Monthly Archives: January 2020

Updating Old Work

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Something I’ve been planning to do for a while is to package all of my old Flash games into a single Steam app, for the purpose of long-term preservation. Technically this is easy enough – I just need to program a simple Adobe AIR app that can load Flash files, which is how most of my Steam games already work.

The hard part is figuring out how much I should change the games themselves.

I obviously need to remove music that I don’t have permission to use – and there’s a lot of that in my old games. I’ll aim to replace it with music that Phyrnna made around the same time as each game was made. I’ll also need to edit copyrighted characters that are a bit too obvious – like recoloring some of the Pokemon. And finally, users will expect a few Quality of Life features – mute button, fullscreen mode, Steam achievements – stuff that is essential now, but wasn’t at the time. I don’t think anyone will complain about QOL features.

But things get tricky in a few cases – is replacing silly text tips with more useful ones a QOL change, or is it censorship? What about replacing a ridiculous font that’s almost impossible to read? What if I want to keep the old font, but I don’t have it installed on my computer anymore, and can’t find the exact same one?

Is making the game easier a bad thing, even if it was universally panned for being too hard? (no one complained when I made EBF3 easier by adding QOL features and lowering the requirements for minigames)

What about really offensive and cringy content? Well… I guess I need to keep that in. Even the bad guy’s Swaztika armband may need to stay. That one AIDS joke too.

I’m interested to know what people think about all this – how much change is best? Maybe the bare minimum, plus some QOL, like in Epic Battle Fantasy 3?

I’m leaning towards that.

I started updating The Kitten Game, only to quickly realize that it loses a lot of charm if I update too many things. We’re talking about stuff I made 12 years ago. As Ronja said, “It’s good because it’s shit.”

It’s also less work if I don’t change much.

Updated Comment System

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So yesterday I updated the EBF5 beta on Steam to v2.0.7… but there’s a couple of big bugs in it that I need to fix ASAP. I’ll try to update it again in the next day or two, so it might not be worth playing until then. It’s getting close to completion, but each update has unwanted side effects!

In other news, I found some more options for this website!
• I changed the site comments to appear in order of newest first, which seems to make more sense than oldest first.
• I’ve disabled the need to enter a name and email when you comment – but it’s still useful if you want to be notified of a response.
• When making a comment there’s also an option to subscribe to the site mailing list.
• You now have the option to like comments! Too bad there’s no dislike button…
• I’ve added infinite scrolling to the main page, so older blog posts load automatically when you reach the bottom.

Let me know what you think of these new features!
I haven’t tested them much.

Maybe it’s time for me to update that very old header image, and figure out how to get those NoLegs emojis working again…

EBF5: Ace Medals

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Hey guys, I added some stars to your medals.

I made some changes to the EBF5 challenge modes, and the game should now be beatable with all of them on.
If the last 39 medals are acquired with all challenges, no cheats, and epic difficulty, then you’ll “Ace” the medal and get a star.

Apart from the extra condition of challenges, these are activated exactly the same as normal medals – you can cheat a bit by only turning on the challenges for boss fights, waiting until the boss rushes, and you can even grind for some of them. Beating the entire game on max difficulty is definitely not required, and would take you a very long time indeed.

But anyway, that’s just another thing you can keep yourself busy with. You don’t get anything other than a star, so don’t bother with this unless you like painful difficulty.

For anyone who’s already tried the challenge options, here’s some major changes I’ve made to them yesterday, coming soon in the next update:

• 1,2,3P modes: Mimic chest surprise attack disabled, all enemy status chances reduced
• 1,2P modes: foe HP reduced appropriately in bunker
• Limited foes to one counter-attack to player’s AOE – order of foes in battle can be exploited!
• Challenges that raise enemy stats don’t have full effect in the Battle Arena
• Changed Foes Attack First to not affect the first wave
• Death works normally with Combo Cap on
• Genesis now revives backup
• Less Player Resistance no longer affects status resistance
• Nerfed some Foe Remix arena battles
• Many damaging boss summons made slightly cheaper, many other summons improved somewhat
• Some overpowered foe counterattacks and stats nerfed