AldenT

Now that you mention it, Lilac doing the cyclone on the ground is a pretty good substitute for hitting enemies quickly, especially with the fast energy regen. You should at least let Carol's wild kicks break blocks, though. She was affected more by the loss of the roll, so at least that could compensate some. Great job on the graphic updates, by the way!

It would be nice if those Greenlight haters stopped that. I think they're hating just to counter the overwhelming praise or something like that. Hopefully Freedom Planet will get past that kind of crowd. But say, regarding that goal, would the playthrough videos be anything

I have some programming skills, but I admit I'm rusty. I was practicing with Construct 1 and 2 since last year, but I didn't get far. My skills are more along the lines of C++ and Java, but I could adapt to MMF2 if I'm one of those people you're thinking about. It would be a nice way to get back in the game. What I'm more worried about is making a new engine, though. It's not that Sonic Worlds is bad or anything, but something tells me that going fully commercial without a personal engine is gonna cause a lot of trouble down the line. Imagine, engine limits spoiling several of the features promised for the future of Freedom Planet. Seriously, plenty of the glitches I found were because I tested those limits and I'm worried about that bringing down the whole thing because Sonic Worlds hasn't been fully understood. If Strife can't explain why some of the features worked out that way, what would that say about the integrity of the game as a whole? Things like the joypad support, for instance... would we really have to say Freedom Planet just has little help on that end? That just can't go on.

Thank you, Overbound. I don't know what all that was about, none of my business, but it really didn't need to take over a thread that had nothing to do with it. In any case, I'm glad I could pledge for Freedom Planet. Looking forward to that closed alpha a few months from now! Don't think I may be able to report bugs like I did in this topic but it's good enough to know I'll still be on the case. It's more fun than I thought, really. @TSS_Ty: Oh, that would explain it. I haven't gotten anything of that sort, but then I don't really use Steam much. I'd certainly vote for Freedom Planet but I guess they added this rule to ensure real costumers would vote.

It really is such an inspiration to watch Freedom Planet come so far, you know? What's more amazing is that it will get even better with time... here's hoping it can make it all the way! Though if you don't mind me asking, Strife, when would one get the closed beta? A friend helped me to pledge for that (and plenty more), can't say I'd start bug testing right away but I'd like to get on that soon. That's when it really counts, right?

You may want to re-add that border if possible. Switching between windowed and full-screen is still possible with Alt-Enter and being able to move the window should be a simple but nice benefit. To put that in perspective, I tried Street Fighter x MegaMan and it has similar benefits. I'm not sure if that was made in MMF2, but Freedom Planet gave me a nasty graphic error when running it while SFxMM was up, so maybe they share resources... and that game does have decent joypad support. It could be something worth looking into. Good luck with Greenlight, too! I'd vote but apparently I can't until I complete any transaction and I never really used Steam so I had no idea.

Wow, Kickstarter already reached its goal in ONE DAY! That's just... wow. . _ . Though if you don't mind me asking, Strife, what kind of sub-boss would be worth $1000? What if it was a smaller boss than the ones showing in the trailer?

So Milla won the poll! I knew it! 8D And the video... okay, wow, WHERE DO I START? It looks very well done, even taking time with jokes and everything. You guys totally hit it out of the park! X3 b But now I'm gonna have to take a loan or something, because that closed beta could come in real handy. Maybe even closed alpha... I mean, wow, $1000 for a boss? That is SO out of my reach. . _ . In any case, congrats on the Kickstarter plan! A month should be more than enough time to reach that goal.

