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.

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.