Category Archives: Epic Battle Fantasy Collection

EBF Collection: EBF2 Update

Hey guys, I’m currently in the process of updating EBF2. Unlike EBF1, there’s no copyrighted stuff to replace, so most of my effort is going into bug fixing. There’s a ton of fairly minor bugs – descriptions not being quite accurate, achievement conditions being unclear, skill effects not working, or foes not having the correct attributes. But there’s a few more serious bugs as well, such as enemy buffs never expiring, or some skills being completely inaccessible.

While fixing that stuff, I re-learned how the game worked, and extra changes started to creep in. I’ve balanced a few things – useless skills have been buffed a bit, particularly the ones that give Matt elemental resistance.

For those that don’t remember, there’s a limited number of skills that you can unlock in each playthrough of EBF2, and the ones available to you are based on your in-game actions. The Epic difficulty meta favours very defensive builds, so you’ll mostly be getting healing and defence upgrades. There’s a lot of wasted potential in the skills system when such an obvious strategy works so well.

So now I’m thinking – maybe I should just add some completely new skills to make the game feel fresh to replay. EBF1 has new graphics and music after all.

I think I’ll be expanding on the usefulness of offensive skills – giving them more tiers, and adding more passive attacks. And also adding more passive healing options besides Slime Bunny.

Is there anything in particular you’d like to see changed or upgraded?

EBF Collection: EBF1 done!

Hey guys, Epic Battle Fantasy 1 is ready for its Steam re-release!
But it’s gonna have to wait until the other games are ready before I publish it.

If you want to play this version of EBF1 a month or two early, throw $2 at me on Patreon to get the .swf and .exe files.

Here’s a list of changes:
• Many Pokemon, Lord Canti, Bob-omb, Mog and Catastrophe had their graphics and names changed for copyright reasons.
• New soundtrack added by Forger434, due to copyright reasons.
• Credits page updated, and you can now listen to the soundtrack there.
• Global volume controls added, and a mute option for music.
• Sound effect volume rebalanced – painfully loud sounds are much quieter now.
• Zero difficulty mode added, where foes have 60% of their original stats.
• Some minor bug fixes: incorrect descriptions fixed, Meta bosses correctly absorb attacks, and ghosts can use Death.
• Game speed and fullscreen options will be added once the EBF Collection launcher is ready.

EBF Collection: New Creatures

Hey guys, I’ve gotten back to work – on the Epic Battle Fantasy Collection!

As you may remember, I’m re-releasing 8 of my very old games on Steam, which involves censoring a lot of copyrighted stuff. So here’s some new creatures for Epic Battle Fantasy 1, which are definitely not Pokemon.

This is only the second-biggest change in EBF1, the first being that it’ll need a new soundtrack. More on that later.

Updating Old Work

Something I’ve been planning to do for a while is to package all of my old Flash games into a single Steam app, for the purpose of long-term preservation. Technically this is easy enough – I just need to program a simple Adobe AIR app that can load Flash files, which is how most of my Steam games already work.

The hard part is figuring out how much I should change the games themselves.

I obviously need to remove music that I don’t have permission to use – and there’s a lot of that in my old games. I’ll aim to replace it with music that Phyrnna made around the same time as each game was made. I’ll also need to edit copyrighted characters that are a bit too obvious – like recoloring some of the Pokemon. And finally, users will expect a few Quality of Life features – mute button, fullscreen mode, Steam achievements – stuff that is essential now, but wasn’t at the time. I don’t think anyone will complain about QOL features.

But things get tricky in a few cases – is replacing silly text tips with more useful ones a QOL change, or is it censorship? What about replacing a ridiculous font that’s almost impossible to read? What if I want to keep the old font, but I don’t have it installed on my computer anymore, and can’t find the exact same one?

Is making the game easier a bad thing, even if it was universally panned for being too hard? (no one complained when I made EBF3 easier by adding QOL features and lowering the requirements for minigames)

What about really offensive and cringy content? Well… I guess I need to keep that in. Even the bad guy’s Swaztika armband may need to stay. That one AIDS joke too.

I’m interested to know what people think about all this – how much change is best? Maybe the bare minimum, plus some QOL, like in Epic Battle Fantasy 3?

I’m leaning towards that.

I started updating The Kitten Game, only to quickly realize that it loses a lot of charm if I update too many things. We’re talking about stuff I made 12 years ago. As Ronja said, “It’s good because it’s shit.”

It’s also less work if I don’t change much.