Hey guys, I extended all of the cutscenes in EBF4 to fit the new widescreen format. Since the art style is so cartoony, scaling and rearranging stuff was pretty simple to do.

I’ve also been quietly optimising how assets are loaded – maps and menus with a lot of icons loaded quite slowly the further into the game you got, and that hopefully won’t be the case any more.

The port is 33% finished so far.

Next up: updating the out-of-battle interface to suit mobile screens.

Hey guys, I’m making progress on the battle interface. It looks a lot more like EBF5 now! The 2nd image is the original layout, for comparison.

I guess I’ll include the option to change the UI window color, since that’s also a useful accessibility feature. The PC version won’t get most of the UI updates, as they are mainly for making the game play better on mobile.

Though the foe HP bars with more information could be helpful on PC too…

Hey guys. Porting games to mobile is a fairly in-depth but boring process, so it would be a waste not to do something fun in this time. I’m thinking of updating EBF4 in a similar way to what I did with the games in the Epic Battle Fantasy Collection – I’d like to add some more content that could have potentially existed at the time EBF4 was released.

So far, my ideas are to add another column of summons (8 more), and another column of weapons for each character (4 each). This way I won’t need to create any new graphics, and can mostly work with what already exists.

There’s a lot of existing weapons to choose from, from my earlier games and other work. So some fan favourites can be added, if you have any preferences. I think only Anna will need completely new weapons created for her.

For the summons, it would be cool to summon some more tough looking monsters like Golems, but also some with interesting buffs, such as the Spirit, who could revive the party. Let me know if you have any favourite monsters, or ideas for effects, that you believe should be represented.

As for other new content, I think other areas of the game, such as skills or flairs, are already quite full, and I don’t know how interesting any additions to those could be. New areas or monsters would be too big of a commitment.

Since I’m copying quite a lot of code from EBF5 for the mobile port, it’s tempting to copy some other aesthetic features too, but they may change the original vibe of EBF4. For example, I quite like the vocal sounds that NPCs make in EBF5, but I’m not sure everyone would like to see that in EBF4. I’m also tempted to copy the element and status effects icons from EBF5, since a lot of those were updated to be clearer on mobile screens. Changes like these would probably be welcomed by new players, but may feel weird to long-time fans.

As I mentioned in my previous post above – most of these new features can be added to the Steam version of the game too, after the mobile port is finished.

Let me know what you think.

Hey guys. The mobile version of Epic Battle Fantasy 4 is around 15% complete – most of the graphics have been updated to work on mobile devices. If you recall from the EBF5 port, this involves replacing any visual effects that use filters, which don’t work correctly on mobile, and also making the game fill up a 20:9 aspect ratio.

In the EBF5 port, this meant that some areas of the map had slightly different color schemes, as the color effects had to be reproduced with different methods. The EBF4 map didn’t play around with color effects very much, so you probably won’t notice many such changes. But you may notice battle graphics such as magic circles look a bit different with their alternative glow effects – and a few have been replaced entirely with different versions.

The aspect ratio change will be much more dramatic, as EBF4 was originally made in a 4:3 aspect ratio, and the battle menu also cut off the bottom of the stage. In this new version, in-battle animations should look a lot more impressive as they will fill almost twice as much screen area. Sometimes this is achieved by simply stretching or repositioning graphics, but some graphics have been expanded upon with new details. Battle backgrounds in particular are now much larger, as I’ve demonstrated a few posts ago.

I’m not promising anything for certain, but it’s quite possible to copy most of the aspect ratio changes to the Steam version of the game later. This would also include the removal of filters, so the game may run a bit smoother too.

Overall, there’s not as much work to do as in EBF5, due to EBF4 being a smaller scale game. But in a few ways, there’s more work, since EBF4 was not programmed with future updates in mind like EBF5 was, so a lot of the code is lazy.

To be continued…

Look at how wide these EBF4 backgrounds are now!
They’re gonna look pretty good on those super long phones.