Updates For Now

Edit: (3/5/2014) DT1 and DT2 have been updated to fix a few things that DT3 had recently gotten.

- When starting/closing the game (for Windows 7 users) it will no longer flash your monitor black for a moment as if it's trying to reset your display.

- An input bug that would cause you to redo an action after taking damage if the key/button was still held down has been fixed. This was most noticeable in DT2.

- When using F3 to swap window sizes, it will no longer cause full screen to function improperly.

Also the Filefront downloads have been removed completely. Filefront has changed their upload methods and policies and I am no longer using their service. Most of the Filefront links didn't work anyway. I will look into an alternate download source for people that can't connect to dropbox servers. I've been given a tip for google drive and have been thinking about them anyway. That may appear on the side links in the future.

I don't post updates here too much lately. I'd rather not talk too much about what's happening with DT3, plot or gameplay wise on where it's at, cause spoilers. Expect monthly updates instead where I'll do an info dump of stuff.

But before all that, grackles!

Here's “Alexander the Destroyer of Worlds” posing for the camera.

Gate 6 Mobility
The player gets one more mobility based ability during Gate 6 that can be brought outside once the Gate is complete. It's pretty nifty how just one thing changes how the game feels and plays. It had been in the game for some time, but feeling it out in levels that are designed to make use of it shows it's quite a game changer.

I'll spoil it, it's nothing too original. It's a double jump, a proper double jump. No Blast-Off to cover that and yes, you still get your air-dash. Currently, it uses the same recovery logic that air-dashes use as well. This was originally going to be an upgrade to the jump height of the player, but anomaly had convinced me a double jump would be a better alternative mostly due to a height upgrade would throw off what the player had been used to for so long. I had come up with plenty of my own reasons why I liked the idea as well. The big idea for it is to cover more ground vertically. There is a design complication with DT and its vertical shenanegans that I will be covering in a video. The voice quality should be tons better as well. I've been working on projecting my voice better and not speaking so fast. That and Jerry got me a new mic, cause he's seen some of my videos and made fun of me, then said, "You need a new mic, expect one for Christmas!" So that happened. (Quality difference is crazy noticable.)

Money Change
Income in DT3 is an issue. No matter the price of items, it seems it's an issue. The tester that was big on this was NZZ, and he had come up with some ideas of reducing late game farming without making money useless altogether. One thing being a way to get 2x money from enemy drops.

WhattayaBrian had also mentioned these issues to me and suggested a crazy change. His idea was to change wallet upgrades (those things that increase your wallet capacity by 100) to money pickup multipliers and make the wallet capacity a fixed value. To make a tl:dr version of the conversation. I went with his idea as I liked the reasons why and it covered the issues that NZZ was having with income in the game.

I had 20 wallet pickups and decided not to change that value. Each pickup increases money from enemy drops by 10%. So up to 3x money gain. The base coin value in DT3 from greens is 1. That number can't be multiplied by 1.1 very well, so the base coin value was changed to 10. Blues give 50, yellows give 100. Everything else in the game had its current price increased by x10 as well. Items that were once 320 are now 3200. Within the game rules, nothing has changed, simply an extra digit. The new wallet capacity is currently 20000.

So if you have collected 11 of the wallet upgrades(will be name changed), you will be recieving 2.1x(or 105%) more money from each drop you collect. A green(10) will be worth 21, a blue(50) will be worth 105. Bigger numbers means better game!

Slaix223 had this to say about it.
"And in a single update, DT3's economy collapsed."

WhattayaBrian's response to the previous post's quote.
"I saw the post.
I am immortalized."

Everyone's Favorite Gimmick

Is wind. One of the more prominent Gate 6 locations is a wind level. Wind is fairly hated from what I've seen, aside from raocow, who we all know just absolutely loves wind. For wind, I've found that for it to work and not be frustrating, it needs to be consistent. For my level, I'm allowing the player to have some control over it. In its current iteration, it affects the player a bit more if they're in the air than if they're on the ground. It will never have multiple speeds though. The main thing the player controls is if it blows to the left or right. For parts of it, I'm leaving this up to player preference, but there are places where this will be used for puzzle solving, so one direction may be required at set times. There's a few places where wind blows upward as well, but that's not used as much as the horizontal wind. There are also effects put in place, much like the underwater fans in the demo's chapter 8 mountain dungeon, to let the player know where wind is going to affect them. (The horizontal effect is typically covering an entire map for this area.)

