The Musings Of The Consensus

I'm still working out a lot of balance and scripting bugs in Catilin, and I've made the following changes because play balance was important to me. * Lora is a lot more squishy. Originally, I set her defense to rise about to the same heights as Sarah, which makes her nigh invincible at times, so now I've reset her defensive power to be not much more better than Mara. Keeping both in the back row and loading them up with defense boosting equipment will keep both alive for sure, but both are now around the same level scale of physical defense given they are magic class users. * In a future update, I'll switch out weapons to use a non MP costing version of the spells equipped items will let you cast, but for now I'm retaining it for further balance testing. * There are two bosses in the Catilin area, and I've set one to be the "easy" boss and one to be the "hard" boss. The easy boss is NOT immune to insta-death, nor most other status effec...

I currently have a lot of beta testing for Build 2.20 of DQ1 Remake I'm doing now, and while I don't have half s much unfinished content to worry about like I did before, I need to test the following: Play Balance: Catilin, much like in the original game and DQ3, is the shopping mall of my world, and you can get some excellent gear, some of which is but a step or two down from some of the best gear in the game, so I'm going to have to make sure play balance isn't set to make things too easy or hard regardless of your equipment. Scripting: I have a considerable amount of game events that revolve around scripts in this build, and I have to make sure none of them are broken. Next build preparations: In the next build, I plan to make the normal route of the game beatable as well as completely unlock the bonus dungeon and true ending route, Certain IRL events have made progress slow, but I hope to get on with it because I really want to finish this sooner or later. O...

Before I address the main topic of this post, I just want to get something about autism out of the way first. I have it. I live with it every day, and while it's very crippling in many ways, I know there is no cure for it and it will be with me til the day I die, and I accept that. But there is nothing that would make me think in a million years that I could cure myself by drinking bleach or gasoline. If I wanted to kill myself, those would be effective means of doing so, but they are NOT sane medicinal solutions for a developmental disorder. For starters, bleach is an incredibly powerful chemical used for cleaning. Some forms of bleach are indeed used in medical fields like dentistry to whiten teeth, but they are not intended to be ingested orally, merely used as a passive tooth whitener. Some forms of bleach are used for food preparation, like flour whitening, but this is again a passive use of bleach and the active components of the bleaching are generally removed from the...

Currently play-testing the Hauksness area, and after I get it all balanced and make sure everything up to the Lord Edward quest works, I'll release a Beta 2.10V2 to replace the first version, which is a hot mess of bugs, bad balance, and overall fail. In the meantime, incorporated the following fixes. * Healing spells have had their resistance modifier check removed. I had to do this or healing spells would eventually be useless due to magic defense nullifying it at a certain point. * Several enemies in the Hauksness region had a tone down, they were OP to an insane degree. They are still hard, but now they are much more bearable. * Several more dialogue bugs were fixed and some tileset edits were done to the Great Caravan for better realism, like being able to walk under most open air stalls. * In the 2.20 build, I'll refine the bonus dungeon balance a little, but I kept them somewhat harder than the regions around them since they all have some OP stuff (especially f...

I write this article with a sigh on my lips and a palm to my face because I thought that people are panicking too much on KIA. Yes, mods have been squelching certain topics, and maybe on some of them, they could ease up a tad. However, I think a few arguments against them are a bit ridiculous. 1. MUH PAGE VIEWS! I hate this argument. I'd rather 1 person who benefits from my work read it than have 100 people who only show up to throw rotten fruit at it, and while page views might have decreased, so long as it's of benefit to someone, I don't see the point in obsessing over this unless you are an attention whore. 2. Has the core mission changed? No. KIA is about opposing crappy journalism, gamer news pertaining to censorship, culture, and politics related to gaming as well as general watchdogging on gaming in general. None of that has changed. When the mods don dangerhair wigs and start declaring a need for safe spaces, then I'll start to panic, b...

The Book of Leviticus is seen as one of the more 'boring' books in the Bible, but I just happen to be painfully autistic and love it, mostly because I find its breakdown of the rules for the Israelites interesting. Below is a simplified summary of the book, with some trivia explained: (Unless otherwise specified, all offerings had to be without defect) Burnt Offerings: Compulsory offerings where an animal was totally cooked to ashes on the altar for God alone. Only male goats/lambs or bulls were acceptable. Grain Offerings: Semi-compulsory offerings by themselves, though sometimes required alongside other offerings. Either unleavened bread or wafers of bread, prepared with oil and salt, with a portion sprinkled with incense before burned on the altar. The priests could eat the rest. No honey or yeast could be mixed in. Newly harvested grain was sacrificed at the start of the harvest season, same general rules otherwise. Fellowship Offerings: AKA "Peace offerings...

