Archive for 'Blog'

Completing the White Mage skill tree has been more challenging that the other classes we’ve worked on to this point because of the different structure of the skill upgrades. In an earlier post, we discussed how Mage skills would have both Major and Minor upgrades. After some careful consideration, we’ve decided that the Minor upgrades are overkill and that in order to balance the Physical class skill SP cost with that of the Mages, we needed to drop the Minor ...

It’s been a while since we posted about the class upgrades in Last Dream II. Midway through the Last Dream II, each class will have a major decision to make regarding which character class upgrade to path to choose. As opposed to Last Dream I where the class upgrade unlocked new skills but offered no choice, the Last Dream II class upgrade will be a major decision on how to shape each character, especially with regards to the skills available.

The ...

We’re working our way through the skill and state animations for the White Mage skills. We decided to start on the Null element skills:

• Null Fire
• Null Ice
• Null Lightning
• Null Wind
• Null Gamble
• Null All

Null Gamble is a new skill in the Last Dream series that is meant for desperate circumstances that gives a small chance of absorbing (e.g. healing) from certain element damage, but it’s random in terms of which element and whether it works or not. All the others should be self-explanatory and ...

The second dungeon of the White Mage prologue – Felton Swamp – has now been completed! Now that the Felton Swamp is complete, we’ll be returning to the Village of Felton which is largely complete except for mapping the interiors of a few buildings and adding the residents of the town. We hope to complete the Village of Felton this weekend and then all that will remain for the White Mage prologue is completing the final skill animations, mapping the ...

We’ve now completed the mapping and mechanics of the White Mage’s prologue first dungeon – the Coastal Cave! This is one of our more ambitious dungeons thus far and features tidal mechanics where you must avoid the high tide to avoid getting  washed back to the beginning of the cave. We also populated the area with numerous small animals such as crabs, fish, and seagulls. We’re slowly figuring out the most efficient way to create maps like this which will ...

We are continuing our effort to convert our draft menus into finalized designs. Our recent focus has been the Victory Aftermath menu which plays whenever the party is victorious in battle. It shows information such as EXP gained, SP gained, overdrive gained, and any enemy drops/gold.

The old design was purely functional and lacked style. It was also a bit cramped because it attempted to fit everything on a single screen which can be preferable when possible; however, in this case, ...

As our development team continues to play other classic RPGs for inspiration, we realized that a key missing element in the Last Dream II battle system was showing the probability of inflicting status effects. It can be frustrating not knowing what the probability to inflict a particular status effect is and whether you are wasting your time trying to paralyze, blind, or confuse a powerful enemy.

We have recently added a new heads-up display element to battle that will show the ...

While game testing, we found that changes in status effects during battle could be difficult for players to track. This is especially true of status effects that naturally have a chance to wear off at the beginning of each character’s turn.

This post shows a small video clip of the new status effect popup that we’ve added to battle to help track the addition and removal of status effects. The video shows the Knight inflicted with weakest variety of Blind (called ...

Our graphic artist (www.twitter.com/unclebladey) has created a beautiful original piece of art for our title screen. This piece is a so-called “Yggdrasil Celtic Knot” where the roots of the World Tree Yggdrasil interleave to form a variety of celtic knot patterns. The tree does have an important place in the Last Dream II storyline, but we’ll save that for a later time.

For now, please enjoy the Last Dream II title screen video. Have feedback? We’d love ...

We’ve compiled the results of our recent poll on whether you would prefer to see our team play-through a prologue and release it as a post or whether you’d prefer to wait until you can play-through yourself.

75% voted for waiting until you can play-through yourself, so that is what we shall do. This means that we will prioritize updating our menus (which are purely functional at this point) so that they are closer to their final versions before releasing you.

In ...