Author Archive

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 ...

As part of the battle system upgrades for the Knight’s prologue, we have implemented “unconscious” animations Tiberius (the Knight), Marcus, and Crassus. We sometimes refer to this animation as the “death” animation for simplicity, since the items to restore from this state are called Resurrection Elixirs.

In the battle screenshot, both Marcus and Crassus have been reduced to 0 HP and are “dead” and have switch to the “death” animation. We have also implemented and tested “Resurrection Elixirs” that will restore ...

As part of the battle system upgrades for the Knight’s prologue, the injured animations for Tiberius (the Knight), Marcus, and Crassus have all been created. This animation overrides the default “idle” animation whenever a party member is reduced below 25% of their Max HP. In the battle screenshot, both Marcus and Crassus are severely injured and are showing the injured animation.

We hope that the injured animation will be another helpful indicator to players to heal their injured party members.

As part of the battle system upgrade for the Knight’s prologue, the poison state animation (and appropriate mechanics for the slow loss of HP each turn) were implemented. The battle screenshot shows Crassus inflicted with poison due to the Black Slug’s Toxic Slime attack.

Like other status effects in Last Dream II, poison comes in multiple tiers that increase in severity as you delve deeper into the game. Poison now properly reduces HP in battle whenever a character gets their action ...