I couldn’t figure out an elegant way of moving EBF5 save files from PC to mobile… so here’s a password system.

Just email yourself the contents of the save file, copy and paste.

The password is around 50,000 characters long, so it’s a bit clunky, but it works both ways.

Hey guys, I’m still optimizing EBF5 for mobile. A big bottleneck is when targets in battle get hit – hundreds of lines of code crunch all of the stats, equips, status effects, elemental particle effects, and other variables, and then different animations are played – sometimes for 5 targets at once. This is a lot to happen on one frame, and usually isn’t too slow, but it often triggers garbage collection or throttles your device CPU for a few seconds afterwards to avoid overheating.

So I’ve added two new options to the game to lessen the resources used:

The “Disable Idle Animations” option now also disables “hit”, “big hit”, “evade”, “heal”, and “defend hit” animations, and replaces them with the target just flashing white. It doesn’t even look too bad.

There’s a new option to “Disable Multi-hits”, meaning that attacks that hit multiple times for no good reason, like Fire Storm, Star Blast, or Hyper Beam, now just hit once. This may make gameplay slightly different when it comes to status effects like Morale, but in the end it shouldn’t be very noticeable.

Hopefully those options get the game running smoother for more people.

Also, nobody asked for it, but I added the option to display a grid on the map, making hunting hidden items a bit easier! A lot of the really hidden items have already been made easier to find on mobile (such as adding visual hints where there were none in the PC version).

Hey guys, I’ve jumped through many of the hoops to put EBF5 on the Google Play Store!
This involved installing the latest version of the AIR SDK, the Android SDK, and an older version of the Java JDK (1.8), and with those tools I could finally compile EBF5 as an Android App Bundle file, which is Google’s new format, and will be required for all apps in a couple of months. I set up internal testing, so I’ve got a group of 60 users or so testing out the game on their devices. Setting up Google’s testing system was a pain, I almost wish that I went with my original plan of sideloading some APK files.

Anyway, so far the feedback has been promising. There’s a lot of little issues that I need to fix, but for most people the game is already playable. The performance seems perfect on higher-end tablets and gaming devices, but still stutters on average and below-average devices. I’m going to keep optimizing it for a while, but even if I had to leave it as it is, it’s passable. But this is one of the main reasons I want to go with some sort of try-before-you-buy payment system – there’s thousands of different Android devices, and the game is never gonna work on all of them, so I’d rather people can make sure that it runs well before purchasing anything. (Especially considering Google’s crap refund policy)

I’ll keep ya’ll updated, and I’ll open up testing to more users once the most common problems are fixed.

Hey guys. On Monday I started writing a blog about why I’ve been so unproductive this year, but it sounded really pathetic, so I immediately got back to work. The interface is almost done for the EBF5 mobile port – I’ve added boxes around all of the buttons to make them clearer for touch controls, everything’s been made larger, and the game is generally totally playable now. I even played around with the vibrate feature during big attacks, but I didn’t like it so I gave up on that.

I’ve started setting up the Google Play Store page for the game, and that’s where things get more complicated. There’s a lot of hoops to jump through to get the app approved, and to add features like ads, in-app purchases, achievements, and mayyyybe even cloud saving. It’s all very technical, but there’s a lot of documentation for me to read, and a lot of services I need to sign up for, and then I still gotta actually program and test the stuff. At least I can re-use the Steam trailer.

Oh, and I’ve only tested the game on my device so far. I’m sure there will be a lot of new problems on other devices.

Overall it’s pretty exciting though.