36 commits and almost 2 months later, it's time for another dev update!
Also I want to preface this by saying, going forward I'll be prioritizing the Emergent Fates mailing list. If you are not already subscribed please scroll down to the footer and do so. Any information about news, prizes, etc. will be sent there first.
Art / UI / UX
Ongoing. There is still artwork being coloured and added to the game. Lots of discussion and iteration on UI / UX. Expect to start revamping the battle scene within the next month or so with player menus to follow.
Native iPad Support
Despite the iPad being the ideal device with which to experience Emergent Fates, the game has so far been exclusively built for iPhone which, when run on an iPad, gets scaled to the appropriate resolution. You'll see this with other iOS apps that don't support a native iPad app (Instagram comes to mind). A lot of work is still required to fully support the iPad, since I need to create a higher quality duplicate of every asset, but similar work will need to be done for the newer generation of iPhones so I'll be holding off on this for a while and hopefully be able to address them all in one go.
Mechanics
While wandering around the world of Emergent Fates, you'll now be able to not just walk, but jump! In addition to improving the quality of life of your travels, this adds a new dynamic to how players initiate battles with enemies. In the past, this was reliant on some tenuous logic based on whether the sprites overlapped each other, and which direction they faced. This was especially problematic considering the sprite files are square but the actual characters (and their animations) are not, resulting in some questionable collision detection. Now, when attacking near an enemy, if the player is within range, they will automatically hop towards the enemy, and initiate battle. Coupled with the ability to jump, players can now be more careful about how they pick fights, whether that means playing aggressively or defensively. Landing your attack from behind the enemy will allow you to go first in battle, but if you miss and the enemy attacks, same goes for them!
Settings
Added support for toggling the background music and sound fx from the player settings menu. Previously this was done in code. Also added a way to adjust some debug settings on the fly to avoid having to rebuild the game every time a change was made. This was all done in a way that will make adding subsequent settings easier in the future.
Classes & Abilities
Each of the 4 players in Emergent Fates has access to 4 unique classes, for a total of 16 classes. Each of those 16 classes has 5 abilities, for a total of 80 abilities. I went through every class and every ability and, where needed, consolidated them, added new ones, or removed some that weren't quite working out. While this took quite a bit of time, the implementation, as expected, resulted in quite a few bugs that needed fixing. Overall I'm much happier with where things are sitting, and I think each class has a much stronger identity as a result. At some point in the future I'll be updating the website to introduce you to each of them.
New Story
More than anything else I've described so far, the story is where I've been spending the majority of my time. It would take too long (and spoil the fun) summarizing everything, but suffice to say I've written a new one from the ground up, borrowing on ideas, and occasionally some dialog, from the previous one. Similar to the Classes & Abilities above, I strongly believe this iteration is superior to the previous ones, and with some tweaking, will hopefully be something I'm not completely embarrassed to share with you at some point.
Next Up
As mentioned, we'll be introducing some UI/UX tweaks, and continuing with the implementation of the story. Hopefully by the next dev update the first pass of the story will be finished. The biggest hurdle afterwards will consist of native resolution support for iPad, and newer iPhone models, since at the moment I'm just using my 5S. Unfortunately those newer devices did not exist when the version of cocos2d I'm using was written, but I'm optimistic I can hand role support for them without too much trouble. There is more work required for release that I haven't gotten into yet but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Questions?
If you have any questions for myself, or about the game, feel free to shoot me an email (see footer). And don't forget to subscribe to the mailing list if you haven't (also in the footer)!
Thanks for all your support and enjoy the holidays!