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[Kamani]

Okay. I’ll just work around it then.

Okay. Thanks. Good to know.

Okay.

Great! Thanks. I’ll get working on the rest then.

Edit: Adding a fair number more tiles. I really need to learn when to quit. One more set to do tomorrow before I get back to Droom1's details.

Also, I need to look into colorblind accessibility for this.

[IndigoFenix]

Colorblindness is mainly an issue for red and green, and even then colors can be discerned by how light or dark they are.

I did a run through Lusuria again, trying to see it as a first time player.  The hidden areas are really well done now that I think about it.  The implication that there is something more tragic behind the scenes meshes with the music to produce a rather subtle vibe that raises intrigue as far as the whole plot is concerned.  There are some things that can use a bit of polish (mostly things I added after it was already done, like text box typing and character "voices"), but on the whole it's quite good.  The town should really have at least some music though.

Spids needs the "face target" boxes checked though.  There's a game breaking bug that happens on very rare occasions where the line charge sends Spids off the screen completely, causing him to disappear, but facing targets seems to prevent it...I think.  It's pretty rare so it's hard to be certain.

I made a open demo for one area I'm making, since it's more or less self-contained for now - Akashmandir, the Mountain City, to the East of the Tower.  The "flavors" for the four worlds are Eastern (Tibetian), Northern (Nordic), Western (Standard European fantasy), and Southern (some kind of desert Near Eastern flavor, ancient Persia or something, I don't know).  I'm kind of building them all at once.  The Tower itself might have its own town, maybe modern or futuristic, but I haven't started with that yet.

EDIT: I added a few new text tags to make handling text boxes easier.  [wait=30] simply pauses the typing for the designated number of frames, much more convenient for pauses in speech than messing around with [speed] tags.  [next] clears the text box after hitting space and then continues typing, allowing you to make multiple text boxes in a single event.  This also allows you to create multiple text boxes in the basic player interaction text.  Unlike other tags, these do not require a closing tag.

[Kamani]

I’ll probably be okay then. I only have red, and not green, and I don’t know if grey or blue are generally problematic. Gold doesn’t matter, since you can barely see it anyway, and it is only really important in one room, where it is blatant that it is there without sight.

Oh. I totally forgot that I hadn’t put in music for Lusuria town. I had been looking for the right song, if I recall, and then I totally forgot that I had. Oops. Thanks, I’ll put something in as soon as I get my WiFi back up (at least my phone still works for replies).
Edit: Hey, it's back. Weird. Rebooting the modem didn't work, but I guess it just fixed itself. Well, if it works, good enough, I guess.
Thanks for the advice, but what do you mean by text box typing? Do you mean having it enter at a speed or something? I’d look and try to figure it out, but I can’t currently.
Edit: Any advice for what to use for character voice noises? I can't really figure out what sound would pair well with how they work.

Oops. I’ll add that as soon as possible.

Neat! I’ll look when I can.

Cool. Those should be useful.

Edit: When I try to upload music (an .mp3 called 92nd floor looping from https://soundimage.org/drama-2/), I am getting an Unknown Upload Error. Any clue what's up? I don't know if I am missing something because of lack of relevant knowledge or if the system is a little off.

[IndigoFenix]

Oops.  Looks like I forgot to reset the max upload size when I rebuilt the website.  Fixed.

The typing speed is set by Text Display Rate under Dialogue Boxes.  Setting it to 1 types 1 letter per frame.  Shorter values are actually slower.  Ideal speed may vary, especially if you are using text sound as well, you'll have to test to make sure the sound isn't grating or annoying.  I typically use a display rate of 0.5 and set the sound as menu__10.wav (which is just a generic beep) for most NPCs, adjusting the Text Sound Speed variable to give characters different "pitch".  Special characters get their own unique voice beeps.

It's not really necessary, but it's a nice bit of polish that can add some extra character to a world and it's characters.  (Undertale did this wonderfully.)

I may need to find a better generic beep, since 0.5 is a bit slow for lengthy text, and menu__10.wav sounds really annoying at a speed of 1.

[Kamani]

Ah, okay. Thanks.

