Archive for 'Blog'

Generating a video game world requires a multiple of colorful non-playable characters (NPCs). These NPCs should be interesting to the player and offer useful information or potential rewards. Most of all, NPCs should enhance the feeling that the game world has been “lived in.”

Last Dream 2 is the home to over a thousand NPCs, including this Stagecoach scene our team just wrote with three NPCs. What do you think?

1. Stagecoach Guard 1 – Thieves in these parts are tricky indeed. ...

We’ve been working on implementing the fishing mini-game into Last Dream II. You can see a screenshot of the current state above. We hope that we’ll soon be able to share with a video but the mechanics are still a bit buggy – this is the first time that we’ve utilized the physics engine in Godot and we’re still learning how to switch physics environments and override object physics so that everything works properly.

Currently, you can cast your hook into ...

After numerous playthroughs of the four completed character prologues, we have now completed our balancing. As discussed in a previous post, each completed character prologue (White Mage, Gray Mage, Knight, and Hunter) has a different number of playable characters and that number of characters changes throughout the prologue in all cases except for the Gray Mage who remains solo throughout.

With a dynamic number of characters, balancing was more challenging than usual because enemy strengths could not be evenly maintained across ...

During our game testing, we found one change that we made from Last Dream I / World Unknown wasn’t holding up as well as we thought. In Last Dream II, we had originally planned to separate monster remains into two types: common and rare. Common remains would only be utilized for earning gold and would have no other utility (e.g. not useful in synthesis). The other types of remains, rare remains, would be more valuable and you could sell them ...

We’re happy to announce that all of the content for the White Mage prologue has now been completed! The White Mage prologue is the largest of the four that have been completed with two unique towns/villages and two dungeons along with a full complement of party members. Our next step is to balance all of the 4 completed prologues in terms of difficulty. One of the biggest challenges in balancing the various prologues is the fact that each prologue completed ...

The last mapping for the White Mage prologue – Galice Port – has now been completed. It’s taken a while because the port art such as the docks, boats, ship, etc. all had to be created from scratch. Now that this is complete, we’ll be doing extensive game testing of the White Mage prologue including improving the balancing.

We hope to be able to report soon that the White Mage prologue is complete which will mark the 4th prologue complete and ...

One of the important subset of skills for the White Mage are those that boost defensive attributes. The White Mage can increase one of those defensive attributes – dexterity (DEXT) – with a skill called Invisible. In prior Last Dream games, there were two separate attributes called “Accuracy” and “Agility” that controlled the offensive and defensive aspects of hit chance for an attack, respectively. In Last Dream II, we’ve combined these two separate attributes into a single attribute called Dexterity. 

So ...

The White Mage’s single attack skill is Holy which allows her to deal significant damage to the undead. We hope to highlight its utility by making all of the enemies in the first dungeon undead. In the video, you can see the White Mage decimating an Undead Toad with her Holy magic.

One of the great benefits of switching to the Godot game engine has been the ability to use shaders. With the White Mage’s Holy skill, we’re able to use ...

As we continue through the White Mage skill animations, we decided that it would be better to avoid having two separate skills for a single ally status cure and a party-wide status cure. In the original Last Dream, Bright was the single ally cure for Blind and Flash was the party-wide cure for Blind. In Last Dream II, similar to what we’ve done with combining Cure and Heal into a single skill (Heal), we have decided to combine Bright and ...