I've finally gotten up to the Hauksness area for testing, and I've already fixed some more issues * Game balance has been further tweaked and polished. Lora gains levels slightly faster than everyone else, but I'm leaving this alone, since she can be recruited at a point where she'll need it. * Fixed odd scripting bug where a 'New Game+ tag would be added to save files, turned out to be a control switch issue, I have no NG+ features built in or planned for. * Several more remnants of the old dialogue system were removed. The game was effectively unwinnable past defeating the dragon guarding the princess, this has been fixed and Build 2.10V2 will be released when I'm done with the Hauksness region, will supplant my previous 2.10 build. * New art for the dragon's portrait has been added. * Noticed a very rare crash bug that occurs when changing through multiple different types of windows while changing scenes in quick succession. I haven't been a...

A friend of mine who read my previous post about Bible humor pointed out that the Bible was amazingly honest about a lot of stupid people in the Bible, and even though the Bible is a mostly human document with some quotes from God, it's still quite impressive for the level of unvarnished human stupidity it covers without trying to whitewash it. And since some of the mind boggling idiocy is funny in hindsight, I'd like to to cover the top five dumbest people in the Bible. 5. Nabal, the guy who decided to piss off David for no good reason. This guy seemed rather appropriate to start off with, because his very name means someone who is a fool, and while his stupidity is rather brief, it's still astoundingly dumb. During David's days wandering around as a mercenary and blade for hire, he found some really rich dude named Nabal with a ton of livestock who was currently doing a lot of harvest work, and David generously offered to provide security for his farm animals...

I discovered some major, gamebreaking crashes in the Cave To Rimuldar, remnants of my old dialogue system were to blame, and since this is plot critical, I will be releasing a bugfix version for this. A few other changes will be in this, another major bugfix and a change to getting Lora in your party. * I discovered, thanks to an oversight when implementing the battle rows code, I made all Club and spear type weapons unusable if your character was in the front row. Since there are few club or spear weapons, I did not notice this until I equipped an Iron Spear and noticed Roto and Sarah could not attack at all, though they could user magic/special attacks. This oversight has been corrected. * Lora will join the party at Level 13. I have redone all the game balance so it's ideal to be a certain levels, and believe this should be reasonable for her to join at. I tried to assign a variable condition to the Hero's current level so she'd join at the same level, but the game...

There are a few things in the Bible that I have to admit have always amused me because when I sat down and did a little thinking about them, some of the things that occurred to me struck me as funny. 1. That scene in Acts where Herod is speaking to the crowds, they all proclaim his voice is like that of god instead of man, and then it's reported that since he didn't give glory to God, he was eaten by the worms and died. I have to wonder, does this mean a bunch of worms consumed him from the inside out, or did they literally pop out of the ground like in Dune and eat him alive? Either way, it's a blackly comical image if you ask me. 2. In Leviticus, if you made a grain offering, you were supposed to offer cakes or wafers made of fine flour, or crushed heads of new grain if it was an offering of the firstfruits. I did a little research, and I realized that technically, corn harvested when the seeds are dry count as a grain product, and popcorn would be about the same ...

Other crap has delved into my time working on DQ1 Remake further, but I have gotten some more progress done. * A lot more crash bugs involving the spit and pencil version of the old dialogue system removed. * Enabled a few bonus dungeons I hadn't completely in earlier builds, like the Tower of Kol. Don't go in unless you have the Final Key (you'll need it to get far past the entrance anyway), or you WILL get slaughtered, it has enemies you will be way out of your league to fight when you first can go in. * Made a lot less enemies capable of spamming status spells. They'll still do it, just not to the point it's like they are trolling you. And speaking of spells, giving Mara a mild boost, since an earlier tweak for balance seems to made Mara a bit TOO weak as a mage, which is ironic, as she was essentially an "I win" button in earlier builds, so I'm gonna even her out to be a tad stronger than at present. * Found the new item limit is great for ...