I'll probably set my text speed a touch faster, to make sure the text isn't too slow, but I'll have to figure out a way to do a generic text sound.
Edit: Could you add something like hitting space to skip the text speed (excepting wait)? This would mean that even if the text was a bit slow, fast readers wouldn't end up waiting.

I'll do the text speed for now, but I'll leave the sounds for later, I think.

Okay.

Spoiler: Akashmandir Secret (click to show/hide)

Found the secret room on the mountain. Must be Lord Santu.

[IndigoFenix]

I made a few changes to the way text boxes work; text sounds now do not "overlap" by default, making it much less annoying to have fast typing with sound.  I also made it possible to speed up text by pressing space.

Both of these can be disabled for particular sprites.

[Kamani]

Thanks.

Edit: Any good way to assign numbers 1-5 (no repeats) to 5 different variables? I can think of some complicated ways using loops, but I probably missing a way that would work much faster, and without risk of causing loop-timeout issues, so if you have any suggestions, they would be appreciated.

Edit: Well, I had Droom2's outline all set up, and then my entire computer crashed, so I have to restart on that. Ugh, and it had turned out pretty nice too. Bleh.
Edit: To clarify, since I was rather vague, I very much doubt this has anything to do with a BoundWorlds issue. I just got bad luck, and that is frustrating.

[IndigoFenix]

I'm not sure what you mean. You want the numbers 1-5 arranged randomly?  No simple function for doing that, although it does sound like the kind of thing an entry level coding job would ask for. Don't worry too much about timeouts, you really need to be making a few thousand loops in a frame before a problem would occur.

I thought you might be looking for arrays though. I should add a method for creating and modifying arrays, possibly even saving arrays as partition data, which would allow far more complex data storage without defining excessive numbers of variables.  I wanted to add a long-term Harvest Moon type farming minigame somewhere, and that's not really viable with the current save system, but arrays could make it possible.

[Kamani]

Alright. I can manage it with loops pretty easily then. Thanks.

Edit: Somehow I completely forgot that computers can easily run loops about 11 times (anywhere between 5 and approaching infinity, but that's probability). That was deeply foolish of me, thinking about it. But hey, it works now!

Edit: Added all of the fixes and music to Lusuria. There is currently no music in the secret home, because I feel like it needs a special theme (I tried 92nd floor, but that isn't quite right), but everywhere else has it. And I added Face Targets to the enemies that needed it (which included the SorceryFlames and Umbra), and fixed the sizeup skill on Umbra (it was not supposed to make Umbra giant permanently. That was a side effect of copying the skill from the old model, which was sized up from its size instead of sized down). Now Lusuria should work everywhere.

Edit: Droom2's outline is done. If you have time, could you tell me if it looks alright (it ended up a little odd because I ended up adding a diagonal version of a room that was originally going to be elsewhere because it couldn't be where it was going to be)? If it is good, it'll be the last major dungeon room (not counting already complete boss rooms, the small room that is just going to be a little mob rush, and the equally small but less technically tricky room that just forms a path between Droom2 and the final boss), so I'll be nearly done with the dungeon.
Ugh, thinking on it, progress has really slowed in the past month or so. I need to start working more efficiently. I'll start planning the town characters tomorrow when I'm away from my computer and thus can't do the dungeon. That should shave off time.

[IndigoFenix]

Droom2 looks good, though I'd advise adding some unique landmarks on each area.  Pools of water, interesting and recognizable patterns of rocks, trees, or enemies, just something to space out the monotony.  Any one snapshot should be able to tell a player where they are in the area.  I'd also suggest making the whole cactuses and trees their own (solid tile) sprites instead of just the tops.  It works the way you did it, but this way you can move them around freely without having to worry about the tiles underneath them.

Anyway, don't worry about it, everyone has their down time.  Pushing yourself too hard is a sure way to burn out.  Honestly, I'd really wish there were more casual world builders out there, BoundWorlds was designed for people who don't have the patience to put together a full game, and you're setting a bad example with your good examples, haha

I've fixed up a bug related to functions and animations on new sprites not working properly the first time you create them.  I also fixed knockback on high-mass objects.  Going to have to start making a party system soon, I think, and that will probably require fixing up pathfinding to prevent party members from getting stuck on walls.