Stuff That Pisses Me Off
A bit of a rant here.

If you're not aware of King.com and what it's doing, you should be. They've been attempting to get a trademark on words such as 'Candy' and 'Saga' so they have no competitors for their products. Won't go into much detail here as the link here and a quick google search can give you all the info you'd need.

http://thebottomline.as.ucsb.edu/2014/02/king-games-candy-crush-saga-copyright-kerfuffle

Other things they've been doing, shown here.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/132196-CandySwipe-Developer-Surrenders-to-King-in-Rage-Filled-Open-Letter

The above should anger you, I understand corporations look after their own interests, but this is way crossing the line. If you're playing anything from this company, you're supporting the enemy.

Other Stuff
Next blog post may be devoted to other games entirely.

In other news, the bottom quote is completely relevant and I said I'd quote it.

"I'd rather play Dark Souls than Ninja Gaiden 2."
-WhattayaBrian

Streaming Games

Edit: (Jan. 31, 2014) This project just needs a few more supporters on Thunderclap. At the time of this posting, it only needs 5 more and 13 hours to go. It isn't a kickstarter, on Thunderclap, you simply use one of a few social media networks that you're on and if this support page gets to its goal, it will post about the project, Positron specifically in this case, to that network you chose. If you can, that would be great. (I am not directly involved with this project.)

I gotta get some new pictures and/or videos of the birds soon. All this talk of grackles and no media makes for stuff not being as entertaining.

Gate 6 Progress
It's coming along nicely, especially now that I have more feedback from the testers about some of the finer nuances of its mechanics. Some fine tuning will need to be done. There was a thing where, as Claire, you could get 2 attacks in after a parry and get that 3x damage twice if you attacked at just the right time. I was uneasy with this, but left it in to see if any of the testers made comments on it. My thought was, if even one person mentions this feeling weird, the timings of Claire's attack and parry phase will be adjusted to not allow this. I got a comment on this phenomenon that mentioned it felt weird and inconsistent, you know what will soon follow. Another note to make about the Gate, that isn't really a spoiler, is that both characters only get 2 offensive abilities. (And their own version of Guard.) The second ability for each character comes later in the Gate and is set up to be utilized far less than the first that each character obtains. Both of them are fairly indirect methods of attack, though Jerry's has lock-on capabilities. Their use is also fairly limited, which will be immediately noticeable after its first use. There is no cooldown, but something else keeps them from being abused. They also don't benefit from the 3x parry bonus. I think I've gone through 5 iterations for each of them until finding something that I felt was right.

Streaming
I've been toying around with streaming a lot more ever since I got a second monitor, and I've finally found good stream settings for my computer and connection speed. I don't have specific times that I stream, but it's usually in the late evening. There may be times that I call it out on twitter now. If I'm playing a game on my PC, I'll most likely be streaming it, partially because it will be recording as well. I'm typically playing Planetside 2 or Dark Souls. Other games will definitely show up. There are also times when I'm streaming DT3 content to someone for various reasons. If you happen to see that, you may get to sneak a peek at my terrible coding practices. (And more in depth when I release the project file after DT3 is completed.) I can't lock my stream, so yeah. :P
It is here!
http://www.twitch.tv/zephyrburst83

It Might Snow

Oh man, the birds have finally come back after their winter moving about business. After weeks of absense, they've shown up and immediately demanded, by standing at a fairly close distance, that I feed them. Luckily I always bring food, just in case of days like that where they will suddenly show up again. The birding will soon begin again!

Gate 6 Questions

Question 1
The question that popped up the most after the last blog post was: "Is the parry mandatory in the game?"

There is very rarely ever a case where I'll put in a mechanic that isn't necessary at some point. However, I am trying to make sure that for most scenarios, there are other options. All the non-boss enemy types with shields, even the one that doesn't put the shield to the side when attacking, have other methods the player can use. That said, most other methods are not optimal to parrying, and the beginning of the Gate when the player has very little offensive options, parrying is super useful there. I've made sure that it's not too hard to execute and counter afterward, since the usefulness of the parry is in the counter. There is a boss fight that will require the parry, and Nightmare Gate boss will definitely require it from both characters.

So for the tl:dr answer; yes it is absolutely mandatory, but only in a small number of scenarios.

Question 2
Another question that I thought I had already answered, but I was probably too vague on was: "Is the Gate 6 ability set useable outside of the Gate like the other abilities?"

