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Maniafig219~1Y
Hooray, AFC!!

There's various things that need tweaking, and some actual bugs that definitely need fixing. I'll make a list!

-Architecture: A frequent thing I ran into with people I collaborated with when making a quest is how some tilesets have a very sporadic set of architecture. For example, you can't put skeletons in temple rooms, indoors or forest areas. There's a lot of good architecture that's limited to specific rooms.

-Mhandisi Men & Women have functional sprites, but unfinished customization

-Varnyn Men& Women have customization, but no functional sprites and aren't implemented

-No Poshgoblins, humbug!

-Dragons don't have functional battle animations, otherwise functional

-There's a battle bug where casting a status spell against an entire party fails if one of the targets isn't an applicable target, like if you cast Dragonblade on a party where one person had Dragonblade but two don't, it just fails on them all.

-The Sensibly AI doesn't function well with AoE abilities

-A missing Action in Conversations that makes an NPC "Face [North/South/East/West]" would be useful

-There's probably a metric ton of problems with Become Player and Transform! I know that Transform has an issue where the character's name changes, but the dialogue portrait doesn't.

-An action to play a VFX and a soundbank for VFX would be nice to have for cutscenes. Spellflashes can only do so much! [Spellflash Lionblade is useful for suggesting BLOOD, to my frequent and bemused use.]

-I mentioned this in the previous blog, but there's an issue where you talk with an NPC with split dialogue in a plot state, then talk to them in a later plot state again and if they have a new dialogue in this other plot state, it's buggy and doesn't play the dialogue correctly.

-Saving and loading resets all splits in general, which can easily break quests or make them unwinnable.

-It'd be nice if you put in some of the Music you have on your Bandcamp that's not in the game.

-There's one really annoying and gamebreaking bug where if you don't properly drag an entity like an NPC into a conversation, it completely bricks the quest, and if you save over it, the quest's basically permanently broken and untestable, editable or playable! Meaning someone has to constantly test a quest to see if it's not broken and save, and never save before testing...

-We got one bug in our collaborative quest where the player character isn't the player character. I don't know how or why that happened, I only know that it happened, somehow.

-Sometimes cutscenes kinda get stuck or hang on a black screen if too many actions are queued up sequentially, I think.

-Did you know you can equip someone with an item, then change that item manually and they'd be equipped with impossible things?! You can equip armor in the sword slot. Or a key! Or a Consumable in the Spells slot! That last one actually works, too!!

You can see a lot of these bugs in the Go North quest I sent you! That quest also in general just has a lot of content and editor trickery and doing things in ways you probably didn't intend.

Clarence: Yes
AFC: Yes
Taming Dreams: Yes
Chamaeleon: Yes
Raider: Yes
Raider Zero: Yes
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Tobias 1099~1Y
Thanks for the specific things I can look into... though there are more than I thought, so that's quite disheartening. I don't really want to get back into developing AFC again, since it's been so long since I worked on it - and with Flash code in general - and it'd take too long to figure things out and then to actually fix them. Kind of like the thought of having to do an exam tomorrow for a uni course from 5 years ago where I've forgotten most of the content and my mind's in a completely different place, or something.

I'd much rather tidy it up to a point where any overt issues are fixed (one you didn't mention is that a couple of equipment items I made for Caoimhe don't exist for men, which are broken in a way you can see easily if they're randomly assigned to characters on the title screen), get it out of the way, then work on the 3D Dreamons thing, which I could maybe convert into (or at least treat as) some kind of 'AFC 2' or something.

I also wonder how many of these issues arise from straying too far from the tool's intended functionality. I suspect that any game or tool that allows player customisation breaks if pushed way beyond what the developers intended (kind of like how in Skyrim you can forge equipment that boosts damage by 154245636% or whatever while only using valid mechanics) because it's just not feasible to accommodate every wild idea players might have... unless you're making something like Dwarf Fortress which is all about having something for every possible eventuality, though things like that take years to make, and I don't personally have any interest in making such a thing anyway.

Regarding some of the specific things you mentioned:

- If I were to make the game again, architecture wouldn't be tileset-dependent; I've been thinking a lot with Dreamons about going about this in a much better way from the start, since it's pretty much impossible to change once things are made with the current system. At most I could copy some existing architecture pieces (eg skeletons) into some other tilesets where they might be needed most, but even then I'm not sure whether that's actually possible since I've not worked with the code in so long.