[Kamani]

Yeah, Droom2 was just a total outline. I will be adding some more unique landmarks. I don't know how well it'll end up, but it DEFINITELY won't be this dull. Thanks for taking a look at it.
That change to cactus and trees would be a really good idea. I'll do that. Thanks.

Fair enough. Thanks.
Clearly I'm going to have to make some small-scale side projects.

Good fix. Haven't noticed that one myself, but it sounds like a real issue.
Party system should be neat. Plus, it'll help once I get to Batelier's trial. Thinking about that trial, I have to figure out the other tier one trial, since I can't do Batelier's before the platform tiles system is set up. Not sure what to do for the other one. Hmm... I better figure that out pretty fast. I'd rather not do things any more out of order than is already done.

Edit: When you updated the Mountain Village whose name is hard to spell, you left the functional tiles visible by mistake. Probably by mistake anyways, you could have had a reason I just don't know about.

[IndigoFenix]

I've implemented some basic optional pathfinding, under AI behaviors.  Pathfinding has two parameters, Pathing Optimization and Pathing Speed.  Optimization makes the object more effective at finding a correct path, but also requires more thought; basically if optimization is low the object will navigate around small obstacles but will mostly just head straight toward the target, while high optimization will allow the sprite to navigate more complex mazes and such.  Pathing speed will cause the sprite to think faster, but this will put more stress on the game's CPU as a whole so you don't want this to be too high if there's multiple sprites doing pathing operations, or slowdown can occur.

Pathing is tile-based and doesn't work very well in all circumstances; it doesn't really know what to do with drop and climb tiles and doesn't work in 2-d segments.  I'll continue to make this work better.

I made a tiny little 8-bit dungeon room that has enemies with basic pathfinding.

[Kamani]

That's real neat. I'll have to try it out.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Checked out the dungeon. Is neat how that works. I'll have to try out how it works myself.

Edit: Made the cactuses and trees no longer work as top tiles only. Instead, they do as you recommended and are the entire object image. The best one is the big cactus, because I made it two objects, the cactus and floor, (one of which spawns the other in the right location), and thus I didn't need to worry about people being under the floor tile. It looks and works better. It was also basically necessary, since otherwise, the big cactus wouldn't have worked at all.

[IndigoFenix]

So I added a thing to make world building a little more unified: a package of six orbs, one of each color.  They can be added as rewards for completing challenges, and by collecting one of each, they can be used to open a door.  This can be used to create "nexus" worlds that encourage exploration of other players' worlds.

Each orb is worth 120 sparks, which means that at the very least the challenge must take 2 minutes to complete (minus any other sparks or items of value the player will pick up), or require the player to spend their own sparks or use a different item of value to acquire.  So you can't just place all the orbs at the entrance to a world.  2 minutes seems like a good amount of time for a relatively small but still challenging world; other similar rewards might be made for even smaller worlds or more elaborate quests.

You can only hold one orb of each color at a time; if you already have one the orb will be grayed out and picking it up will just grant the player 100 sparks instead.

The Orbs are as follows:

Orb of Power (red): Intended to be granted for a combat or destruction focused task
Orb of Heroism (yellow): Intended to be granted for heroic deeds
Orb of Kindness (green): Intended to be given as a reward for helping someone or making bonds
Orb of Tranquility (cyan): Intended to be found while wandering a generally peaceful world
Orb of Wisdom (blue): Intended to be given for completing a puzzle
Orb of Mastery (magenta): Intended to be given for completing a particularly difficult challenge

They can also just be found in a place that fits their color and theme for other reasons, I'm not restricting their use beyond the 2 minute requirement so world builders can use them as they want to.

[Kamani]

Neat! I'll add some in for completing side quests once I get around to adding those (that could be a while).

By the way, I'm having terrible lag on Droom2 new. Is it because of the size or the fairly large number of objects (all of which are immobile trees)? Will be unplayable until I can work this out. At least, it will be unplayable for me. Might work better on other computers.