No, this ability is exclusive to this Gate and its Nightmare counterpart. It doesn't work well alongside the other ability sets, and it was never the intention after the Gate redesign to make it that way. Althrough, there is a mobility based action that is gained within the Gate that is usable outside once the Gate is complete. Since dashing is never usable in Gate 6, the player is given the chance to become familiar with this action without dashing/air dashing.

The other abilities are also not usable inside the Gate even after it's completed. This isn't a technical issue, this is by design. I'm finding that the number of technical limitations I run into that are brought on by my own inability to code something properly, is declining by quite a lot.

And now for a screenshot! Claire may have dealt damage, but at what cost?

Wrong move Claire!

Editing Games

One More Gate 6 Thing

This is another segment of the game where there is no dashing, and enemies cannot be stunned. For this Gate, both characters have access to blocking.

Ignore everything about that UI element except for the bottom right meter with the shield icon. As you guard, that meter depletes and while you're not guarding it regenerates. The shield breaks if that meter is fully depleted and will recover in a few seconds. That's pretty straight forward, but DT has a few extra rules attached.

While the shield is broken, the player takes double damage from all sources. When the player successfully blocks an attack, the attack takes a chunk of the shield energy away. However, if the player blocks just as an enemy attacks, they'll parry, which removes no shield energy (you get some back actually) and the player is invulnerable for a very short moment and deals triple damage during that. This is how Claire works. She can only block close range attacks.

Jerry however, can block ranged attacks, like projectiles, and can parry from those. Jerry doesn't get an invulnerably state, but his damage is tripled for much longer than Claire. Claire is primarily close range in Gate 6, while Jerry is all ranged attacks. The rules favor Claire over Jerry. At least I think so, and I'm fine with that. Of course there will be scenarios set up to make use of both characters, but what I have set up, Claire seems to benefit the most. She needs more screen time anyway.

I know what some people are thinking. Spam the shield!! That doesn't work. There is an initial cost to using the shield, and spamming it to attempt to perform an easy parry, will significantly increase that initial cost during the spam fest, usually ending up in breaking the shield, and the player taking double damage from a giant sword. The player cannot use Claire and jump themselves onto an enemy to perform a parry either. The enemy has to be performing an attack.

I've yet to allow the testers to use it, but I'm sure once they get a hold of that build, I'll be tuning some numbers. And that's the end of any more info on Gate 6 till you experience it for yourself.

DT1 Debug Mode

Remember when Negative Zero Z did an S Rank Run of DT1? The game tells you how to unlock its debug mode when you achieve that rank, which he has shown how to do here. You don't actually have to have a save with an S rank, the code he gives works at any time.

On this debug mode stuff, DT2 does not have one available in the final build. DT3 might have something like that hidden away... probably will, and it'll be just as obscure to unlock.

Frozen

The Disney film that was released in November. I won't say anything about it other than it was enjoyable for the most part. Could use a few less songs though. There is one song, that luckily Disney has up on youtube that I found amazing, easily my favorite Disney song, topping even 'Hellfire' and 'Make a Man out of You'.

Phantasmaburbia

If you haven't played this game yet, I think you should. It's pretty damn amazing. Slaix brought my attention to it recently. There's not much I can say that isn't said on the game's site or from various reviews found. What I found odd though, was that almost no one mentioned the game's story, or simply glossed over it. Maybe so there's no room for spoilers, but the narrative is what I'm most fond of from the game. Very well done, and quite dark, so prepare for that if you are interested. The site linked below will tell you what the game is about. Spoilers, there's ghosts.

http://phantasmaburbia.com/

Fun Feedback

Edit: (12/25/2013) Merry Christmas to everyone, now get off the Internet! :3

Damage Feedback
When the player takes damage, there are 3 main damage types that the player commonly comes across. That being [Normal], [Elemental], and [Explosive]. So of course, the game gives the player options for more defense against these.

When the player deals damage, the game lets them know through colored damage text if they hit an enemy's weakness or resistance. (Instead of DT1's method of ambiguation.) So it's only right that the player knows what they're being hit with. In the demo, this isn't shown, you just get a screen flash. This has changed, instead, the corners of the screen will flash a color based on the type of damage you were dealt. (And it isn't so in your face and intrusive when the player is hit.) The other thing is the game now tells the player how much damage they took like in DT1 and DT2. The color of the text matches the screen flash as well.