By the way, right now, I got some more things to report. It's real quick this time, but I suppose I dumped most of today's info in my previous post. 83; In any case, here's what I got: - Clearing DV with a multi-level shield then playing again starts the player off with 4 keystones. What's more, getting the last one to activate the shield gives you all the hits you'd stored in your previous run. I haven't tested just how many hits it's possible to stack this way, but it could potentially trip up players that test DV with one girl then the other. - More noticeably, Carol's energy gauge reverts to the old design when she runs out of petals. For that matter, her energy gauge being red but her keystone slots being yellow seems a bit inconsistent. Either thing could stand out to anyone who plays Carol long enough. - The bike parking workaround might not be enough to stop all those floating bike glitches. I got this to happen by parking it on the grey block before the weight switch. I'm pretty sure it's possible to do it with any platform that can give way underneath the bike. It may be especially notable with the breakable blocks or the bridges near the end of DV. That's it for now. Hopefully these will be easy fixes just in time for Kickstarter like the ceiling thing.

That difficulty tweak would be a great experiment, especially at this point. It may just be that keystones don't play a big part in Dragon Valley, but could still factor into more advanced stages. If anything, if later levels have a certain element to define them, making certain enemies drop the proper keystones would reinforce the identity of each level AND make each effect more useful as they'd be more likely to appear when they matter. If you need more examples to borrow from, I can think of Super Mario World where one of the early features that stood out were colored "!" blocks. They had to be unlocked by reaching secret switches hat, once triggered, would spread the blocks all over the game world. You could potentially run into stages with hollow spaces that would only fill out after the correct switch was hit, hinting at the mystery to solve. And let's face it, Avalice will have its own mysteries, right? About elemental attacks, I'd recommend granting such properties to the characters themselves for the sake of identity. There's a good start in Lilac breathing for so long and swimming because she's a water dragon, but actually having a water element in her attacks could work to define her even more. Shields would be much more valuable in this case, to counter the weaknesses of characters that need them. Perhaps getting the character a shield of their element could give them a unique boost tailored to their strengths. Of course, if every attack became elemental, that could cause a problem unless some moves are deliberately left neutral. And then, without effects or new animations, it might be hard to tell players what's elemental and what's not. Really, there's just so much that could come from this that it could help to turn keystones and shield crystals into the central mechanic they seemed to be.

The thing about MegaMan's health system is that it's huge because of the loads of damage you take from all sorts of sources, most of which you can't get rid of before they have a chance to hurt you. On top of that, health pick-ups are relatively rare, health drops are random (so enemies aren't worth killing sometimes) and even when considering E-Tanks, there's always the fear of spikes and bottomless pits to worry about. In my experience, I find Megaman lends itself to too much farming in desperate situations because there are few checkpoints and it's very easy to die on the way back. Stages with early E-Tanks (or bolts, in games that have them) are a blessing for this, since you can just get them and kill yourself over and over, but I don't see this as a good quality for Freedom Planet. Perhaps the health system in Freedom Planet is a problem because enemies aren't aggressive enough. MegaMan mooks work because they have a specific role that becomes annoying in the right spots. Some are actually spaced in order to bust a player who gets predictable, which is itself possible to design because of the linear feel of the stages. Freedom Planet has some fairly linear design to it, so I think it could use more enemies that attack more quickly. DV already has pretty good examples with the green cannon enemies, especially the one placed right above the second set of handlebars. That guy will nail you if you just wait for the platform to come down, so it teaches you to not do that next time. If you're ever considering these changes but fear you might butcher the difficulty, just experiment with Hard mode. That would help to set a clear difference. By the way, great to hear about the update. Not sure when Kickstarter will really, well, start, but I hope to find you a bit more info before then.

Temporary shield effects? This could actually be better in the long run if they're built into the stage design, adding them right when they're needed. One of the older ideas you mentioned (that the shields are self-demonstrating when left alone) could be merged with that too, adding a decision between taking cover behind a permanent effect, or breaking it and using it yourself for a while. But from keystones? That might happen a bit too much for it to feel valuable. Shield crystals aren't common enough in DV as is so maybe that just needs more of them in place but if every keystone resulted in a shield effect (even a temporary one), they might as well be the standard for the game and that's not rewarding anymore. Frankly, shields as power-ups are better off removed from Freedom Planet. The effects are worth keeping but the idea of power-ups is another parallel haters could use to bash the game as a "Sonic clone". What better way to show it's not than using a new format for an old concept? I know I liked the Sonic shields until I realized the added effects made it that much more discouraging to get hit, even without the ring loss. All in all, I say go for it.

