Hart-Hunt

I've been out of the FFT scene for long, but nevertheless I've yet to play a good rebalance FFT classic mod. So I'll be following both FFT projects closely! I'll give my insight to both independently in the future as well.

Yo! Glad to see you back in the community sir. Welcome back!

Stream's up!

I want to personally thank @Nowea and @seibaby for helping out with the event. Let's rock everyone. With these things, making the gifs soner is better than making them late, because one always tends to kick it towards the last minute.

Important news:

The dispersal thread will be made in the 23th! Gifts will be encouraged to be posted on that same day, but with these things, we know real life can get in the way, so we give a 3 day leeway afterwards, til the 26th. So, you guys have plenty of time to communicate in case you get late with the gift. Happy gifting!

As with the intro stage's teaser trailer back in the day, graphics are all meant to be placeholder - I'm showcasing the design of the first half of the stage here. Enjoy!

Late Friday night stream!

https://www.twitch.tv/harthunt

6 hours ago, Kaffe Myers said:

And this is only what I've done. There has been all kinds of submissions -- Hart-Hunt made a chip tune out of one of my songs with a band I used to play with

Dude, I totally forgot about that. That was so cool.

Long and very productive stream! We finished the first two sections of the stage, fixed a few graphical bugs from 0.0.5, learned some more ASM in the process, and modified more enemies to be more evil! This stage makes has a feel of speed and movement attached to it, which is because of the amount of slopes and enemies chasing you around, giving you just enough time to learn their patterns and start moving in a dance to dodge, seek and destroy. ...To many hours in front of the screen, I'm talking nonsense now.

Now streaming!

https://www.twitch.tv/harthunt

On 12/4/2017 at 6:11 AM, SerjTargarien said:

I'm in! Loooong time lurker (and sometimes Discord chatter) here. Are they physical gifts? Virtual ones? How does the gifting work?

The prefered way are virtual gifts, like an image, a song, something that can be shared virtually. There's been various kind of gifts in the other years. The thing about physical gifts is that they'd cost money, so consider not giving out those because it's not the spirit of the event to actually spend money. 

Here's one old dispersal thread as a reference!

http://ngplus.net/InsaneDifficultyArchive/www.insanedifficulty.com/board/index6df2.html?/topic/7179-id-event-2015-secret-santa-dispersal/

Awesome! There's plenty of people already! Let's see how many we can have participating!

2 hours ago, A Dummy said:

Plus, hearing that even some of the regulars around here didn't always finish their Secret Santa does make me feel a little better.

That's the worst case scenario, because that means someone else wouldn't get their gift! So try not to do that everyone!

Also needless to say, I'll participate myself!

On 12/2/2017 at 5:15 AM, pbrand said:

I'll join in if I get my bonus this year 

You don't need to get a bonus because all gifts are supposed to not cost any money! so be sure to participate!

Here are the rules of Secret Santa - New Game Plus, edition 2017!

This is an event where all of the participants will get a person at random from their group, and they will secretly arrange a small gift to them! Since that's a very open definition, let me give you some context with said rules!

• Do not spend any money! This should all be home-made. Use your imagination! It might be an image edited, it might be a song, it might be anything! But the idea behind this is to have something that will cause a good impact, and that doesn't spend any money! And try to make it look nice, if possible!  Remember that someone else will also work on a gift for you! Everyone will get their gifts!
• Do not share who you're giving the present to! The idea is for it to be secret! Also, do not give out your gift until the actual date! Me, or Nowea will be making a thread for the dispersal of the gifts, and everyone will be able to post the gifts from there on!
• It's a lot better if your gift is designed in some sort of way that fits the person you got! this is a young site, so you probably won't know much about the person you got, but you can always be creative, lurk what kind of things he/she posts, the mods he/she likes... Or you can just do something cool, regardless of who gets it.
• Lurkers be warned: You're invited to this! No one is obligated to participate in any sort of way, but these events make a community! It's a way to get to know each other and to integrate ourselves as a community! So don't be afraid to step in and say "Ah, fuck it. Let's do this!"

