Status on the First Demo.



Apologies for the silence as I've been sick for much of the las two weeks, but regardless I've managed to finish quite a lot of work. This is basically the milestones that I've completed and that still need my attention, so let's get to it.

Mapping and Tiling - 91% Done

Currently everything up to Chapter IV is done and I've completed much of the the mapping in Chapter V. For the first demo the entirety of Hajimari Island, the large island to the SW, is accessible alongside a few other islands and Kulturra City. Overall this should last the player quite a few hours as even though that I've "only" added five chapters for the demo, each chapter will have the player visit from between 5-8 areas, all designed in a fairly non-linear manner, and 1-2 cities.

The SS I'm using in the header is a shot of Titalo City, which is a mining town in the north of Hajimari Island. Originally the region around Titalo City was not supposed to have snow but I've changed it as I felt that making the player wait until they could access the NW island to catch Ice-Elemental Anima was a bit too much. One of the main complaints I've read about monster taming games is that some games make some monsters obtainable way too late which makes it kind of pointless to catch them when you pretty much have the entire game done, so I've been trying to make every monster catchable as soon as possible. 


Anima Stats - 100% Done 

Every single Anima has had their stat added to the game. I consider this milestone to be completely done. I won't need to work on this anymore until I begin working on Chapter VI. I will be tweaking the stats of the 340 Anima that are currently in-game for the sake of balance, so even though everything here is finalized, they're still subject to further balancing.

Innates - 98% Done

There will be a grand total of 114 Innates in the first demo. Currently all of them except two innates are fully implemented and functioning. The last two shouldn't take much time to program so this should be mostly done.

Trainers - 84% Done

Pretty much every trainer up until Chapter IV is done. I'll probably have to tweak their teams' levels once the playtesting phase begins but otherwise everything is finished.

Skills - 85% Done

Current goal for the first demo is to have at least 30 Skills for each element, so I'm roughly 510/600 done. The first demo will most certain have more than 600 Skills being that some Elements do indeed have more than 30 Skills but I want 30 per Element to be a minimum baseline so I can start designing learnsets. Once I'm done with this then I'll leave this alone for the remainder of the development cycle barring coding in signiture moves for new Anima, so consider this to be one of the ligthest categories for the progress of development.

Learnsets - 0% Done

As before, I plan on finalizing all skills first before designing learnsets so I don't have to return to add a skill to a previous learnset or whatnot.

Anima Sprites - 47% Done

Probably the most time-consuming work of them all. I basically need to finish a grand total of 340 sprites before the first demo is released and I'd say that I'm halfway there. The sprites are reflections rather than backsprites so this should allow me more flexibility in my schedule. For icons used in the party screen they're going to be small 15x16 pixel icons so they're the lightest work I'll have to do art-wise. 

Overworld Sprites - 60% Done

I've already finished all of the trainer sprites, so all that remains now are the storyline characters.  I'd say that this would mean that I still need to finish up roughly 12 overworld sprites. Maybe more as 12 is lowballing it.

Items - 0% Done

I've been leaving Items as one of the last things to do. Most of them are just generic medicine items that perform basic functions such as healing LP, non-volatile status, stamina, and more. Some key items will be added as well and a few charms that improve an Anima's performance in-battle, but other than that this should fill up fairly quickly.

Storyline - 20% Done

So far the only thing I've written was the prologue and the first chapter. The entire storyline is already planned out and in general it has vibes closer to a 90's JRPG rather than a monster tamer game where it's just a simplistic "Wake up, visit the local researcher, get your starter, defeat X important trainers, defeat the champion" or whatever.

Sidequests - 0% Done

This is basically going to be the very last thing that I'll finish before the demo is released. In general the side-quests will be something closer to Final Fantasy XII's Marks where it's basically a "go to the local Hunter's Guild, get a request, defeat a superpowered Anima, return for the reward." I don't plan on adding many sidequests until closer to endgame in order to prevent too much variance in the level curve.

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.