have a really weird dynamic now that Quackles is actually on the dev team, so the constant complaints about every element of the mod being unfair bullshit moron jerk one-solution-only bad game design etc etc etc are going to be directed at the OP

I am specifically doing my best to make it not unfair, so. :)


Grapplejack posted:

Removing the hustle repel thing is stupid because the only time it's actually possible is at the endgame when you're doing the bonus bosses, though with how much the devs love ONLY ONE SOLUTION ALLOWED I'm not surprised they went out of their way to stop it.

I'd love to see a video of the devs beating the bonus bosses because I want to see what degenerate strategy they think is the right one, as compared to those other, WRONG strategies.

Many of the bonus bosses are being reworked, also.


Explopyro posted:

(What will this mean for the Anti-Squad though?)

Watch this space.

Ignatius M. Meen
May 26, 2011

Hello yes I heard there was a lovely trainwreck here and...

These ultimately sound like more reasonable design choices unlike the stuff Quackles was deriding and suffering from earlier. The status effect change in particular sounds great; since it's a universal shift in how weakness works, people won't have to look up a guide or write up a big paper math spreadsheet in order to figure out how to best exploit it for a given fight. If it also means the devs can go easier on the number bloat and unintuitive counters, so much the better.

JustJeff88
Jan 15, 2008

I AM
CONSISTENTLY
ANNOYING
...
JUST TERRIBLE


THIS BADGE OF SHAME IS WORTH 0.45 DOUBLE DRAGON ADVANCES

:dogout:
of SA-Mart forever

Ignatius M. Meen posted:

These ultimately sound like more reasonable design choices unlike the stuff Quackles was deriding and suffering from earlier. The status effect change in particular sounds great; since it's a universal shift in how weakness works, people won't have to look up a guide or write up a big paper math spreadsheet in order to figure out how to best exploit it for a given fight. If it also means the devs can go easier on the number bloat and unintuitive counters, so much the better.

Speaking as someone who doesn't know much about the game and often thinks that people who like ultra-hard mods are utterly mad, I will say that the changes to status effects seem very sensible.

Araxxor
Oct 20, 2012

My disdain for you all knows no bounds.
Paper Mario Master Quest: A Realm Reborn Book Rewritten.

Araxxor fucked around with this message at 04:47 on May 7, 2020

LiefKatano
Aug 31, 2018

I swear, by my sword and capote, that I will once again prove victorious!!
Mmmm, I have mixed feelings on the Hustle Drink patch, though that depends on if Hustle Drinks and Repel Gels are replenishable.

On the one hand it feels like it was an unintentional exploit anyways (Hustle removes invisibility, Outta Sight removes Hustle, so only Repel Gel into Hustle Drink works); on the other hand as far as I'm aware you only have a few chances for it, so I feel like the "Elixir effect" would kinda flatten how game-breaking it would be (since what if you need the exploit to deal with another boss down the line?!).

If an infinite amount of Repel Gels and Hustle Drinks are available I'll concede that removing it is for the better, though.

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


LiefKatano posted:

Mmmm, I have mixed feelings on the Hustle Drink patch, though that depends on if Hustle Drinks and Repel Gels are replenishable.

On the one hand it feels like it was an unintentional exploit anyways (Hustle removes invisibility, Outta Sight removes Hustle, so only Repel Gel into Hustle Drink works); on the other hand as far as I'm aware you only have a few chances for it, so I feel like the "Elixir effect" would kinda flatten how game-breaking it would be (since what if you need the exploit to deal with another boss down the line?!).

If an infinite amount of Repel Gels and Hustle Drinks are available I'll concede that removing it is for the better, though.

Hustle Drinks and Repel Gel are both purchasable in unlimited quantities. Hustle Drinks in Bowser's Castle, and Repel Gel... in either Bowser's Castle or Star Haven. I forget.

It was a standard strategy for most Star Temple (postgame rematch) bosses.

Explopyro
Mar 18, 2018

Repel Gels were in Star Haven, IIRC.

Sorites
Sep 10, 2012

LiefKatano posted:

...so I feel like the "Elixir effect" would kinda flatten how game-breaking it would be (since what if you need the exploit to deal with another boss down the line?...

Even if the items were limited, you'd end up with the 'Master Ball on Mewtwo' effect where certain boss fights became the consensus standard places to use the combo - thus ceasing to meaningfully exist for players who took advantage.

Raitzeno
Nov 24, 2007

What? It seemed like
a good idea at the time.

Hey, I finally caught up to this, having started flipping through it a few days ago. Good stuff, though I was kinda hoping the delays mentioned would've been resolved by the time I did so. Oh well. :v:

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


So, the Forum is In an Indeterminate State right now.

I have absolutely no idea what will happen at this point. Instead of typing up a big, long post about the trouble I went through to rework Spin Smash, here's what's next:

Updates are on hold (they were already) until things stop being on fire. Updates have now resumed.

• Development of the next version, codenamed 2.0, continues. Right now, the prologue and a lot of framework stuff is being worked on.

If we have to move, and this thread is still here, I'll link a new destination. The thread does not appear likely to move at this time.

Stay safe out there.

Quackles fucked around with this message at 11:03 on Aug 16, 2020

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


Dev Blog Update: The Milestone System

So first off, I should probably note that, to quote some classic literature, I ATEN'T DEAD. And, it seems, neither is this forum.

So, what's been going on with Master Quest?

The Milestone System



Work on the upcoming version, version 2.0, is well underway! We're working in a series of "Milestones". In each Milestone, all content through the end of that chapter is worked to a fine polish.

Currently, we've just finished Milestone 0, which focuses on the Prologue (as well as a lot of backend stuff that we needed to get working first). We're working on Milestone 1, which covers Chapter 1, right now.

Highlights of Milestone 0 include:

Donluvlee's Back



Donluvlee's connections have returned! She knows the location of every badge and Star Piece in the game, and she's smarter than ever. She'll also call out Badges from Rowf and her brother Donlow, and Star Pieces from Chuck Quizmo, separately from regular predictions, so you don't ever pay for a useless prediction.


Chuck the Dependable



Speaking of Chuck Quizmo, his appearance rate has been adjusted. If he has questions to ask, he should always appear in each town you enter. Before, the chance of him appearing was 30%!


Smart Berserker Mario


Stock footage. Not indicative of final behavior. Professional Mario, closed course. Do not attempt.

The 'Berserker' badge has had an AI update, and some general balance tweaking. Mario will no longer jump on spiky or fiery enemies while controlled by the AI, and will go for the enemy he can do the most damage to when deciding whether to Jump or Hammer.

He also deals double damage after all attack modifiers except enemy Defense - but in exchange, he will never block attacks.
(These are subject to change as balance testing continues.)


Stats in Tattles



Goombario has boned up on his enemy stats! All enemies will now list their stats when tattled again. The only exception is certain parts of chapter bosses, and that's purely for technical reasons.

(And there might be a way to fix that issue, too...)


And, best of all:

The Jr. Emblem



We're making MQ and MQ Jr. into one game. To switch difficulties, you just have to put on - or take off - the Jr. Emblem, and the game will do the rest.



That's all for now. Who knows what other surprises might be in store?



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NAME REDACTED
Dec 22, 2010
These all look like incredibly positive changes! Very well done. I'm looking forward to seeing what other changes are in store...

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