Author Archive

Improving Rewards After Battle

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We’ve also spent time refactoring how rewards are calculated and presented after battle.

In the past, reward handling was more loosely structured, which made it harder to cleanly display things like “before vs after” values or animate gains in a consistent way. As part of the refactor, we introduced clearer data structures to track original values and gained values separately.

That means gold, experience, and item drops are now handled in a way that makes it easy to:

  • Show exactly what changed after ...

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Reworking Items and Inventory

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Items have been rebuilt to be fully data-driven.

In earlier versions of the game, item behavior was often tied directly to code in ways that made it difficult to extend or safely modify. That worked early on, but as the number of items grew — including consumables, equipment, gemstones, quest items, and more — it became increasingly difficult to manage edge cases and keep behavior consistent across menus and battle.

We’ve refactored items so each one has a clear definition and validation ...

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Dungeon Art — Dragon Statues

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Dungeon Art — Dragon Statues

This week’s focus is dungeon decoration: dragon statues.

These come in multiple sizes, directions, damage states, and coverings like moss and snow.

These variations help make dungeons feel aged, abandoned, or environment-specific depending on where they appear.

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Boss Showcase — The Fates and Hecate

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Boss Showcase — The Fates and Hecate

This week we’re highlighting the Fates and Hecate.

The Fates were designed with a unique visual concept — partially obscured forms with a “void” beneath their robes, giving them an otherworldly presence.

Hecate builds on that idea, with additional elements like energy orbs and hidden arms that can emerge during battle.

These designs help differentiate major encounters from standard enemies and give boss fights a stronger identity.

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Making Auto-Battle Smarter

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Auto-battle is something many players rely on, especially for grinding or replaying content.

We’ve been refactoring the system so decisions are based on actual expected outcomes rather than simple rules.

That means:

  • Evaluating buffs and debuffs based on real impact

  • Considering probabilities of states applying

  • Choosing skills based on context instead of fixed priority

The goal isn’t to make auto-battle perfect — it’s to make it feel intelligent and consistent.

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Enemy Showcase — The Villain’s Army

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Enemy Showcase — The Villain’s Army

This week we’re showing the enemy units that make up the main villain’s army.

These enemies are designed to evolve visually across tiers — starting as standard soldiers and becoming more imposing with darker armor, red accents, and eventually boss-like variants.

One interesting detail is that different elements like cloaks and horns were designed modularly, allowing for mix-and-match variations.

This gives us flexibility to create variety without needing entirely new base designs for every encounter.

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Why the Refactor Took a Year

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One question we expect (and completely understand) is: why did the refactor take so long?

The short answer is scope.

Over time, Last Dream II grew into a large system with many interconnected parts — battle logic, targeting, states, menus, inventory, equipment, saves, maps, and more. Many of these systems worked, but they were tightly coupled. That made even small changes risky.

Instead of patching over issues, we chose to rebuild the foundation so systems are more isolated and predictable.

That meant rewriting large ...

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Reworking Treasure and Map Systems

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Treasure has also gone through a major refactor.

The older treasure system relied on a mix of global state and map-specific logic. That worked for a while, but it became hard to manage as the game added more treasure types, randomized rewards, mimic chests, blue chests, gold chests, dungeon phases, revisits, and roguelite-style progression.

The new treasure system tracks chest state more explicitly. Treasure can now be initialized deterministically, saved properly, restored when returning to maps, and resolved through cleaner reward logic.

We ...

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Building the World Tile by Tile

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Building the World Tile by Tile

his week’s art update focuses on tiles and autotiles.

Some of the most important art in an RPG is also the least glamorous: grass, dirt, roofs, walls, tall grass, plaster, wood, brick, log cabin walls, and other repeating tiles.

These assets have to do more than look good in isolation. They need to tile cleanly, repeat without obvious seams, work with auto-tile masks, and hold up when used across large maps.

Our artist has been updating and expanding many of these foundational environment ...

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New UI Icons for Last Dream II

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New UI Icons for Last Dream II

We’ve also been updating a large number of icons used throughout the game.

This includes main menu icons, battle action icons, item category icons, system icons, achievement icons, quest icons, settings icons, status effect icons, attribute icons, elemental icons, skill upgrade icons, and gemstone state icons.

These icons are small — usually 32 x 32 pixels — but they matter a lot. Players see them constantly, and strong icons make menus easier to read at a glance.

A good icon should communicate its ...

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