天下制覇

It's tough being busy on vacation.

Since BB1's release was such an embarrassing mess of problems introduced by the patch, I'm releasing a sample beta patch here and making a note of it on the blog for slightly more exposure that should get through the introductory areas and into the main dungeon hub area to try to catch any gameplay issues that myself and the one poor editor who I inflict these have missed thus far. Read the readme, you heathens. Unfortunately, a lot are of the somewhat insidious variety, like passive abilities not functioning correct, or certain skills not targeting as they should, so it's often not immediately obvious.

That said, it has been easier going than BB1, but it could just be that I know what to look for. Some things are implemented differently though, and tracking down issues can be complicated. For example, everything that targets an entire party shares the same string, both passive/innate abilities, and usable skills. Innate skills that affect stats are broken into two substrings, one for the stat they affect, one for the target. Both those substrings need to be translated, but the definition for the targeting of active skills that affect an entire party (but not columns or rows) is defined using that same substring list. So now the party-affecting skills all have weird targeting definitions like "敵Leader" so that the substrings match again and everything functions as it should, even if under the hood, things look a bit bizarre.

The only other truly complicated thing left is the bonus quiz in the Extra Material unlocked after beating the game, the entirety of which is stashed away in the exe, because of course that's where you'd put something like that. No obnoxious chest minigame, and the skill stuff is greatly streamlined and simplified, for both better and worse. Of course, the problem with bugs is more finding them than anything else.

The above are examples of stuff not done yet, some of which are due to text formatting scripts that I still need to write (once some conventions are figured out), but mostly it's image editing, which I'd really, really prefer to not do myself. Some of the work's already been done, but there's a buttload more to go. Maybe this will spur people into finishing that. If you want to help, with this beta patch or the remaining image work to be done, do so here. Thanks (very, very much) to Nagato's help, all the important technical issues have been taken care of now. I hope to finish the script files themselves this week, and then it's cleanup and whatnot before back to the behemoth for the next probably 6-8 months, although I may announce it some time before then for… a number of reasons.

For now though, back to finishing up the preview and then finally getting around to writing stuff up on Izumo 4.