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[IndigoFenix]

Yeah, I don't like the default fonts for the app either.  Default fonts are based on the browser.  I'll figure out a way to change it, for consistency's sake at least, so just ignore it for now.

[Kamani]

Okay. Thanks.

[IndigoFenix]

I've fixed direction variables, they should work with degrees now.

I'm also fiddling with knockback and "push" values to make them a little more consistent, instead of sending the target flying sometimes and sometimes doing nothing.

[Kamani]

Okay. Thanks.

Good.

[IndigoFenix]

It looks like the app doesn't actually prevent crashes after all.  Hmm, maybe there's something else causing them besides memory overload.

I found a method of getting better crash data, hopefully that could give me some more leada.

[Kamani]

Well that stinks.

Good luck. Hope it gets found pretty fast.

[Kamani]

Okay, I still seem to be having the degrees/radians issue on the ShockerSpider. I just used 6ths of two pi (plus a randomly large number between 0 and 360 that is equal for all six targets), and it shot out attacks in sixths of a circle. I mean, this works, but if the issue gets fixed, it'll break. Not really sure how to handle this one.

[IndigoFenix]

The update must have not gone through.  I re-uploaded it, it should work now.

[Kamani]

Just tested it, and it works correctly. Thank you.

Edit: Just put the new monster into the package. Named ShockerSpider. It has pretty high damage (highest attack does 20, others are 10 and 11), but all attacks are pretty forecasted, so it isn't too tough to dodge most attacks. Tell me what you think, if you have the time. It seemed to go pretty well, but I can't judge it all that accurately.

Edit: I also just uploaded an alternate package version of the monster package where all of the monsters drop a 15 point heal (primarily for my own use, but I made it public, since the 15 point heal makes certain dungeon design plans work way better). Because of how it works, I SHOULD only have to edit one to edit both, but I haven't actually tested that yet, so I'll have to see how well that goes.

Edit: I just finished the dungeon room 3, so now all that's left is the forth, the final boss, and the post-dungeon Lusuria (people will have moved around, but, bright side, only one room will really even slightly, so no room redesigns). I'm not going to have enough time to manage it in my goal to do it before July, but I shouldn't take too much longer. If nothing significantly slows me down unexpectedly, I should be done in less than a week. Seeing as the original took about 4 months to do this (and that didn't even have Lusuria), this is going pretty well (about half of the time this time around).

[IndigoFenix]

Lightning Spider is pretty neat, though it feels more like a boss or miniboss than a regular enemy - not in terms of difficulty, but just the fact that it's throwing lightning bolts and making the whole screen flash when it attacks.  I would have given it a bit more HP and put it in its own room.  In terms of balance and telegraphing, it's pretty good.  An attack and death animation would enhance it, but all in its good time.

Hmm, now you've made me consider the use of fire, ice, and lightning spiders.  I'm all for the Standard Fantasy Elements Trinity, and there are enough color variations...

Minor graphical quibble, you might want to give enemies a fade timer, right now they kind of just vanish.  My usual standard is 60 frames and flickering for normal enemies, or 30 frames without flickering for certain ghost-like enemies, but whatever feels right.  You might also want to adjust (or remove) some shadows, like for the warning effects and the spore cloud (you can add a looping flash effect on the spore cloud in its _create function to make it easier to see).

If you edit a packaged object that is included in another package, the original package will be edited as well.  So if you load KamaniMonsters without KamaniMonstersHeal, they will try to create a heal item, and will fail since the item doesn't exist.  This is a bit messy code-wise, but it does technically work, so eh.

You may or may not have noticed that objects no longer target you if there is a wall in the way.  There's a "Wall Vision" option in the AI Behaviors -> Targeting Vision tab if you want to remove this.

[Kamani]

Fair enough. I guess they do seem a bit more miniboss-like. Unfortunately, that isn't actually what I was going for, but I guess it should work pretty well anyway. On an attack animation, not sure how I would go about doing that, but I can do a death animation pretty easy (I hadn't thought about it, since they were originally just a normal enemy).

Would be interesting. Wouldn't surprise me if I end up making a fire one for the desert dungeon I have planned.

Just went and added fade timers. In addition, I also removed the shadows. What kind of looping flash effect would make the spore cloud easier to see, by the way?

