Cumulative Patch Notes 6 June 2020: Setting Up the Final Twist
Hi everyone! As you've probably noticed, we've been uploading patches on most days but neglecting the patch notes to tell you what we've changed. So here we are with a long-overdue update to tell you what's new in Himeko Sutori.
For about the last month we've been focusing on the story, setting up all the background necessary to drive home the plot twist going into the final act.
We needed to show more of the conflict's collateral damage. The idea behind some of the new cutscenes is to make the heroes more sympathetic and to add more emotional investment in stopping Candle and Sword.
[Edit: Steam's announcement editor may not be loading the image correctly. This is the intended image: https://himekosutori.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/JacobEncounter.jpg]
Short cutscenes reveal more information about the world, giving context to the plot twist and the final confrontation.
[Edit: https://himekosutori.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ShadowlandsRuins.jpg]
New information reveals that events from throughout the world's history culminate in your struggle.
[Edit: https://himekosutori.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Inscription.jpg]
The significance of past events will be made clear in the end.
[Edit: https://himekosutori.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DesertTimeGate.jpg]
We made some changes to a major story battle, adding tougher enemies and a gate to assault. This battle features some important dialog that reframes some of the game's earlier events. The battle really wasn't working as we had hoped though, and we decided to tweak the AI, which now plays much more defensively when given walls and towers.
And in addition to all those changes, we also fixed and improved a lot that isn't quite as obvious:
As you can see we've been very busy fixing and adding to the game. We're making steady progress now toward finishing the main quest. We'll continue uploading new patches as we finish new content and we hope to have the end of the main quest finished soon.
For about the last month we've been focusing on the story, setting up all the background necessary to drive home the plot twist going into the final act.
We needed to show more of the conflict's collateral damage. The idea behind some of the new cutscenes is to make the heroes more sympathetic and to add more emotional investment in stopping Candle and Sword.
[Edit: Steam's announcement editor may not be loading the image correctly. This is the intended image: https://himekosutori.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/JacobEncounter.jpg]
Short cutscenes reveal more information about the world, giving context to the plot twist and the final confrontation.
[Edit: https://himekosutori.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/ShadowlandsRuins.jpg]
New information reveals that events from throughout the world's history culminate in your struggle.
[Edit: https://himekosutori.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Inscription.jpg]
The significance of past events will be made clear in the end.
[Edit: https://himekosutori.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/DesertTimeGate.jpg]
We made some changes to a major story battle, adding tougher enemies and a gate to assault. This battle features some important dialog that reframes some of the game's earlier events. The battle really wasn't working as we had hoped though, and we decided to tweak the AI, which now plays much more defensively when given walls and towers.
And in addition to all those changes, we also fixed and improved a lot that isn't quite as obvious:
- Target selection during battle is now much more random, especially during ranged attacks. This spreads damage out more randomly among party members, making it harder to lose a single character to the bad luck of being targeted a few times in a row.
- Normals on the pyramid materials were wrong, causing the gaps between to appear higher than the bricks. We fixed the normals so now the pyramids look right.
- Some earlier changes had stopped status effects from display properly. They were not playing, and not getting deleted, possibly contributing to performance issues and crashes. We fixed status effect popups and also stagger them slightly in an effort to not overwhelm the Flash player's memory allocation limits. The status effects popups now get cleared from memory when they're finished, which should improve performance and stability.
- Fixed several instances where materials were not responding to time-of-day lighting changes, mostly in the Northern Shores area.
- Fixed the condition for going through Misfortune Gate. Previously, the condition could not be met and there was no way to return to the Ittihad after the lava arch battle.
- Fixed the timing of autosaves, which were broken in several places when the save occurred between state changes, such as the transition from a town map to the world map.
- After the attack on Sunrise Falls some of the dialog was spoken by the wrong character.
- We previously changed the scale of hit point bars in combat, but did not modify the hit point bars of castle gates and other obstacles, causing them to look very thin and stretched. We updated obstacle hit point bars to match character hit point bars.
- Asterisks in the Change Class menu were meant to indicate which character classes had level-up cards waiting. A bug was causing the asterisks to appear if you leveled-up a mastered class that had no cards remaining. We have fixed that so that the asterisk does not appear unless the class really does have cards available.
- Localization was taking a long time because dialog and character names originally set in the editor needed to be copied by hand into localization files. We created scripts to copy information from the game files into config files that are much easier to work with. This allowed us to prepare all of the dialog and character names for localization and will simplify the localization of future additions to the game.
As you can see we've been very busy fixing and adding to the game. We're making steady progress now toward finishing the main quest. We'll continue uploading new patches as we finish new content and we hope to have the end of the main quest finished soon.