Journal

We’re continuing to develop and test the skills for the White Mage prologue, now with a focus on the White Mage’s skills (as opposed to her Templar companions). Our initial efforts have been one of the White Mage’s foundational skills – Heal. With Last Dream II, we’ve decided that we didn’t need separate “Cure” and “Heal” skills for the White Mage. In the past, “Cure” was the single target healing skill and “Heal” was the party-wide healing skill.

With the switch ...

As we continue to work on the White Mage’s prologue, our efforts have turned to the skill animations. We decided to focus on the Templar characters first – Baaduri, Gatsi, and Gaimi. We’re happy to report that we’ve now finished all of their skills including the animations and upgrades. The video shows the Holy Slash skill available to two of the Templar characters – the Templar Captain and Templar Knight. It’s a normal attack infused with Holy elemental which will ...

We’re continuing our game testing and we’ve now completed testing of the Coastal Cave – the first dungeon in the White Mage prologue. The mapping has been polished, all of the cutscenes are complete, all of the enemies are setup, the treasures have been placed, and the enemies have been rebalanced to make them a bit more challenging.

To improve the cutscenes, we created new functionality to split the party so that you can see all of the party members during ...

We have now completed our testing of the initial White Mage town – Galice. This means that it is fully functional and has been played through as part of our game testing. This includes all of the shops, NPCs, interactive events, and everything else needed to prepare for the first dungeon – the Coastal Cave. The only thing not included in Galice at the moment is the large port which will require some additional art before it can be mapped. ...

While testing the White Mage prologue, we realized that two-handed weapons were not fully implemented. To give some background, Last Dream II has two primary types of weapons for each character class:

1) Single-handed weapons which allows the offhand to be equipped with a defensive item

2) Two-handed weapons that take up both the primary hand and off-hand

During testing, we realized that two-handed weapons and offhand equipment (such as shields) could be equipped at the same time. We’ve now fixed this to ...

In our last post about the White Mage skill tree completion and the removal of Minor mage skill upgrades, we discussed balancing the Mage skill tree total SP cost with the Physical skill tree total SP cost. We found that even the removal of the Minor upgrades still left the total SP cost of the Mage skill tree approximately twice as high as that of the Physical skill trees. The simplest way to interpret this is that the physical classes ...

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 ...