Category Archives: Epic Battle Fantasy 5

RIP Kongregate

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Hey guys, it’s the end of an era.

Kongregate.com is going into archive mode and no longer accepting new games. A lot of the main staff already left a while ago, but there was still some really good web games being published there, so I’m a bit surprised that it’s no longer working out for them. They were even doing the monthly cash prizes for games up until the end, which I appreciate. I guess now they’re gonna be focusing on publishing mobile games, and on their store, Kartridge.

When I published Epic Battle Fantasy 3 on Kongregate 10 years ago, it got a million plays in the first week, and eventually 11 million in total. I think that was the biggest long-term boost to my reputation and career. The people at Kongregate were a lot of fun to work with, especially Greg the badge guy, and I don’t think any indie game platform today has anywhere near the same influence. I’m glad I published Epic Battle Fantasy 5 on there while I still could – it’ll be one of the last games to ever get badges!

Personally, I’m gonna keep checking the site every once in a while. There’s still lots of fun badges that I’ve missed. Even when the Flashplayer plugin is disabled, there’s still browser extensions to get around that.

A lot of the popular Flash games I’m sure will eventually make their way onto other platforms like Steam, but there’s also preservation projects like BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint to keep these games alive.

Anyway, you should go have a browse through Kongregate’s badge categories. I’m sure you’ll find something fun to play every time you have an hour or two to spare.

EBF5: Maps fixed!

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I’ve finally finished fixing all of the map colors in the mobile version of EBF5. That took way longer than I would have liked, but all the maps and battle backgrounds now look as intended, with some of them having new color palettes.

Time to get back to optimization. The game still runs poorly, but it’s gradually getting better. The goal is to have it running smoothly on high-end devices, and running at a playable speed on weaker ones.

EBF5: New Palettes

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Hey guys, I’m still gradually fixing the map colors in the mobile version of EBF5. As you may recall, filters don’t work on mobile, and I often used them to change objects’ hues. So I’m going through all of the maps and using alternative methods of transforming colors. Most maps will end up looking the same, but sometimes I’ll have a bit of fun and try out some new colors, and below you can see an example of that.

Anyway, it’s a mostly tedious process, but I’m getting through it.

EBF5: Weird Maps

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I’m gradually improving the performance of EBF5 on mobile devices. It’s still noticeably laggy, but totally playable on higher-end devices. Hard to say exactly what causes the slowdowns, since the game was never designed for phones, and is not particularly optimized in any way. It’s going to take some time, and some trial and error.

Also… graphics filters aren’t supported by Flash in GPU mode on mobile, which is the mode I want to be using for graphics to render much faster. (even vector graphics are handled by the GPU on mobile – something that Flash on PC never did!)

It turns out that I used a LOT of filters for scenery hue changes. This is going to take some time to remedy – I’m gonna have to recolour a ton of scenery. Chances are I won’t bother making it identical to the PC version – some maps will look a little different, and others may have totally different colour schemes.

Here’s a tool I made if you want to see what the maps look like currently, it shows the maps with and without filters: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qch3i2w0gcodx7/map%20test.exe?dl=0