Force Armor
Remember this expensive piece of equipment in the demo? It reduced damage from all sources by 1, which is quite useful, a bit too useful. It was changed to reduce damage only from normal type damage. (Basically anything that isn't explosive or elemental (like fireballs)). In every situation, when choosing what type of defensive gear to use, Force Armor was the obvious go to. Why choose only elemental defense when you could go with all of them. (Unless you were stacking them.) This brings back a meaningful choice and removes a late game design issue I was seeing with stacking too many defensive options together.

Gate 6
I mentioned before that it became the final one since Gate 7 was removed, but I never did say what theme it would be using. I still won't, but a not so helpful hint will be given. I've mentioned in the past that it would be of an arcade style, but that's not what it actually is. DT already embraces a lot of arcade style action at times and doing entire set of levels on it is unnecessary. Gate 6 does not represent a game, but instead a genre.

I need to get an FAQ up sometime, not on the game, but on questions asked to me.

Fun Fact
It was around this time that I originally wanted to release DT3. Seeing how I'm finishing up chapter 14 of 20, you can see I'm a little behind schedule. What happened? A lot of things, remember nothing ever goes as planned.

Healing Items and Stuff

Edit: (11/20/2013) It's the Planetside 2 first year anniversary. On that note, if you tried the game and were turned off from it due to it running like shit, I recommend trying it again. The game has had a huge overhaul on its back-end and has improved its performance for nearly everyone, and they're doing 2 more, smaller, optimization passes on the game. It's also going to be on the PS4, again as a free-to-play game, and you won't need PS+ to play it.

The other day after shopping, I found about a quarter of a burger left outside. Well the top bun anyway. It had been out for awhile, which was made apparent by the bread being hard. I saw a grackle close by and tossed it over to her. She happily skittered over and grabbed it. That happy mood was quickly replaced by very visible frustration at the bread being hard. She shook it and threw it on the ground twice. I waited and watched to see what she would do next.

One thing that grackles know how to do is put hard food in water to let it soften, such as dog food. However, bread can be a pain in the ass for them to eat when it's wet. There were plenty of puddles around for her to use, which I figured she'd use, but that's not what she went for. Instead, she grabbed the dried bread and flew in front of a parked car, then placed the bread in front of the left front tire. What's interesting to note is the setting is a parking lot, so there were plenty of parked cars around. She didn't just put the bread in front of any random car though, she chose the one car among the rest in the area that had someone sitting in it.

So after putting the bread in front of the car, she went to the side, looked up at the car, and started chirping at it.

Healing Items
Short segment here. It's worth noting that when playtesting, I don't ever use healing items. If I can't get through a segment without the help of healing potions, then the level has to be edited. (Technically I have to be able to perfect run a segment, but when doing a full run through an entire area, that is disregarded due to human error. The healing potion clause always applies though.)

Stuff
I've mentioned that DT3 will be the last fan-game (or game with sprite-rips) that I'll do. It'll also be the last of its scale that I'll make, at least alone anyway. DT3 is massive, its main quest is definitely bigger than DT1, and that's not mentioning DT3's side content. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it would be a lie to say this wasn't an oversight. I prefer smaller games honestly, both in playing and making I've found. Really, I think games should be smaller for the most part, MMOs aside. I feel games typically explore their gameplay well enough within 5-8 hours. The rest seems like filler or copypaste content. DT3 isn't any different, to be honest. I've tried to bring something unique to each area, and not just in the visuals. If I were in the mindset I am now 2 years prior, DT3 would be a bit smaller, but at this point, it would hurt the project to cut it down. It certainly explores each of its Ability Sets extensively, especially on the end game chapters.

On the note of games being shorter, this is a huge topic, and not one I know how to fully address. In some cases, more content can be better, even if it's more of the same type you've come across before. I'm pretty sure we could have gone without level... we'll pick 5-2, or 6-1 in the first Mario game and it wouldn't have felt any different than it did... or would it? It's hard to really figure out, “Is this better with or without this content? Does it add anything to the experience? But does it take away something without its presense?”

I know if I were to start cutting existing content, the Sky Castle in Gate 3 would be the first to go. Next would be a few misc. maps in Gate 2, and I know of 2 or 3 maps in Gate 5 that I'd remove. That's speculation though, I'm not removing existing content that currently works.

Progress
Chapter 14 is getting fairly close to being done. Just a few more gameplay scenarios to script and it'll be ready.

As for unique content for each new area, the end game certainly does this better than the rest of the game.