Category Archives: Epic Battle Fantasy 5

Thoughts About Mobile

6 Replies

Hey guys, it’s been a while since I’ve updated you.

I’ve made some progress on the monetization in Epic Battle Fantasy 5 on mobile. People had told me that no one likes compulsory ads, so the new plan is to make ads totally optional. At the end of each battle, you’ll have the option to watch an ad to get +25% more battle rewards, which means EXP, AP, and gold. I think this is a decent trade off, since you’ll only be tempted to watch ads after larger battles and bosses, and if you want to avoid them completely, it won’t take a lot of grinding to get those rewards back. Plus you have the option to simply play on a lower difficulty setting.

Anyway, the in-app purchases are likely staying as they were.
There’s 3 purchases, and they’re gonna be around $5 or $6 each:
• Ad removal and extra battle rewards
• DLC dungeons, including all the bosses, equips and other stuff within
• Custom Game Modes, Cheats/Challenges and Newgame+

So far I’ve got the in-app purchases working, ads almost done, and I’ve tried adding Google Play’s achievements, but so far I can’t get the user sign-in working, so I may or may not have those done when the game launches. I did spend a lot of time entering all of the achievements into Google’s system, so it would nice to get them working. I’m not sure how much mobile gamers care about their achievements though.

Overall the experience of developing for Android has been bleak. The developer dashboard interface is rubbish – everything is hard to find and counter-intuitive, every task takes more steps than it should, and none of the features are integrated with each other. Want to display ads? You’ll need to use a new dashboard and new credentials. Want targeted ads? You’ll need to ask the user for consent and write a privacy policy. You want to unlock achievements? You’ll need to use some new authentication method and new credentials. It basically feels like I need to make a new account and use a completely separate service for each feature!

Some of the requirements don’t make sense at all. They want icons to be 512×512 pixels, up to 1MB in size. And they want my developer page background to be in 4K resolution, but… also 1MB maximum. You have to fill in detailed questionaries for each new app you upload. Is it a news app? Is it a medical app? Does it contain ads? Describe in detail the violence and other mature content. You want to save your changes and come back later? You can’t! You have to fill in all of the details in one go or it’ll delete your progress. Want to enter achievement details on one page? Too bad – you’ll have to open a new tab for every single achievement!

I’ve heard from other developers that you never really get used to how awful it is, and that iOS is more or less equally bad. So I’ve still got that to look forward to.

Besides EBF5, I’ve also started porting EBF2. It’s a more complex game than EBF1, but I also know what to look out for when translating AS2 to AS3, so it should go quite smoothly.

So far porting my old games has earned me less than minimum wage, but it’s fun to work on smaller projects, and maybe it will pay off in the long term.

One of the things I’ve always envied about mobile games is how easy it is to show them to strangers or non-gamers. So I’m looking forward to having a decent portfolio of games I can show to pretty much anyone, anywhere. It’s just sad that Google and Apple are so awful to work with. But I’ll give them credit for recently reducing the cut of revenue they take from developers from 30% to 15%. That’s a nice change that will make a difference if these games ever take off and make some money.

Oh, and since people keep asking about the EBF Collection on PC, that’s been put on hold for a while. It’s a shame the timing worked out like this – it was almost finished. But since I got dragged into it, I want to finish all of the mobile stuff first, including iOS ports. Or maybe it won’t work out and I’ll return to PC sooner than expected.

EBF5 Mobile: Optimization Hell

3 Replies

Hey guys, there’s not been a lot of development news from me, as I’ve been working on super boring stuff. I made some changes to the battle animation system in EBF5 mobile so it would use less memory and stutter a bit less. Does it run better? A little bit. Was it worth the trouble? Probably not – I spent like two whole weeks on it.

At least I now know what kind of optimizations are worth doing when I eventually port my other Flash games to mobile. Getting rid of all filters and unnecessary animations, and using cacheAsBitmap as much as possible, are the main changes that make a huge difference and aren’t very hard to do. But trying to improve memory management to reduce garbage collector stutters is nightmare if a game was not designed with that in mind from the beginning. Hopefully my other games won’t suffer much from this anyway, since they’re not as big as EBF5.

I’m currently playing through EBF5 again and making sure all of the changes work correctly. I’m still changing puzzles and secrets to make them a bit easier for touch controls. Since the player doesn’t have a cursor, there needs to be other visual hints. I’ve ended up putting a lot more effort into this port than I originally planned, so I hope it pays off.

Anyway, I’m almost done and I should have a new beta out in a couple of days. Jump into the EBF Discord if you want to be notified and maybe get an invite.

EBF5: Tried and Tempered Mod

2 Replies

Hi Folks!

In addition to Tough Love, there’s another mod in development for EBF5 called Tried and Tempered (TnT) and the team working on it have recently released a bit of a playtest trailer as well as a list of new changes. The mod is still under development and will be receiving further updates with more content, but right now the team are looking for players to test and provide feedback on the newest update.

Here’s what the team have to say about the newest update to TnT

This update lays some groundwork for big future changes, but mostly focuses on making the Jotun and Neon Valkyrie fights more interesting.

• Large revamp of the Jotun fight. Manipulate the weather to your advantage and be on guard for his changed minions and interesting phases. Watch out, he’s feeling a bit vengeful in his targeting.
• Large revamp of the Neon Valkyrie fight. Face off against Lance’s new tricks and keep up with the brand new Soldering Turret (a new foe is a bit of a milestone, if I do say so myself). The soldering turret will be in more battles in the future, but for now it’s just here.
• Reduced OTK strength. You no longer keep limit charge between fights, and along with nerfs to normal attack unleashes and on-defend buffs, you might actually need to interact with bosses now.
• A few miscelaneous balance changes
• New mechanics to play around with, such as the Sunder status effect, general buff to “ignores buffs” effects, and a summon that applies Target to foes.
• Really cool auto-scan cheat rework. Seriously, turn it on. It doesn’t even prevent achieving medals anymore.

TnT is being worked on by TheJazMaster and a trusty team of areaofmobeus, Le, JSlayerXero, Hamstermer, GDA-G, The Purified, StuffyKnows, Axiss, Alan; a wild math enthusiast, and codyfun123. A chunk of the team frequent the EBF Discord server, which is where you can try out the mod using the patch files found in the #ebf-mod-archive, and chat about and provide feedback on it and other mods in the #ebf-mod-discussion channel.