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!
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!
Hey guys.
I’ve adjusted the pricing of EBF5 on the Google Play Store so that it’s consistent with the pricing on Steam. The 3 DLCs ($6.66 or £5 each) now add up to the same price as the game on Steam ($20 or £15).
Steam and Google do regional pricing very differently. Google just does a simple currency conversion, where as Steam considers the purchasing power of different regions. So for example, Google’s automatic price in Russian Rubles was almost 5 times higher than Steam’s price – which seems ridiculous to me.
The new prices are live now, and if you already bought some DLC and feel ripped off by the price change, please contact me for a refund, or for some free DLC keys.
In other news, the EBF Discord server has got over 100 new emojis today, for a total of 250.
That’s a lot of emojis!
Hey guys, Valve sent me a cool present – a free Steam Deck for testing my games!
I played EBF5 a bit and it runs well enough, but is not particularly smooth, performance-wise. Which shouldn’t be too surprising as it doesn’t run great on most PCs either. EBF3 has lower requirements and seems to run better.
But the bigger issue is that the EBF games are designed for a mouse, and I wouldn’t want to play them with the Steam Deck’s track pads, which are quite similar to what the Steam Controller had. Maybe people who have practised a lot with the track pads will become quite comfortable using them, but so far that’s not me. The Steam Deck also has a touch screen, which you can use for the EBF games, but it’s still a bit clunky, especially since you can’t see tooltips this way. Controller support for the games would have been ideal, but I think it may be too late to be worth the effort at this point.
Bullet Heaven 2, on the other hand, runs great. It’s got the occasional stutter like it would on any PC, but it runs at a nice 60fps most of the time, and the controls are very comfortable. I think personally I’ll be playing a lot of 2D shoot-em-ups and platformers on the Steam Deck.
Sadly, I only received the middle model, so I can’t try out the anti-glare screen on the most expensive version (and we don’t have any sun in the UK at the moment anyway). It would have been fun to compare it to the Nintendo Switch screen, which is impossible to see on a sunny day. The Steam Deck screen seems to be about an inch bigger, which is cool.
As for hand comfort, it’s not quite as nice as an Xbox 360 or Xbone controller, or the Hori Switch controllers, but it’s not too far off. But that probably also depends on your hands.
Anyway, that’s my review for now. I’m not allowed to say much more at the moment.
Hi Folks!
The Steam Lunar New Year Sale is now on and that means you can get Epic Battle Fantasy 5 for 30% off, as well as Epic Battle Fantasy 4 and Bullet Heaven 2 for 50% off until Feb 3 10AM Pacific.
Remember to check for the seasonal event in EBF5 to get extra fancy gear and the Firecrackers skill if you haven’t yet!
