Author Archives: Matt Roszak

EBF Collection: Adventure Story

Hey guys, I’m currently working on more updates for Adventure Story.

Controller support is almost finished – you can even change the mapping of the buttons if you wish. Every spell is mapped to a different button, and you don’t need to use the spell hotkey system any more.

A “Zero” difficulty option has been added, which is much easier than Easy. I’ve been testing the “Extreme” difficulty option, and most levels are beatable, but the boss rush levels are probably impossible except for the most hardcore gamers.

And finally, I’m still adding some special abilities to equips, to make them more interesting and strategic. Obviously the Katana can now deflect bullets, and the Claymore can deflects rocks, etc.

That’s the fun stuff done. The boring stuff will include fixing some old bugs, such as the collision detection not working correctly if the game window is scaled. Not looking forward to that.

I’ve collected 139/150 Steam achievements for the EBF Collection – so that means the achievement system is working well, and the Steam overlay seems to be working correctly too (you can take screenshots and whatever else).

Cool Flash/AIR update!

The latest version of AIR/Flash for Desktop has enabled the option to turn off anti-aliasing!

This was a critical feature in the browser version of Flashplayer for improving performance, but for whatever lazy reason, Adobe never cared to include it in the Desktop version. Game devs have been asking Adobe for this feature for 10 years!

HARMAN, the new company which is managing AIR/Flash, added the feature immediately when asked about it.
Flash’s customer service has improved dramatically after its death!

I’m making this blog post to point out that porting Flash games to Desktop is trivially easy now.
The lack of the “LOW” and “MEDIUM” anti-aliasing options meant that Flash games on Desktop required twice the CPU resources compared to browsers, but now that’s no longer an issue. For my games, I had to use very awkward work-arounds to add these anti-aliasing options – it cost me a couple of weeks of work and frustration, and the games still have some bugs because of it.

Any developers following my footsteps will have a much easier job porting their games today.
(feel free to ask me for advice if you want)

Hopefully this doesn’t come too late to be useful!

Anyway, what this means for EBF5 is that it won’t need stupid workarounds to work correctly anymore.
In a future update, it could:
• Use “windowed fullscreen” mode in different resolutions – no need to change the monitor resolution with QRes.exe anymore. (This also makes it easy to add support for a bigger variety of resolutions)
• The “fullscreen”, “exit” and “save” features won’t time-out anymore, this is a bug that slower machines encounter.

There may be other advantages I haven’t noticed yet!

Epic Auto Pets

Me and my friends have been playing Super Auto Pets lately, so here’s some fanart.
I assumed it was a crappy mobile game at first, but it’s actually pretty deep, while being easy for beginners to jump into.

Oh, and I only realised afterwards that the game already has a sloth.

War in Ukraine

Hey guys, I’ve been quiet for a while. I couldn’t bring myself to post anything on social media when there’s a war going on so close to home. I’ve got relatives in Poland, Lithuania and Finland that are getting a bit nervous. I think it’s more important that people pay attention to the news rather than anything I’m working on.

I don’t think I even need to point out that war is bad – everyone loses. I hope that Putin is overthrown ASAP and that Ukrainians and Russians don’t suffer too many losses before then.

Since the UK government is doing nothing to help refugees (or even its own citizens), I figured I’d give my money to charity instead of paying taxes. I hope it goes to good use in Ukraine, Afghanistan, and other troubled regions.

I’ll get back to regular updates soon.



Back to work on the EBF Collection

Hey guys, I’m working on the Epic Battle Fantasy Collection again. This week I got Steam achievements for 6 of the games working – just 2 more to go. There’s a total of 150 achievements in all! The Steam Overlay works for most of the games too.

Besides achievements, I also need to add window and fullscreen options to the games, finish controller support in Adventure Story, and… that’ll be the features pretty much finished.

The EBF Collection will probably launch in Early Access on Steam – now that Flash doesn’t work in browsers any more, it’s hard for me to share the games with hundreds of testers, so this seems like the simplest way to get some feedback. But fear not: the EBF Collection will be 95% finished when it hits Early Access, so it won’t stay there long. Early Access has been working very well for the Android port of EBF5 – people who are impatient can play the game early with some bugs!

Speaking of which, the Android port of EBF5 is 99% finished, and will probably stay that way for a while. The main thing stopping it from being finished is the frequent crashes, which seem to be caused by audio playback issues in Flash/AIR on Android. I’ve sent the error reports to the Flash/AIR devs – they are aware of the problem and say it should be fixed in the next update. So that’s out of my control for now, let’s hope it goes well. If the crashes aren’t fixed, Google will punish me harshly for publishing a misbehaving app.

Anyway, keep an eye on those progress bars.