Author Archives: Matt Roszak

Back to work on the EBF Collection

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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.

EBF5 Regional Pricing

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Hey guys.
I’ve adjusted the pricing of EBF5 on the Google Play Store so that it’s consistent with the pricing on Steam. The 3 DLCs ($6.66 or £5 each) now add up to the same price as the game on Steam ($20 or £15).

Steam and Google do regional pricing very differently. Google just does a simple currency conversion, where as Steam considers the purchasing power of different regions. So for example, Google’s automatic price in Russian Rubles was almost 5 times higher than Steam’s price – which seems ridiculous to me.

The new prices are live now, and if you already bought some DLC and feel ripped off by the price change, please contact me for a refund, or for some free DLC keys.

In other news, the EBF Discord server has got over 100 new emojis today, for a total of 250.
That’s a lot of emojis!

Steam Deck

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Hey guys, Valve sent me a cool present – a free Steam Deck for testing my games!

I played EBF5 a bit and it runs well enough, but is not particularly smooth, performance-wise. Which shouldn’t be too surprising as it doesn’t run great on most PCs either. EBF3 has lower requirements and seems to run better.

But the bigger issue is that the EBF games are designed for a mouse, and I wouldn’t want to play them with the Steam Deck’s track pads, which are quite similar to what the Steam Controller had. Maybe people who have practised a lot with the track pads will become quite comfortable using them, but so far that’s not me. The Steam Deck also has a touch screen, which you can use for the EBF games, but it’s still a bit clunky, especially since you can’t see tooltips this way. Controller support for the games would have been ideal, but I think it may be too late to be worth the effort at this point.

Bullet Heaven 2, on the other hand, runs great. It’s got the occasional stutter like it would on any PC, but it runs at a nice 60fps most of the time, and the controls are very comfortable. I think personally I’ll be playing a lot of 2D shoot-em-ups and platformers on the Steam Deck.

Sadly, I only received the middle model, so I can’t try out the anti-glare screen on the most expensive version (and we don’t have any sun in the UK at the moment anyway). It would have been fun to compare it to the Nintendo Switch screen, which is impossible to see on a sunny day. The Steam Deck screen seems to be about an inch bigger, which is cool.

As for hand comfort, it’s not quite as nice as an Xbox 360 or Xbone controller, or the Hori Switch controllers, but it’s not too far off. But that probably also depends on your hands.

Anyway, that’s my review for now. I’m not allowed to say much more at the moment.