Okay, you got me with that! Yeah, I've been all over DV by now, seriously need to record a run sometime. 8D; Though this does confirm overlapping as the main form of damage calculation in Freedom Planet. Great to know it works against the players too, that kind of consistency is rare. Speaking from experience, loading a game with passive effects makes it harder to remember what a player can do and even more complicated to balance the difficulty around them. Players may or may not have them, keeping track of it all in a menu tends to break the pace of the main action and the more passives there are in a game, the less useful each of them tends to be. So they usually need to be stacked together for some mindless game-breaking combo and that's even worse for balance's sake so yeah, I say stick with actives. For that matter, of your listed ideas I think the third one is the best. I mean, what else would open a chest than a KEYstone? That would be an incentive for beating enemies and could expand on chests as a mechanic, since some chests may need specific keystones while others could change their contents based on what the player has on hand. Of course, that crystal booster sounds great too and even the second shaver thing could be useful if record unlocks like Carol's will be common in the full game. As for health, I think it's great to go with a small base value that increases as the adventure continues. MegaMan X's heart tanks are an amazing example of a steady boost in health while Super Mario Galaxy's approach as a temporary boost works because the star mushrooms appear in the right spots. Both examples build these into their stages so perhaps DV needs more shields and/or less petals to make health more valuable. There's another example but I'll get to that soon enough.

By the way, not really glitches but some things people might notice when playing: - If Lilac is going too fast in this section, she'll stick to the ceiling and run in the other direction, breaking up the flow of the moment. This doesn't happen to Carol, even on the bike, and she's unlockable so chances are players may run into this earlier than it seems. - It's strange that players can't leave Carol's bike on platforms. I understand it's because of the lack of physics and this is the workaround until then, but I predict people being forced to ride the bike when they meant to leave it behind. Personally, I hope this workaround doesn't make it to the final game. - Due to the shape of the second slope in the boulder chase, it's too easy to get behind the boulder and so the "chase" sorta inverts. This could be solved by sending several boulders at once (so it might be more of an avalanche) or simply changing the second slope so the player can't stall it. I honestly found it clever that letting the boulder run offscreen simply sends another one into the scene, but I don't know how the Kickstarter viewers might take that. I still need to check what's fixed and what's not in this update, but it's okay. It's still nice to see the project come so far.

I'm with Sereph on this one. With the new shield system, it was way too easy to do a no-damage run in Hard mode and I couldn't even keep track of how many hits the shield could take. What's more, getting a different shield from a keystone rather than an orb reset the hits of the previous shield, so all that build-up didn't amount to anything in the end. It's more discouraging than it sounds. Of course, making shields too easy to get would make the health redundant (in fact, I play in Hard mode because otherwise there's no real reason to dodge) so reducing the health of the player to compensate might throw people off. At this rate you might as well make shields the real portion of health if they're gonna be that important and their effects will be central to the gameplay. You could consider Super Mario Galaxy too. In that game, health was a simple 3 HP counter and a star mushroom added another 3. The effect disappeared as soon as those extra 3 HP were lost but otherwise it worked like real health. That made it an incentive to not get hit (to conserve it) and rewarding to find (since it's a bit too easy to die otherwise and it takes serious skill to avoid that in several late stages). In the end, perhaps the beef with the shields is that they're balanced around immunity in a game that doesn't really need it. I'm willing to believe the full game may have that many traps and/or more aggressive enemies to compensate, but from what's available here it's not really showing that. I know Dragon Valley's the first level and so it needs to start off lax, but the case is that it deals in occasional hits rather than constant assaults by enemies. Since there's so much health, you just take hits and go. Is it a fear of making the game too hard that caused this?