- Re Mhandisi and Varnyn/Sindrels, I don't know which version you have, but in the one I've been working with, the latter two races are already removed and I haven't noticed any obvious issues with the Mhandisi. Is it just a lack of options, or are they actually broken in some way?

- I don't want to add any other creatures at this point. I can't even remember how to draw vector art in Flash! I'm concerned about the two broken equipment pieces for this reason, and will likely just remove one (Travel Coat?) and... try to figure out something for the other (which is necessary to include for the Caoimhe quest).

- I also can't remember how to animate in Flash, so I don't know what to do about dragons.

- I could at the very least look into how I might add a Face [direction] action, but with the Transform and Become Player ones, if they're that badly broken I'd rather just remove them.

- I definitely won't be adding a VFX action at this point for this. Things of that magnitude would have to wait for Dreamons/AFC 2/whatever.

- I'm not looking forward to investigating the split issue, but it seems like an important one so I'll at least try.

- I listened to the soundtrack - including extra music - while working on this the other day and wondered whether some pieces were finished enough to include in the game. I'll have to see if I can figure out how, though; I will only if it's not too difficult.

- You said:

"There's one really annoying and gamebreaking bug where if you don't properly drag an entity like an NPC into a conversation, it completely bricks the quest, and if you save over it, the quest's basically permanently broken and untestable, editable or playable!"

This one's concerning, but I also don't know exactly what you mean! What specifically would I have to do to reproduce it? Do you mean if you let go in the wrong place or something? Is there something you have to be hovering over for the issue to happen?

- Under what circumstances would you even want a long chain of conversation actions? That's the sort of thing I'm considering 'pushing the engine beyond intended limits' though and won't be looking into.

- Does that item issue specifically apply to custom items, so for example you'd create one with a base item of a weapon, equip it, then change the base item? That should have a fairly straightforward fix... if I were familiar with the code, but I'm not, so I'm wondering whether I can do anything about it at this point. I suppose with things like that, though, it's not as if they disturb 'normal play' in an annoying way; if you break something by doing that, it was basically your own fault!

Now hopefull I'll remember to check back on this when it comes time to fixing things...
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Maniafig219~1Y
How silly, I forgot about those two broken pieces of equipment! Despite them constantly appearing on the literal main menu like you said! In the worst case you could maybe just copy over the black robe look if a man equips the Sorcerous Robes. Maybe the same for the Travel Coat and Painter Smock, replaced with the Brown Tunic and Green Tunic respectively, since I think those are also broken for Men.

Mhandisi are functional, but IIRC things like hair colour changing don't work properly on their sprites, and in my version the Mhandisi Man afro and bald hairdos have their associated sprites inverted. Varnyn also aren't in my version, but I am aware of their general existence! They have funny facial customization options.

Become Player and Transform still mostly work if someone's not trying anything too complex, so I don't think they need to be deleted, I think they're just easy to mess things up with if someone was making a complex quest. I know someone actually tried making a quest where you can choose your protagonist using those actions!

I'm having a hard time reproducing the bug, I'll need to get back to you about it later when I figure it out. It's the biggest hurdle in the game right now, I'd say!

Our quest is full of parts where there's just a chunk of actions! That's because we liked adding ~cinematic flair~ to our quests, which is how we got stuff like using the dialogue system for:
-Dance battles
-Anime morph sequences
-Card game trials
-Platforming
-Gratuitous dice rolling
-Just a whole lot of characters walking around and facing each other in general

Here's an example of a scene where two characters fuse into one: [LINK]

Or just some of these cutscenes in art quest [I still like this whole sequence!]:
[LINK]

The 'bug' [it's more of an exploit] only works with custom items, and it doesn't exactly break anything. Something similar that's possible is putting invisible signs on something and then changing the sign to a door, or a waypoint, letting you put doors in objects like trees [treehollows!!] or warp people into architecture.

There's a whole other bunch of tricks like that which don't break anything but aren't intended either. Someone else figured out they could use the quest state to add branching and unbranching paths into a quest, for example! I think it's not how robust the system actually is, despite the simple uses you probably had in mind for them. That's half the fun of the engine for me!
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