August 4 Update

I am tired and grouchy at the moment, but let's see if I can't turn things around. Instead, let me talk about all the things that have been finished over the past while.

• The next build of TLS will have 47 new skills!

  • Everybody is getting two new skills that round out their capabilities or do something interesting.

  • There are eight new synergy skills, evening out support a little bit and adding some new wrinkles. These may be the last synergy skills unless an idea really inspires me.

  • Six of the new skills involve a brand new capability I don't think has been seen in RPG Maker before: swapping out a party member mid-battle. Thanks to LordForte for coding some new features to allow this.

• You've been seeing the Stineford screenshots, right? I'm redoing the interiors to match the exteriors, just like everyone wanted. You'd all better enjoy.

• I've made fundamental changes to how LUK works, which required changing LUK values all across the game in various ways to try to keep things balanced. I've finished the grunt work but these values may require tweaking later.

• I've commissioned the art for the final harem member from Annikath. She is all ready, once I manage to get to that content.

• There are some very fancy new features thanks to Rachnera. These will probably get a post all their own later, because there's a lot to show off. Still design work and some decisions being made here.

Anyway, it's not enough, not if I want to meet my goals. The problem isn't that I'm attempting too much, it's that my output is being hindered by cycles of anger and frustration. There should be some fun things in this week's work, so if they give me enough energy to power through the un-fun things, hopefully next week's update will be more positive.

Nah, let's not end on that note - let me show you one of the new features I've mentioned. Of course you all know what normal dialogue looks like:

Thanks to Rachnera doing some real coding and several community members doing a lot of configuration work, we've implemented a new dialogue system that looks like this:

Based on my work in OEA, and playing other games, I have mixed feelings about bust systems that put the character faces too far away from the text, but I like this design a lot. You can switch it back if you really want, but I think it's a nice improvement. ^-^ This will help distinguish TLS from all the other RPG Maker games, and most importantly I think this will be a feature that fans of the game will enjoy.

There are a few omissions and some characters/expressions will have kinks to work out, but as a whole this new feature should be set without eating any more development time. Building on top of this will be something potentially even fancier! More on that next week or the update after that, depending.