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One of the required elements for the Hunter’s Prologue first dungeon is animating the enemies. The above screenshot shows the Nepenthes – created by our very talented graphic artist (https://twitter.com/UncleBladey). The process of animating each enemy requires separating the enemies into their individual pieces – in this case that means each leaf, tentacle, and the body – so that we can move each piece separately.

At this point, we’ve created the “idle” animation which is used when ...

We’re excited to have finished off the introductory cutscene for the Hunter’s prologue. It focuses in the friendship between the young huntress, Atalanta, and the village elder, Ignatius. We don’t want to give away too much but we think it ties nicely with the Knight’s prologue. 

We’ve also wrapped up adding all of the treasures, hidden items, NPCs, and interactive environment for the village of Greenwater. With that complete, we’re transitioning to the first dungeon – the Southern Dryades Forest. There’s ...

After finishing up the Hunter’s roaming sprite, we’ve moved onto mapping the primary town in the Hunter’s prologue – Greenwater Village. This has required creation of new art, especially pine trees, log cabin walls, and some new plants unique to Greenwater and the surrounding areas. The exterior of Greenwater Village is now complete and we’re moving onto the building interiors and the Hunter’s prologue first dungeon – Southern Greenwater Forest.

We’re excited that the mapping is going quickly and we anticipate ...

This last week, our team met to test both the Knight and Gray Mage’s prologue. It was a very successful game testing session with many of the major game-breaking bugs having been fixed and a much more enjoyable experience with auto-saves enabling testers to lose little to no progress if/when major issues were encountered. There are, of course, still many bugs as shown above in the Item Menu screenshot which highlights a bug where items with zero quantity still briefly ...

One of the new improvements that we’ve added in Last Dream II is the enemy AI system which allows enemies to choose their actions based on predetermined conditions. We’ve barely scratched the surface so far, but it was a significant rewrite of the battle system source code to implement the framework to allow for the enemy AI. At this point, we’re only using the enemy AI in one place in the game (the boss of the Knight’s prologue), but it ...

We’re excited to let you know that we’ve wrapped up the Knight’s prologue! One of the major efforts that we had to complete before wrapping up the Knight’s prologue was the new Enemy AI system which allows for enemies to choose their actions based on the current battle conditions (e.g. if they are injured, if they are inflicted with a state, etc.). We’ll discuss the Enemy AI system in another post, but with it complete we were able to wrap ...

The Auto Battle menu is a replacement for the “Macros” of Last Dream I and World Unknown. “Macros” referred to a specific set of actions that each character would perform automatically each round of battle. With the transition to a dynamic time battle system, rounds of combat no longer have any meaning.

In the Auto Battle menu, each row refers to a set of actions for each party member. In the screenshot, Tiberius has selected Smite, Crassus has selected Defender, and ...

As part of our series of posts on battle system upgrades, we wanted to share the new “Guard” action which has been implemented (both in terms of mechanics and animations). Currently, “Guard” will reduce any damage by 50%; however, we have plans to give unique abilities to each character class whenever taunt is used. An example of such a unique ability is the Knight getting a weak “Taunt” (e.g. increased enemy targeting) when guarding.

In our next post, we’ll discuss the ...

As part of our battle system upgrade series, we wanted to share an update to the core battle system menu. Previous menus included the “Status” option which has now been made accessible at any time via a button mapping (“M” in this example) when the player is either selecting an option or targeting an enemy. The status menu allows checking on the detailed status of all party members and enemies at enemy type during the battle.

The new replacement action is ...