Any questions? Feel free to ask below! Nowea and I will try to be as clear as possible!

Chariot has already a soft cap of 50 turns, right? What about changing the soft cap to say 5 turns? That way, it's way harder to manipulate RNG and abuse the system, and it still has the good things about chariot.

Stream was fantastic. Streaming is definitely the way to go for me when designing the platforming, because it really gets me motivated and forces me to be on the chair working.

Chill Penguin's platforming is done, and the results are really encouraging - When playing through it, one can feel the fluidity in the design and the liberty to move and climb. the stage is all around climbing, combining a lot of horizontal sections with vertical obstacles, all while feeling really speedy.

Here's the first section of the stage, as a sneak peek:

Thank you for sticking around, everyone. We're getting a lot of results like this. At this rate, the stages will be designed a lot quicker than what I anticipated. Summer and vacations just started for me, and that means we're all getting some Hard Type Christmas gifts.

Going live now!

http://www.twitch.tv/harthunt

Stream's delayed by about hours tops! Should be up at around 9:30 pm EST tonight! Be sure to ask in Discord chat in any case!

Right. Now that I'm back in development, let's answer this and add something at the end that's unrelated.

On 15/9/2017 at 3:28 AM, MysticLord said:

The Launch Octopus stage should be thematically all about water.  Fighting in shallow water, deep water, underwater, the surface near water, and (if the game allows it) around moving water like streams and waterfalls are all different.  A good interstitial zone would be a cave system with submerged areas, air bubbles, varying water depths, and moving water that shoves you in different directions effectively limiting you to one-direction movement in some cases.  If the starting area is this central zone, then you can implement metroidvania mechanics and actually finding the boss (as opposed to a miniboss or a dead end with a hard to reach item and lots of enemies) is difficult.  Note that these dead-ends should be conditional, there should be a reason to come back later when you have mobility upgrades (double jump, gliding/floating, dash, dash jump, head bash, a buster upgrade/weapon that can destroy some class of obstacles, limited flying/hovering ability).

Geysers that push you up in the air would be interesting too.

A vertical area with platforms sticking out of a waterfall and streams that are blocked/diverted in some places by other platforms (in terms of fluff, they lead to caves in the background or foreground) would be cool.  Falling wouldn't be lethal, but it would be annoying.

The Chill Penguin mountain you shared above could use a cave system in that empty space, or maybe some floating platforms leading to who knows what.  Your option is either single-path with middling difficulty or multiple-path with higher difficulty but in different ways on each path.

About Launch Octopus: The vanilla version of this stage is probably the one that has the least memorable theme. The minibosses are kind of engaging, but that's where the originality of the stage ends. The stage feels empty all around (if you see it in the editor or if explore it you'll see what I mean). And water physics can actually be fun to play with.

My idea for New Hard Type is to direct the theme towards something more similar to Pirate Man's stage in Megaman & Bass (which, in case you guys didn't know, is one of my favourite designed Megaman games):

If you watch the video, you'll see what I mean: Combination of open areas with hazards floating, and closed areas with water physics. And I've had an idea for a while with this stage: Having at some point a branching path, one that leads to fighting Octopus with no water, and another with the usual Octopus with water. We'll see if I can pull it off, I might not be able to due to the engine being hardcoded or something. I can't add new enemies like Geysers or anything like that. I'd be really nice, but I don't have any knowledge with all of the necessary things (sprites, AI, dealing with the game's memory) to do any of that. And, I actually don't want to do that either, because I want this mod to be a reimagine of vanilla's Mega Man X. You can see that in the intro stage, and you'll be able to see that in Chill Penguin.

About Chill Penguin: There's two caves in the stage. One you can already see at the bottom right of the picture I shared above (it got polished, and it looks somewhat different but the concept is the same), and also at the beginning of the stage you'll have a descending cave with ice on the walls that won't allow you to wall jump. It will add some variety to the stage.

