Weekly Progress: Twice Upon a Hero

Despite having a pretty busy week (spring cleaning is no joke!), I got a considerable amount of work done for Twice Upon a Hero.

I bit the bullet and integrated Yanfly Battle Engine Melody, along with several smaller scripts that helped create a few unique skills and states. I'm still setting up all the character skills, and the enemy skills are far from being finalized. Things are well on their way, however. Alistair, Cordelia and Penelope's skills are done. I'm finishing up Claudia's skills and I have a basic outline for the other characters. It's just a matter of setting up some animations (thanks to Timmah for gorgeous particle work, and IceDragon for awesome icons) and fiddling with the cost/damage ratios.

Melody also came with a simple message system that allowed for some features I've been wanting to use: basic text formatting (italics, bold text, ability to change fonts), a way to add icons in text and a name box. I've loved the namebox idea ever since I first started using Ccoa's UMS back in RMXP. It's a great feature that identifies the speaker without taking up a whole line of text. Of course, the downside to this great message system is that I've had to go through hundreds of messages to change the code.

I've also fixed a couple of small bugs that all you faithful players caught - one being a missing switch that gave you access to the sewers. Now, you can only explore it if you've accepted a side quest.

Thanks to Modern Algebra, I've created a few tutorials that should help newer players. They're completely optional, but they do give some useful items if you can sit through them. I'm finishing up a basic battle tutorial, as well. It's not too complicated to create, though it still takes time and lots of play-testing.

Other things I finished:
- Fixed up one of Closet's facesets because it was a tad messy and didn't fit in the quality of the rest of the faces.
- Sprited an original windowskin. As much as I liked the old one, I wanted something that was a little cleaner and simpler.
- Changed the font to something a little bigger and more readable.
- Also mapped one of the first areas of chapter 3. I'll post some screenies when I'm a little further along mapping that chapter.

I'm hoping to release the updated version of chapter 1+2 by the end of the week.