I've (pretty much) finished all the areas needed for the third level of the game, which leaves me with two more to make (although the last level will have a different format and so shouldn't take as long as the fourth). Admittedly, I need to add a couple more lock-picking minigames and a couple more battles, but you can play the whole way through the level without incident now.
Also, and somewhat luckily, I picked up on a bug that was occurring when using the "Flail" skill against the last enemy in a three-enemy battle, which is a good thing since it was replicated in all the other three-enemy battles the game already had! I need to remember to test my battle-events more thoroughly when I am going to be copy-pasting them into other enemy groups, even though I am pretty sure I'd tested that skill quite heavily already. Oh well, it's fixed now, no need to worry about it!
So, what now? Well, unfortunately, I'm now turning my mind towards a bunch of tedious stuff that I need/want to do before starting on the fourth level. Some of it is just a case of going through the database and messing with values, which isn't that hard to do so long as I am paying attention. The rest is more cosmetic, which means it'll probably take more effort to complete, especially since I no longer get to use old MS Paint for my images (I'm not going to lie; I really miss it!). I guess it's mostly a case of repeating repetitive tasks over and over, so as long as I can deal with the tedium there won't be any major dramas:
1) If you read the instruction manual (look at the tabs at the top of the page), you'll see that different types of attack are effective against different enemy classes, but IMO these classes are pretty ill-defined. They're also pretty skewed towards carrying at least one blunt-type weapon since they're never negatively effective, which isn't what I was aiming for. What I want to do, therefore, is two things:
a) re-define the enemy classes so that they make a little more sense.
b) re-balance the weapons based on the new definitions.
The differences to how the battle-system works and how difficult the battles are will be minimal, I hope. The only real effect should be that things are clearer. Clarity is important when you are aiming for a simple system!
2) The second and third levels of the game have a number of areas where you are moving to the left instead of to the right or where you need to backtrack through areas you've already visited. This makes the current layout of the GUI seem silly as it uses the terms "Previous" and "Next", which aren't always going to be applicable. Because of this, I'm going to replace these labels with "Left" and "Right" so that their use is never ambiguous, which will take a bit of time since I have a lot of different GUI overlays.
"Why do you need so many overlays?", you might be asking. The answer is simple: I'm fucking stupid. Basically, I use a single picture for all 5 commands that are on the screen at any one time, which means that every time I want a "unique" combination of 5 commands it requires a new image. I thought it would be easier to edit a single picture a few times than to position 5 separate pictures on each map, but the sheer number of unique commands I have come up with has made that an incorrect assumption. I'm not going to go back and change how this works now since it's heavily built into the way I go about creating and eventing each area, but it's still something I should remember for any future project I might make.
3) Cutscene graphics. They're currently terrible and disorganised. I really want to have image-based cutscenes (think
Alter A.I.L.A Genesis) and that's something I am aiming for at the end of development, although it is not something that I'm going to do right now (because it will get in the way of "proper" development continuing). However, what I am going to do is streamline the way the cutscenes look. From now on, the organisation of each cutscene will be consistent with the others, which will make it easier for me to replace my shitty images with something custom made later on, should I choose to do so.
Perhaps I can convince a certain someone to draw some cutscene images for me?* *Probably not /sadface
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