And the other thing I wanted to mention. I streamed yesterday some of the development of Chill Penguin, and it hit me that the best order for me to design the stages will be to design all of the platforming in all stages first, and only then work on the bosses. That way, all of the platforming will be designed in a more cohesive manner, and all stages will feel like they follow a more similar thematic throughout the game. And, at the same time, designing the bosses afterwards will mean that the first boss that I mod and the last one won't be that much different (which was a case in ye old Hard Type, because I had learnt a lot more assembly when doing the last boss). That comes with the downside that stages will take longer to be 100% finished (that meaning, stage + boss), but it will make up for having a much better finished mod, and hey, platforming is also really fun to play. Also, it will be a lot faster for me to specialize in designing all platforming, and then moving on to the boss mindset.

Absolutely! I'm glad to be back. It was on the back of my head this whole semester while I dealt with school.

I did a test stream yesterday and made a lot of progress with Chill Penguin! I'll be streaming again, tonight, at around 7:30 pm EST! See if I can finish the platforming in Chill Penguin, and slowly start to add enemies! Be sure to check it out, everyone!

http://www.twitch.tv/harthunt

People are quick to jump complaining when they have no control over the outcome of their characters, but if that's the true nature of the gameplay that you're aiming with that system, then players should probably just try the system before jumping the gun to say it's probably bad. The project sounds well rounded and interesting (and needless to say fresh). I'll be playing it in the future.

Yo! After a few months of newly absense, I'm back and running! I've finished the second half of the platforms of Chill Penguin (tweaked the little preview I showed in the stage design thread), and now I'm designing the first half, for then to add enemies, and add the graphics!

And I'm also announcing that I'll be streaming on next Sunday! I'll be updating the thread with the actual time I'll be around, but if you have any questions, feel free to ask here or in the Mega Man X Hard Type Discord channel in NG+ chat!

I have no idea. You could always go to the link and tell us yourself. I'll gladly edit the OP for other users to see.

PC/Steam.

And starting yet another playthrough, this time of a mod that I waiting for it to get to its latest version! FFVII: New Threat is a fantastic mod and you shoudl all check it out!

The playthrough has 2 videos already uploaded, and it will all have a YouTube playlist as usual, as well as all videos being uploaded to the Videos section of the site! Any comments, be sure ot leave them below and in the video itself!

So, a year ago I quietly began brainstorming a FFT rebalance and reimagine project. I nearly completed all skillsets, and designed an original job tree, with growths and multipliers balanced between the jobs. now I'm sharing these notes with you guys for discussion, or for your own amusement.

As I've said in the past, the very first step in a FFT serious project should be figuring out the job tree, and then rebalance the multipliers and growths, then make the skillsets, and then only then move on to everything else. The first 2 steps is eactly what I did, all in paper (or rather excel sheets). I balanced the jobs and multipliers by assigning a pointing system, distributing "100 points" to each class, making them excel in some form or another, and trying to add the most diversity and combinations between melee, magic, speed, so on adn so forth. You'll be able to see some things that I think are essential but haven't seen much in other FFT projects, like extremely low multipliers in MP and speed (but not static growths), a "circular" job tree, that combines melee and magic requirements, and classes differentiating themselves in unique ways, like the lowest tier of magician, Apprentice, actually having the most MP out of all classes, and many other little things that were neat ideas in concept. For easier visualitation I also had included which stats each job would have at level 1, at level 100 if leveled in their base Job, and at level 100 if leveled in the Druid Job, which had the most balanced (read as "average") growths, to see how multipliers worked alongside growths.

If I ever decide to step forward and take back this challenge, well let this be a cool precedence, and a good thread for you guys to say how bad I am at rebalancing FFT. Also, please disregard any and all non-completed skillsets. That part was harder to figure out, and hey, if you guys want to tell me I should change this for that, or even design skillsets yourselves, I don't know. I'm open for ideas. Also, last note, in range you'll see different letters. I don't remember each. W was weapon, S was self (range around the caster), SS iirc was self, and only for the caster. Use your imagination and context and everything will make sense.

Have a good week y'all.

Job tree (notepad file)

Skillsets, Growths and multipliers (Excel file)