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[IndigoFenix]

The reason why you can move while blocking when blinded is because thr SandCoating sets a fixed _speed for some reason and this overrides speed settings in the block event.  Setting priority to 1 may help. Although when altering numerical stats it's usually better to use multiply rather than set. Also I'm not sure why the sand coating sets speed at all, it actually makes the player slightly faster so I'm guessing it's a mistake?

To handle flash effects, you can either set a reference variable (use looping to keep the flash going until then) and destroy it when needed using Destroy Object, or you can bind it to a sprite (generally a status effect) and it will disappear when that object is destroyed.

I'll fix up the credits.  My name is probably at the end because you are using some of my objects (the object programmer credits are still only partially implemented.)

Pointing out spelling errors is fine.

[Kamani]

... Oops. Thanks, I’ll have to fix that. I have no clue why it is set up as it is. Edit: I need to stop overestimating my own competence in these situations.

Okay. Thanks.

Ohh. Okay. Makes sense. I’ll still have to try to consolidate the other two instances of IndigoFenix, but at least I know this one’s presence makes sense. Thanks.

Okay. I will do so if I see any more.

[IndigoFenix]

I've added a small thing to help determine how many sparks the player should be picking up, as well as an experimental "rank" system.  This will be changed, since it takes away from the main purpose of the game (I want players to feel rewarded for exploring, rather than feeling rushed to "complete" a world) but it might be helpful for world builders to approximate out how much players should be rewarded for a given amount of travel.

Basically, as the world builder, you will pick up the most reward points for players in your world if the player gets right at the low end of a D- rank.  It should never be possible to exit a world with an S rank; players who do so will have the extra sparks (or if they did not get enough sparks, some of the new items they picked up) taken from them upon completing a world and if it is possible to do so then this indicates bad world design.  S ranks are bad!

Yeah the ranking system makes no sense, I'm going to change it, I'm just not sure exactly what it should be changed to, or how the system will fit in with the plot exactly.

[Kamani]

Okay. I’ll have to see how they work next time I’m on.

Yeah, I do have to agree that that ranking system doesn’t make much sense.

Okay. Looking forward to whatever it will end up becoming.

Edit: The Sculptor (golem boss) has only two skills (not counting the one that is only used as part of one of the others), and I can't decide whether it works as a miniboss or not. Admittedly, the last miniboss had three, and one of them was a basic tackle, but there was a pretty big difference, since Sculptor has precisely 0 damaging attacks (they have a regen move that can be countered sort of Lusuria golem style, but with immobile rocks instead of living rocks (and no nodeath), and a move that makes a desert golem).
They are still tough though, since you have to keep destroying their spawns if you want a clear shot.
I guess I'll just leave it in for now.

Edit: I think Hiekka will need to be a puzzle boss, since there is no real way that Hiekka can be harmed (I mean, story-wise, all of the Trial Guardians are far more powerful then they act for the player (Trial difficulty does change with the participant, since different forms may have otherwise unfair combat advantages), but I don't think that works really at all with the sentient living force of an entire desert (which fills the entire world)). Haven't made one before, so this might be a bit more tricky...
Also, you called it right when you said a puzzle boss might work well.

[IndigoFenix]

Updated the spark/time ratio readout to something more logical.  It now appears as a meter which shows you the "ideal" number of sparks the player should have in order to maximize the amount returned to the world builder; basically the closer it is to the yellow line the more your world is "optimized" for gaining sparks from travelers (although worlds that are a bit more generous may gain more visitors, so the specifics are up to you).  It also shows you the number of sparks that will be acquired by the world to give you and idea as to how this calculation works (though in practice this number is divided by 10).  If you go over the limit, the meter turns red to let you know.  Note that this only really matters when the player leaves the world.

Also I should mention that items used count toward points lost, which can make the whole system fairly indeterminate, you'll have to make an educated guess as to what the average player will use up to complete the world.  This might need some adjustment, given that players may vary significantly in terms of how often they use items.

All of this only shows when you are in one of your own worlds.  None of these details affect the player directly unless they go over the limit, in which case they get an "Unstable" warning message to let them know that they will lose sparks for entering a gate to a new world unless they wait around for a while.

All this is basically to answer the question of "limiting rewards gained from player-made stages" that games like Super Mario Maker and Little Big Planet both had to deal with.  (SMM handled it by simply setting a maximum of 3 extra lives and making this the only thing that carried over, while LBP as far as I know just kind of ignored the issue entirely).  This is a rather complicated solution, but hopefully it will create a system where acquiring sparks actually means something.

[Kamani]

Cool. I'll have to take a look at that next time I'm on. That will help me balance out my world a bit better.

Okay.

Makes sense, and it sounds like it'll probably work. On Little Big Planet: you didn't really have a grand score as far as I recall, so carrying stuff between levels wasn't a huge deal. You could collect as many items in a world as possible, but since you could only use them to build your own content or to decorate yourself, it didn't really make a huge difference in the long run. And scorewise, you only competed against people in the same level, so if everyone hit the maximum number of points, everyone just tied for first and it didn't do anything.

Edit: Huh, unstable 47 on Guardian's Challenge. I suppose spamming Spring Jumps makes it a bit easy... Those really counter some standard enemies.

Edit: I am completely clueless on how to do a boss fight for Hiekka. This one might take me a day or two to figure out. Hard to make a boss fight for something that could never be hurt in any way I guess. I'd do a shapeshifter bossfight, since that would fit, but I already have one of those, so I should probably avoid it.

[IndigoFenix]

Or spamming loads of enemies is bad level design  .  Going to have to fix that up.