I actually designed it so that it would work that way. I originally copied the effect directly on to KamaniMonsters, actually. I knew it would be a bit messy, but what works, works.

I just went through and set Wall Vision to enemies who I felt would be able to (Sorcery Flame, Pyreskull, Lightning Spider, and the Spheres), and made it so that each individual instance can be set individually (primarily so that people using it can set it to how they need it).

Edit: Starting to hate the words Oh Snap, since they appear every crash. Also, there is no sling this time around. Instead, you can buy armor for a 25% damage resist. Buying every item reduces your reward to 30% (edit: miscalc, 15%), but will make things far easier, since you'll be dealing 50% extra, taking 25% less, and have two full heals.

Edit: Because I have spent SO much time doing this tile puzzle while editing, I think I might make it a 4x4 instead. So that people can actually solve it in less than a millennia. Because this is really getting boring, and I just spent like 15 minutes on it and still didn't solve it.

[IndigoFenix]

For the health drops, here's a possibility: you can make a dummy "health pickup" item, then set its Pickup Class (under Usage Details) to the health pickup object (this basically means that, if a sprite with the health item dies, it will drop the pickup object instead of the generated item pickup).  Then you can make all of the enemies have individual inventories.  Each enemy can then be given health pickups individually, or other items if you want to.

I actually added the wall vision thing because there are a number of points where enemies shooting through walls makes them feel a bit unfair...But whatever you think works.

I think I mentioned this before, but yeah I really don't like the tile puzzle - difficulty aside, it feels out of place in an otherwise action-oriented dungeon.  Adding a way to skip it, or just removing it entirely (maybe putting it in a later puzzle-oriented challenge) would be my suggestions.

To make the sporeclouds more visible, give them a Flash event in their _create function, set the flash timers to a small value (like 5) and check the "loop" option; this will make the cloud blink continuously.

An idea - to make the town and the dungeon feel more "integrated", maybe some of the NPCs can give hints about the dungeon?  Tips to beat particular enemies, the most recommended items, or outright hidden areas.  Stuff like that.

I'm working on figuring out how to fix the crashes.  The crash logger that I added on doesn't seem to help, so I'm going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.  Unpredictable crashes that can't be reliably reproduced are the worst bugs to fix...

[Kamani]

I guess that would work, but if there aren’t any costs to doing it this way (if there are, please inform me), my current method should be fine. Individual inventories for them might be helpful, but I think I should be good for now.

Yeah, that is why I made it individually setable. Need to adjust how it is set in some places, but I think it works pretty well in most places.

That makes sense. I like mixing it up a bit, but I didn’t realize the puzzle would take a long amount of time on average. I’ll definitely make it easier (and skippable), and I might remove it.

Makes sense. I’ll do that. I was testing, and they can be pretty tough to see as is, so that’ll really help.

I’ll do that for the Lusurians who would reasonable have gone into the dungeon (Wren, Jeremy, Evrel, and Leaal, who have all been adventurers). The others wouldn’t really have been in there for actually doing the Trial, so they know nothing.

Yeesh. Stinks that the logger didn’t work. Good luck figuring it out.

Edit: Just made the tile puzzle DRASTICALLY easier. As in it takes like 20 seconds (and hitting every tile solves it too). It should probably be doable  for people now, and it shouldn't break up the flow so much. I think I'll leave it in as is, for now.

Edit: Just finished up all of the death rooms, persistent rooms (and the unloading that makes that work), and dungeon rooms 2 and secret2, which it turns out I entirely forgot to finish. Woops. I don't know whether making Spids's boss version will take one day or two, since they were a pretty complicated boss technique-wise, but that is where I'll be starting tomorrow (well, today, I guess, looking at the time).

[IndigoFenix]

All looking very nice!  I did a run through the dungeon, it's pretty balanced.  Not too easy, not too hard (at least with all of the equipment).

A few minor things:

The flame at the bottom of the jump is a bit of a nasty trick - the player doesn't really have any time to prepare.

Is there any limit to how much the golems can multiply?  I get the concept, but sometimes an inopportune tactical retreat can make a situation much worse.  Maybe the spawn could be temporary, or unable to grow to full size, but let the golems regenerate if left alone for too long.

The randomness of the flame's teleport makes them annoying to deal with sometimes.  Having them teleport back to their origin point after a few seconds would work well.

