Category Archives: Epic Battle Fantasy 5

EBF5 Mobile Progress etc

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Hey guys, I’ve been back to work on the mobile ports of EBF5.

I’ve fixed a lot of minor issues in EBF5 for Android, but still have more to go before I push out an update.
One fun addition is that I’ve made the slime minigame change theme based on seasonal events.

I’m making some progress on the common crashes – I’m helping the AIR/Flash developers debug some issues with the Android runtime. That will take some time, but someone’s definitely working on it. The important part is that the crashes aren’t my fault!

I’ve bought an iPhone 11, so I’m starting the process of porting my games to iOS. With some luck, it won’t take too long, and I can work on it alongside the Android crash issues.

The Epic Battle Fantasy Collection is pretty much finished, I doubt it will get any substantial updates from now on. Someday I may add Bullet Heaven 3 [Prototype] to it, but that’s a long time away, if it happens at all, with Ruffle still being a work-in-progress.

Finally, I’ve uploaded the full source files for Adventure Story, both the old web version, and the new Steam version, on my Patreon for any tier. You’ll need Flash/Animate to make any use of them, and can only use them for education or modding.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

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Steam JRPG Sale

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Hi Folks!

You can currently grab EBF5 for 35% off and EBF4 for 50% off in the Steam JRPG Sale until March 21 10AM Pacific.

In other news we’ve both been ill this week with covid, and are hopefully starting to get better soon. The weather is giving its best this weekend so we’re very happy to have the garden to spend some time outside as well and not just be locked up in the house. We’re keeping our fingers crossed we both make a full recovery, and are thankful for modern medicine and vaccines for keeping us from being at high risk. Stay safe out there!

Here’s some lovely fanart of the EBF5 gang from Mythia.

EBF5: Mobile “Screenshots”

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Hey guys, since the Android version of EBF5 is getting more and more promotion on the Google Play Store, I figured it was time to make some catchier “screenshots”. So here they are.

The Android version of the game still crashes a lot, but other than that it’s basically finished, so go check it out. It’s currently getting 2,000 downloads a day (not from my followers, that’s mostly from the Play Store), and if that continues, it’ll do very well!

Cool Flash/AIR update!

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The latest version of AIR/Flash for Desktop has enabled the option to turn off anti-aliasing!

This was a critical feature in the browser version of Flashplayer for improving performance, but for whatever lazy reason, Adobe never cared to include it in the Desktop version. Game devs have been asking Adobe for this feature for 10 years!

HARMAN, the new company which is managing AIR/Flash, added the feature immediately when asked about it.
Flash’s customer service has improved dramatically after its death!

I’m making this blog post to point out that porting Flash games to Desktop is trivially easy now.
The lack of the “LOW” and “MEDIUM” anti-aliasing options meant that Flash games on Desktop required twice the CPU resources compared to browsers, but now that’s no longer an issue. For my games, I had to use very awkward work-arounds to add these anti-aliasing options – it cost me a couple of weeks of work and frustration, and the games still have some bugs because of it.

Any developers following my footsteps will have a much easier job porting their games today.
(feel free to ask me for advice if you want)

Hopefully this doesn’t come too late to be useful!

Anyway, what this means for EBF5 is that it won’t need stupid workarounds to work correctly anymore.
In a future update, it could:
• Use “windowed fullscreen” mode in different resolutions – no need to change the monitor resolution with QRes.exe anymore. (This also makes it easy to add support for a bigger variety of resolutions)
• The “fullscreen”, “exit” and “save” features won’t time-out anymore, this is a bug that slower machines encounter.

There may be other advantages I haven’t noticed yet!