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I wrote an article about making the battle system. It’s too long to put here so I posted it in the forums. I don’t know if it’s interesting for anybody who didn’t make it so let me know.

http://johnwizard.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=887

Some of you will now know that the next Lilly and Sasha game is called The Nexus of Souls. If you haven’t completed CoTI yet, don’t worry, it’s not a spoiler. Andrew read something about ‘x’ sounds being good for titles plus Nexus is just a cool word to use.

Most of the storyboard has already been worked out. Even once CoTI was feature complete we kept getting new ideas so we wrote them down. Now we have a massive list of things that we can choose from to build the next game. It will be a shorter development cycle because we already have menus, battles and mouse done and that’s what I spent most of my time on for CoTI.

Now that all the scripts are done, I can’t wait to spend more time making exciting quests and new puzzles.

We’re also working on another game. Something very different. Will it be awesome? I dunno, probably.

I updated Lilly and Sasha today to fix a few small issues.

- Terry would fight you again.
- You could enter the farm house the wrong way and get a error.
- The code chest in Wilson’s Manor took your item off you even if it was the wrong one.
- There were strange looking black areas in the opening scene.

You can download the update if you want but it’s not required.

The only one of those that would cause any trouble is the Wilson’s Manor item thing. I don’t think it will affect many people but if you seem to be missing an item that you need, I can give it back to you. Just email me or post on the forums.

Oh yeah and you should probably ignore my previous post. Bad time to write on the blog.

Thanks for the votes and comments.

Edit: This beta test is finished now so we don’t need any more testers. Stay tuned for future beta tests.

Hi guys,

The game is getting  very close to the beta phase right now, so I thought it would be a good time to start the beta tester sign up. Hopefully there are enough of you still reading this blog for us to get a nice beta testing league going.

If you have a bit of spare time in the upcoming weeks and you’d be interested in helping us out by playing the game and reporting problems, please send an e-mail to dan@johnwizard.com. I’m only accepting people who played Dawn’s Light so email me from the email you used to buy Dawn’s Light.

Keep in mind that being a beta tester may ruin the experience for some players. You may get stuck multiple times and have to wait for a new version or you might have to replay areas a few times over. You might also see some spoilers from later parts of the game. If you think this would annoy you then you should wait a few weeks for the game to be released.

I better get back to my 100 pages of bugs that I have to fix before beta.

So we’ve been working hard for this last week getting Lilly and Sasha ready for beta testing. As expected, the game is taking longer than expected.

We’re getting closer every day but in the meantime I’ve made a quick preview video. Click on the video to watch it on youtube in higher resolution.

The colored light puzzles are my favorite. I’ve always wanted to do a puzzle like that but I wasn’t sure if it would work. The one in the video is the first one so it’s pretty easy.

I never ended up doing a preview of the new text system but you can see it in the video. It’s got a cool glowing effect behind the text that you might be able to see but it’s a lot clearer in the game. It also has the big text for yelling. The text system was inspired by Twilight Princess. It has really great text.

You’ll also notice the bottom bar that I stole from Aveyond. When I first played Lord of Twilight I knew I wanted to have that in my next game so thanks for that one Amanda. It also completes my goal of making the whole game playable with only one mouse button.

So I should get back to work now. I hope you enjoy the video.

We’re going into the home stretch now. This is the part where we make lists of everything that isn’t done yet. Then after the list is complete we find more things that aren’t done. Sometimes they are really big things that we somehow forgot about. Those are the very worst.

While we’re doing this I’m not going to write any blogs. We need to try to think as little as possible and just follow the list. The more zombie like we can be, the better. Zombies don’t get bored when they develop games which makes them very efficient.

The next blog I write will be the beta announcement so stay tuned if you’re interested in doing some testing.

Finally! I’ve been writing quest descriptions all day and they are finally done! So I can tell you that there are 149 “tasks” in Lilly and Sasha. Some are long, some are short and there are other things that don’t have associated tasks.

Doing jobs like this is very boring but it does feel like I’m getting a lot done. When I’m designing puzzles for example, I might come up with something good or I might just end up with nothing. At least with boring jobs you always get a sense of accomplishment.

It feels good to be working on these kind of jobs because it means the game isn’t too far from completion. On the other hand this is when you start to get a little nervous about the release. Will people love it? Will they hate it? Will they say that we just made an easy game to get good reviews? We’ll probably get a bit of each.

Like the menu system, the battle system is something that I always wanted to change while making Dawn’s Light. The Dawn’s Light battle was made up of a few different parts made by different people. Then I made many changes to make the battle system more interesting.

But it got too wild!

Things like the combos, the threat system and some of the trinkets wouldn’t have been possible without the changes I made. The problem was that I had to work around other people’s code which was not very fun. The built in RPG maker code was the worst. I just found it very awkward and I wished I could just do things my way.

Of course being a self taught programmer, my code is probably pretty awful to other people but it’s my code and it makes sense to me. When I started coding the battle system I quickly came to realize that even though the battle system was my code, there were many other bits and pieces that I needed that were not my code, so I changed them too.

Too much code

I ended up changing so much code that the only default code we’re using is the mapping and basic graphic and audio systems. It was probably not a smart move because it made Lilly and Sasha take longer to develop but at least we’ve got it for our future games. Although I’ll probably just write a new battle system for those because I have so many things I want to try.

I’m gonna break the chains!

For this battle system I wanted to break free of the chains that held us back on Dawn’s Light. Our new battle system has no such limits. It’s very different from Dawn’s Light and all other similar games for that matter. So it’s a bit of a risk. The goal is to make a battle system that is more streamlined for those who don’t like battles and more interesting for those who do.

Coming up next: I’ll say a little bit about the skills we’re going to have in the game.

So here’s our new series. It’s called Lilly and Sasha. The two main characters are also called Lilly and Sasha so that was a lucky coincidence.

After Dawn’s Light we thought about doing a sequel but we really didn’t leave ourselves anywhere to go. We’ve designed Lilly and Sasha to be a multi part series with a longer story to last 3 games.

The first game is probably called Curse of the Immortals. Lilly and Sasha: Curse of the Immortals is a pretty long name but you know…

Our focus for this series is overall game polish. So we want a more interesting story, better dungeon design, better and more varied puzzles, new menus, new battles and a new text system.

The new battle system is a little bit of an experiment so hopefully it will end up being a lot of fun.

This is Enoch, an apprentice of sorts.

I’m working on the battle system now so you’ll probably see some blogs about that shortly. It’s another thing that I’ve made from scratch especially for this game. It ended up being more work that I expected but I’ve come to expect that.