The mushrooms can be kited away from their origin point.  This isn't always a bad thing, though - it's actually a handy trick in some areas where they are teamed up with another enemy.


Hey, I just got an idea - leaving comments at positions in a world (like in Super Mario Maker).  Would be quite useful for making suggestions to world builders.  Maybe with different options, like who is allowed to leave comments and whether they are visible only to the creator or also to other players.



I'm making some progress with the crashes!  The Chrome tools has a useful function for monitoring memory consumption.  Press F12, then the Performance tab, then record a few seconds and examine the results.  The green line (nodes) seems to be the important bit - it basically says how many objects the program is trying to hold in its memory at once.  When that green line reaches a maximum threshold, it crashes.  The key is to try and figure out when it is storing more data than it is supposed to; that indicates a memory leak (the program isn't deleting unused data.)

I've already found and fixed one major memory leak: turns out that not only were damage numbers not being deleted properly, they each held a reference to the sprite that created them, which means that any sprite that was damaged at any time was also being stored in memory indefinitely.  Not surprisingly, that was consuming a ton of memory over time.  That's fixed, though I'm pretty sure it's not the only memory leak, since there have been crashes occurring even when damage was not involved.  Figuring out the exact cause is tricky, but at least now I have something to work with.

[Kamani]

Glad it’s working pretty well (plus, that saves me testing time, so thanks).

Which jump was the flame at the bottom of? I’ll take a look once I am at a computer again.

Oh. Hadn’t considered that. I’ll make the golem regenerate (although I might need to increase their active radius for this to work) after 10 or so seconds off screen, and doing so will destroy all clones they made. That sound like it would work?

Oh, right, I forgot to readd that after the lost progress (another world-copy problem). I made them do that so they couldn’t get into unreachable rooms, but it should help for this too.

Yup. Especially when the other enemy is a golem (which is basically how I handle golem encounters). Don’t plan on changing this one as is because of that.

Good. I’m glad there’s something that can help make solving the crash issue less of a problem. Seems like it would be a real pain without that.

Yeah, I’ve had crashes just editing rooms and the like, but that helps to explain why I was crashing so often during boss fight testing on Umbra. I had figured it was just loading the room a bunch, but this makes far more sense.

Edit: Hmm... The golem thing might be a bit tricky. It wouldn't be bad, but I am not entirely sure how to handle the fact that you might have more than one. I would need to do something with summons I guess. Perhaps I could make golems spawn an invisible golem control? That might work. I'll test it out when I can get back to my computer.

Also, I noticed the world comments idea, and that would be real useful.

Edit: Is there a good way to destroy all summons? If I can do that, I should be able to manage it, but if that won't work, I'll have to try something else.
Also, any suggestions for handling this that might work better? I feel like there might be a better solution I am just not thinking of.

Edit: Hmm... I think the Spids skills were flamestorm (two versions), charge, fire breath, flame spiral, and fire trap (the one that made 4 delayed exploders). I think that was everything in phase one. Hope I didn't forget anything, but I guess I'll see once I am done if it feels right.

Also, if I ever decide to do a hardmode version of bosses, Spids phases 1 and 2 will be primarily the same, but Umbra will join in as an invincible attacker, and there will be an additional phase between them in which Spids becomes a giant spider made of blue flames with the smaller Spids spider floating in the middle. In that phase, Spids would be immune to damage (and attacking them would inflict damage), but all of the attacks would sap their own life (since they would literally be firing the blue flames that make up their form. Think it would be pretty interesting.

Edit: Was just testing Spids skills. Yeah, that went... badly... 52 blue flames on screen based on a quick count. I REALLY wish I had thought to keep Spids preserved somewhere. I don't remember how I handled the firestorm and flame spiral skills (the skills beside that were pretty easy, although flames might be moving a bit slower/faster) when it comes to timing and speed. Edit: Admittedly, with the damage so low (and my laptop so SLOW. Lag has been getting worse for some reason) I still did fine, but still.
Edit: This is fixed(ish).

Spids phase one is done(again, ish). All of the skill and the big attack timer have been added, but it may need a lot of balancing. Now I just need to add phase two (for which I don't really remember the skills, so I might need to redo that from the start. I think there was still a spiral flame and firestorm and I know there was a rush, but that is all I can remember. I think I'll need to continue this later (ugh, I should have used my time better so I wasn't behind schedule).