Category Archives: Epic Battle Fantasy 5

EBF5: Forgotton Ruins gif

Woop, here’s a mountainous area. I wish I had done more vertical areas in the game, there’s not a lot and I think they look pretty cool. (even though it’s all just an illusion, this map is completely flat logically)

I’ve named all of the areas now, and there’s 20 of them. That number is not a very useful measure of anything though, as they’re all different sizes and may or may not have a boss involved. But it sure *sounds* impressive at least.

Finally, I’m strongly considering making the monsters level up with the players, meaning they will always be around the same level. This will:
• Make grinding to beat fights mostly useless. (Though a tiny amount of grinding to get a certain skill might help)
• Make rushing through the game easier, as you can skip most of the fights without making the bosses harder.
• Allow playing through the optional parts in any order you like.
• Possibly make balancing much easier for me.

So overall it gives a lot more options in play styles, which I think is a good thing.
Final Fantasy 8 tried this, but they did it WRONG because if you wanted to min-max you would level up as little as possible until you got the best summons (which boost your stats at level up). EBF5 will have no such exploits.

Thoughts?

forgotten

Patreon is okay again!

(continuation of an earlier post)

Hey guys, after a lot of pushback, Patreon has decided not to change their fee system!
This is good news, as it means they will continue aggregating all of your pledges into one monthly payment, and you won’t get hit by transaction fees multiple times. So if you support 10 different people, you’ll only be hit with one fee, as before. (and the fee will continue to be invisible to you, being taken out from our end)

But basically, the smaller your monthly amount, the bigger proportion goes to fees. If you’re only giving a $1 or $2 in total on Patreon, it’s probably not worth using. Save up your money and give $10 after a year instead. No point in giving 35% of your pledge to PayPal or Credit Card companies. The main benefit of Patreon (in my opinion) is that you can make lots of micropayments together, as an efficient larger payment.

It’s also worth noting that protesting actually works, if you hit your opponent where it hurts: in PR and cashflow!

Anyhow, in EBF5 development news, the overworld map is complete now!
I’ve just got two of the premium dungeons left to do. After that I’ll finish off NPCs and sidequests, and then patrons will be able to test it all out. It would have been nice to get it done by Christmas, but that’s probably not going to happen. I’ll have many more animated gifs done before then though.

I suppose I may have to do my usual Christmas Steam key giveaway soon…

EBF5: 77% done

EBF5 is about 77% complete. It’s been roughly two whole years of full time development now.
I would have liked to be a bit further along by now, but at least the extra time is paying off and there’s a big jump in quality over the previous games. Everything is turning out better than I originally envisioned – I’m redoing stuff I planned on recycling, and generally putting a lot more effort into everything. It’s tiring, but hopefully will have been worth it.

And by some miracle EBF4 is still selling well enough to cover my living expenses… so huge thanks to everyone for that.

If I ever decide to work on a  3-year project ever again… please kill me.

Well actually, if EBF5 is successful… I’ll have to keep working on it for even longer after it’s finished, with all the leftover plans I’ve got saved for future updates.