Changes and updates to the beta that *you* helped with!
almost 9 years ago
– Mon, Apr 03, 2017 at 12:45:36 PM
While the *Mystic Origins* quest was sort of incidental and never a planned part of Mystic Searches, it has been incredibly beneficial to get the feedback from everyone. Between our faithful Kickstarter backers, our supports on Steam, and our friends and NESdev and Nintendo Age, you guys have helped us isolate and eradicate a lot of bugs, and have helped us in finding ways to balance the game play a bit for a wide spectrum of users (those who are old NES pros and those for whom this will be their first NES experience).
I wanted to discuss a few bugs that were found and correct, and a few of the updates that were added for the cartridge version, and what will be considered the Mystic Origins final build (because back in those days, there was no such thing as DLC to patch fixes!). So here are the 10 changes to the beta that will appear on the Mystic Origins cartridge.
1) The biggest bug was found by a friend on the NES community who set out to break the game. And he did. There was a problem where if you just started mashing notes while in song mode, eventually, under the right conditions, all sorts of chaos would begin to happen - palettes flickering, sprites changing, randomly appearing on empty screens, etc. This has been corrected.
2) Friend of the project Jeffrey Whittenhagen streamed a playthrough and found a few tiles that were incorrectly *warp up* tiles...seemingly just normal background texture tiles caused the player to warp up and become stuck in the forest. These were fixed. On the same note, arguably the projects longest running fan (who I used to share ideas with on the schoolyard as an 8 year old kid, who has seen and been supportive of every iteration), Greg Toussaint, drew my attention to the fact that the forcefield at the end which was *supposed* to say something about a horrible hum instead gave the message from the beginning of the game, and that one of the rock tiles that was not meant to be stompable was stompable, leading to a hole that led the player down to get stuck in a wall! These were all just problems with our collision tables caused by user error on my part, nothing wrong with the underlying engine.
3) Friends at the Steam community were fairly adamant about the problem of feeling *stuck* against solid objects. Since this was a fairly common critique, I took this one seriously. This problem was two-fold. There was a problem where the player could be knocked back when hurt and end up slightly stuck on the edge pixel of a jumpable object (it wasn't a huge deal since you could jump to free yourself). Monsters had the same issue. This was fixed. The second part was more complex - supporters essentially wanted diagonal strafing. The concept was easy enough - when the player is pressed against a solid wall and presses diagonal, he should be able to move along the free axis. I had to rewrite a bit of the movement code for this to work, but now there is a *slow strafe* against solid walls while pressing diagonal.
4) At random, sometimes monsters would become stuck for an obscenely long time in their hurt state...just continue to move around the room flashing for a long time. This seemed to be caused by a strange, rogue bank switching error and has been fixed (or at least, endless testing hasn't reproduced the problem where it once was occurring rather regularly).
5) In the HUD, the crystal ball's flashing (when charged) used to be a very fast flicker and looked strange on some methods of play where the timing wasn't so regulated. We've changed it to become more of a strobe. We also changed so the four *corners* of the flashing crystal ball display the correct color. Neither of these things are functional, but make things a bit more aesthetically seamless.
6) Jumping monsters (jumping snails / forest devil creatures) would become stuck in jumpable objects sometimes. This is fixed. Now they bounce until they are no longer over the jumpable tile. And believe me, I already have some annoying rooms planned for your poor players that take advantage of that!
7) The snail monsters went through a bit of a re-write. There were two problems - one was a bug and one a preference. The bug happened if a new snail monster ever respawned on the screen...any snails in the process of digging or emerging would suddenly pop back up to on the surface, rather than continuing their dig or emerge action. This was yet another bank issue and has been fixed. The preference - their pop-up was random, and it was this way intentionally. However most players considered this unfair. So I took a page out of *Zelda*'s book. Now you can see a little disturbance where the monster will come up. This gives you more time to avoid it. What's fun is, with our stomp mechanic, you can also stomp it while it's still underground, which is oddly gratifying!
8) There was a conversation about respawn points for the player. Most players were very thankful to find a respawn point once they got to the forest, but hated that they couldn't then reset that respawn point back to near the start of the game. What I did to demonstrate the mechanic (and also to inject a little narrative) was to make a new screen with a fellow vagabond's tent and camp. In Mystic Searches, one of the disposable items will be a tent, which will allow you to set your own respawn points wherever and whenever you want (on most screens). This NPC in Mystic Origins offers you use of one of his tents that he's been considering bringing to market. Talking to him can set the respawn point there. So now, there are two potential respawn points that you can set back and forth at any time.
9) A lot of people didn't like that once you got through the swamp and faced the bogmen guards, you had to fight them again to get back to Dariav. I built a one-way back door to the swamp temple that leads to the sewers under Dariav to prevent the need to do this. Also, I have placed healing pools which cure poison inside the swamp temple, mostly to demonstrate the concept.
10) A lot of people wanted to actually see the exp system work. Now it does, for a single time increase. When you've gotten enough experience, your strength goes up by one. Again, this is mostly to demonstrate the concept.
