Due to the holidays and a lot of other matters on my plate, I still have plans of releasing an updated beta of my game with some new features, though I may put it off until sometime after the new year.
Some of these items include some custom commissioned artwork by Fumirei and music commissioned for the League of Gamers website which I graciously received joint permission from Mark Kern and Jared Burrell to use in a limited capacity for a custom credits scene, as well as some gameplay and world updates.
However, the reasons I am considering belaying that until I have my new engine finished are because, while the new engine is far from complete and still in alpha, it already has made far less mistakes than my old engine, eliminated a lot of monkeypatched issues the old one had, and brings a lot more features to the table. An overview of the features of the new engine:
FF9 styled "Rows" - In Final Fantasy IX, characters in the back row took less damage yet did less damage, unless their weapons ignored the row penalty. This feature was planned for inclusion early on but cut out due to technical issues, it has now been restored. The menu interface also resembles FF9 to a degree, with the player menu having the options aligned to the right side of the screen.
Dragon Quest style difficulty: The original design philosophy of Dragon Quest was to make a lot of actions a gamble and to make the difficulty somewhat challenging, and to that end, I have done the following:
1. Lowered amount of items of any type carryable to 9.
2. Small Medals are rarer.
3. Casino games made riskier.
4. Improvements added to combat engine to make battles much less easy with a greater chance of randomness.
Much less resource bloat: My original engine had a lot of unoptimized for size and quality files under the hood, and my new engine intends to curb this somewhat, both for performance reasons and to reduce the size of the game file for those with slower connections.
Lots of added yet not enabled scripting features for future proofing: Since I plan to use this engine for later games in tweaked forms, there will be a lot of added scripting unused yet vetted for performance and compatibility under the hood in the new engine. The open source SDK will retain all of these added features for use by anyone else who wishes to use these added functions for whatever purpose in their own projects, subject to the terms of the scripts included.
The SDK will be as open source as possible: The SDK version of my game will simply contain all the assets used for the engine, minus commercial/licensed assets. Some of the scripts included may not be for commercial use, and all scripts included (with or without my tweaks) must be used within the same terms I had to use them, and the SDK will require some tweaking to some scripts for other projects, but it will be totally unencrypted and completely free for redistribution, all I ask that you let people know where to find the original to find updates and to give me credit for any of my own contributions.
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