Maybe Hieakka's challenge can be a part of the dungeon instead of a boss fight?  After all, there's no reason why a trial guardian's challenge must be a battle.  This can also help you come up with new and interesting dungeon areas.  Some sort of puzzle involving sand sculptures perhaps.

Do you have a plan for each of the worlds you are intending to make?  With two or even three boss battles per dungeon I'd be concerned about running out of ideas unless I planned them out ahead of time.  (That's basically enough material for an entire Zelda game).

[Kamani]

Probably. Either way, I suspect I took down the guardian fast enough I would have managed it without that (I think I only beat 4 or 5, so unless they give 10 a piece, I still would have managed it). Perhaps the reward is a bit high?

That is a very good idea. Thank you. I know Batelier won’t be the final boss, so there is no reason that they all should be.

I have plans for the end bosses of every Trial Dungeon except the third tier one and the third tier two (which I don’t have really any plans for... it just feels like there should be three per tier).
The mid-bosses I have plans for most of them (although I don’t know if Batelier will have a real mid-boss).
The mini-bosses I am a little less worried about, since they generally have pretty basic skill sets (Fulmine has two skills and a rush (and wasn’t even originally intended to BE a boss), and Sculptor has two (a heal and a summon. They never attack directly)), and a little repetition in them won’t be the end of the world as long as they are decently unique.

Edit: Think I'm going to end up not putting the town in the middle of the Trial because my original plan (caves, town, desert) is not getting used. I think I'm going to end up doing a light puzzle that covers the entire dungeon based on two special types of floors which both can't be active at once (and can only be switched after you fight the mid-boss (Sculptor, who is getting redesigned and promoted to mid-boss). Autem is the final boss now, and Hiekka is both the puzzle, and, technically speaking, the dungeon (I guess this counts as a very strange twist on the classic "dungeon inside a monster" )). This also means that I am actually bothering to draw out the dungeon before making it, so hopefully that'll turn out pretty well.

[IndigoFenix]

The dungeon is the guardian?  I like it. 

Working on a few new item-related features, notably the ability to permit or forbid the use of particular items in particular rooms.  I guess that classifying items under particular "categories" like healing, combat, and so on might also make sense.

Edit: You can now permit and forbid the use of all or specific items in individual rooms.  No item categories yet.

[Kamani]

Seeing as, technically speaking, the entire desert (which takes up the whole world) is Hiekka, yes.

Neat. That should come in handy.

Cool.

Edit: Do 48x32 rooms lag for you? A nearly empty 48x32 room is lagging pretty badly for me, so I'd like to know if that is normalish.
Edit: Never mind. The real issue was not the SIZE of the room, it was that I have 4 colored tilesets and they lag terribly. This is... problematic. Not really sure what to do about this.
Edit: I guess I could make some copies and then colorize them using GIMP. That would mean BoundWorlds isn't colorizing them, which would mean no lag. Plus maybe I could add some transfer tiles...
That'll work, I suppose.
Edit: To avoid uploading like 5 tilesets that I will never use again, will the colorize lagging thing be fixed?

[IndigoFenix]

Ah, I see... it applies the color to the entire image every frame, which greatly slows things down.  I'll have to create a new method to fix it.  Not sure how I'm going to deal with temporary flashes or color adjustments, but I'll figure that out after.

I'm wondering if I should increase the sparks-per-second maximum, and if so by how much.  It doesn't really matter in a practical sense, only in the sense of how many points per second people generally expect to get in a game and what "feels good".  I guess part of the issue is whether or not BoundWorlds should feel more "arcade" friendly.  Very few fast-paced games only give you a maximum of one point per second (let alone one point every five seconds); my space shooter test has to give fractional points to work, and it just doesn't feel natural.  I can of course make a custom value and then exchange them afterwards but...  I'm going to do a quick study of different kinds of games and see what is a typical "base denomination per second".

[Kamani]

Okay. I’ll wait on the actual color then, so I can avoid adding 4 extra tilesets (I’ll still need to add some extra color transfer tiles, but that reduces the number down to one extra tileset).

I don’t really know what would be good, but good luck finding the right balance.

[IndigoFenix]

Okay, I improved the system for rendering colorized tilemaps; instead of re-coloring the tilemap each frame it just stores a copy of the colorized tilemap and uses that.  This won't help for flash effects or tilesets that need to change their color regularly, but those probably won't be used much anyway.

[Kamani]

Okay. Neat!

Edit: I ended up making colorized tilesets anyways, primarily because I wanted to make transfer tiles, and then, since I wanted to make sure the transfer tiles had the exact same color as the colorized tilesets, I figured it would just be easier to do it this way. Although I ended up combining all of them into a single tileset for some reason.
Well, colorized tilesets will definitely come in handy in the future, in any case.

Edit: Woops. All that, and I mes up the transfer tiles. Better redo that... Ugh.

Edit: Advantages of GIMP: Can do a lot of different stuff. Options!
Disadvantages of GIMP: You might never even figure out how to do pretty basic stuff without guides because it is so utterly unintuitive.

Edit: Welp, I tried making a sprite (because I couldn't find what I needed) called ColorSandControl. I really need to learn how to sprite, because it's pretty awful and it took like two hours. Well, I guess I'll go back to searching OpenGameArt.

[IndigoFenix]

You ever try Paint.NET?  It's like Gimp but much easier to use.  Probably doesn't have quite as many options but it has all the important ones.  Also it works with Ninite, which is nice.

You can post your art on the "random things you drew" topic and ask for advice on improving it. It's how I developed the current player sprite.

I'm making some more character sprites.  Might have to ask for advice myself soon.