Splice The Hedgehog: RPG Fangame.

At risk of ruining the 777 postcount in the Fangames forum, I shall give a small update.

I talked big about porting the game over to a new engine, but I've been doing a lot of thinking lately during my downtime. I think that maybe I was a bit too quick to consider jumping ship to VX Ace. I know for a fact that some people still use 2k3 in this day and age and can make it work. Considering the fact that SpTH runs pretty much seamlessly on my old cruddy computer that's literally been held together with duct tape, I believe the problem is actually caused by my old harddrive. Though I have no conclusive evidence, 2k3 had been giving me issues since before I bought my new computer back in August. It had been gradually getting worse until it came down to this.

For now I'm going to keep my chin up and get back on track towards making SpTH Demo 2 a reality.
for those of you wondering about Demo 1, it was released about 10 years ago and i've long since lost the original download.



Back to the game itself, I am mostly working on bugfixes and ironing out issues. The attack on GFC is notoriously broken, as the introduction still lags and a lot of the enemies actually aren't updated to be affected by the Blue Shield power-up, rendering it borderline useless. I don't know how I flubbed that up, but now I'm going the extra mile and making sure that enemy encounters are fixed. Another update that I could have SWORN I added was the removal of back attacks. Directional encounters in this game are unfortunately stupidly broke. Too many times have I gotten surprised from something that should have counted as a normal encounter, or even an advantage. I've messed with it for a good long time before I finally said "screw it" and got rid of them. But apparently I only did it on one singular enemy and I can't figure out for the life of me which one it was. This is why you don't work late at night, kids.

Enemy encounters aside, there's been some long awaited progress towards the game's artwork.










Thanks again to Flame-Eliwood, everyone is very rapidly getting new menu icons. His art has improved so much that we're considering going back and redoing Splice a third time! But that's for later. We've officially covered every party member available from this demo, and then some!



Can I give an exact date for a release yet? No. But it's definitely progressing much faster than before, so I'll say again: Soon.

Good to hear that things are going strong! My compliments to Flame; those icons look amazing!

Small update of actual progress this time, I've decided that if I'm going fix the enemies I'm going to need to make all the other shields. I'm using one enemy as a base for all the others and just piling all the things I'll have added in the future or should have added already (field ability effects, shield collision, etc.) On one hand I may be getting ahead of myself since the only shield that's shown up is the regular Blue shield; not to mention that I haven't even figured out everyone else's field abilities. But on the other hand this will make my life so much easier later on.


That being said, I've gone ahead and actually created the different shields. Graphics notwithstanding, they all are in perfect working order against the enemies--but a couple of them function somewhat differently than I'd previously explained.

With the removal of directionals in encounters, the Fire Shield now runs on a timer instead of being destroyed by back attacks. It lasts about 60 seconds. Enemies will NOT be destroyed on contact, but will instead ALWAYS give you the initiative. Note: If I hadn't mentioned it before, jumping on enemies normally gives you the initiative. With the Fire Shield active, doing this will also grant you a nice buff upon entering battle. There is a special way to destroy enemies on the field and gain EXP with the Fire Shield active, however...

The Pure Shield is still relatively the same, but the enemy that breaks the shield will be destroyed along with it.

The other two shields' specialties aren't enemy related, so I haven't even touched them yet--and probably won't for some time.

I loved the image of Pearl it was very good.

Slowly but surely drawing closer to my goal. Just finished some very important bug testing and cleaned up some potential game-breaking glitches and sequence breaks you could pull off. (Using a field ability while jumping on a spring will enable you to walk through walls, for example.) There's still some more things I've gotta clean up before I'll feel comfortable releasing anything. But in the meantime, here's some small design updates for our two guest characters, Daz and Cymbeline!



Oldest to newest from left to right.
Daz' design is kind of the oddest one out, and that's saying something when we've got Splice for a main character! He's had a major problem of having too many colors, even before I gave him his SpTH outfit on the far left. You can't see it well here but he's got a green furred body with a light blue belly and dark blue legs. Later, Daz himself shot some ideas at me for a redesign, which brought us to the middle left one. From then on out I decided to start axing all the unnecessary colors and trying to make his hair easier to understand. Still has messy hair, but it's overall an improvement!



Oldest to newest from left to right.
In this case it's less of a redesign and more of "setting things right". Cymbeline's suffered inaccuracies since day 1 of spriting, from making her a blonde to leaving her with the generic female character's 3 bangs to the side. Her dress did change a little though, but overall it's nothing too major.

Spoiler:

I'm pretty pleased with the results, so far.

I've still been carrying on with the bugtests and sweeping through things I've overlooked and/or want to add. Mostly minor and visual things, such as changing the color of the message box for non dialogue related messages.. though I've fixed a major oversight with certain variables when Tab, Crystal and Sonic first join you.

Speaking of Crystal, Her sprites have undergone a major update! Both her's and Krysi's!



I can't say for sure whether or not her sprites will be ready for the demo, as it's not my main focus right now. But significant progress has been made just by finishing this one.

Speaking of major updates, Kyle's got an even bigger one!

Spoiler:

Once I've gotten things all set up, I'm gonna see just how much of Crystal I can update.

I love their designs, they look so cool!

It's been a bumpy road, and after a busy June I'm trying to get this train back on the rails. Play testing has been very unorthodox as I can only do some short-term tests on my main computer thanks to the broken music. But I'm going to try and go through the game one more time and properly pave a path towards the demo release.

That isn't to say I haven't made any sort of progress, however.






After you've been given the Leader Flag, you can activate it in certain areas. The main place is, of course, Splice's house. As you unlock more and more party members, the house will be rather full with friends. This is the replacement for the Party Switcher item. As of now this is the only way to change party members, but in the future there will be a quick select option available at every save point.


As for story progress, The Mystic Ruins is won't be finished in time for the demo but I have added the scene that comes before finding the first dungeon--just so you can follow the story.

Spoiler:

I haven't checked in on this thread for a really long time, but I just scrolled through the last couple of pages and I'm pleasantly surprised to see lots of progress, especially that the art is getting some really nice touchups and much-needed consistency amplification. Awesome work!

It's good to hear from you again, Phys. The art is a major and consistent part of the progress being made, though I'm sad to say that everything else isn't moving along quite as fast.