So, first off, I'm sorry this is coming late. I was planning to write and prepare this post earlier, but university got a bit hectic and the demo needed working on, so I kinda put this off to deal with all of that stuff. But the good news: THE DEMO IS READY!!!
Now, some of you may have seen the little post on twitter that the demo was ready early on Wednesday. That was just a small demo that didn't have all of the spells of this current one or have a tutorial. It was really just so that there was something for the people that were seeing it on Wednesday would have something to download.
Additionally, I'm technically calling this a free-roam or gameplay demo because that's all it currently is; a demonstration of the basic gameplay, allowing the player to roam around. I mean, Lotus isn't even in it, so I can't really call it a demonstration of the actual full game.
So, about the demo. Each player starts off with a tutorial fight to give a basic idea of combat and levels up a bit. This should hopefully teach the basics of the combat system so that someone who isn't familiar with it will understand how it works. It also points out the spell book. However, items aren't demonstrated as they are currently in development.
After the fight, the player is given a quick tutorial in the overworld, then is free to roam around having random encounters. The demo doesn't have alot of the planned implementation that comes with leveling up, except for level points, which can be used to unlock more spells.
About the screen size, that's just the base size I've been working with so that I can test it. Please do not press the full screen button 'p' in the corner; the result is not pretty. I do have full screen functionality... but there's a problem. You see, I spent alot of time researching and experimenting on image renderers, text and image modes, and scaling, and how all of it affects the frame rate. I thought I had it working, but about a month ago I realized that there was a major issue. The text mode (how the text is drawn) that I use works well at the base size, but scales horribly and looks terrible at the full screen size. So I programmed it to switch which way it was drawing text depending on if the screen was full screen or not. Unfortunately, while the text mode that it switches to for full screen looks perfect, it is extremely heavy on the processing and kills the frame rate. Any time alot of text is drawn, the frame rate goes from 60 to 20 to 10 to 5. You see it for yourself if you press 'p' for full screen. I'm still working to solve that problem.
So, that's all for now. I apologize for this super late post; it's been kinda hectic lately. I'm currently working on preparing the first big cutscene for the real demo, but before that, I'm finishing up the items (which as of writing this are currently mostly working, they just have to be fully made). They should be in the next demo that I hope to release with the next post. But I won't really be working on it this weekend due to the upcoming Global Game Jam!
Well, I will write about the progress and the items in the next post.
Thank you for your support!
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