Splice The Hedgehog: RPG Fangame.

Progress has unfortunately been pretty slow; Of the 18 things I listed for myself to work on, I've only completed about 6 and 1/2 of them. Fortunately, today was much more productive, as I've begun work on finally overhauling the interior of two of the other stores in Greenflower City, the flower shop now called "Greenflourists", and the armor shop now called "Rob's Wears". These two shops have basically been a blight on the city, being such blatantly old maps using a bad and a purely RTP tileset respectively. This has also given me a chance to take another look at some more NPC designs.

This past week has been super busy for me, but I'm slowly but very surely making progress. Of the list of 18 things I've been working on (which grew to 19 by the way,) I'm down to the last 7 of them. I've made some other tweaks and fun stuff along the way.
The GFC Sewers open up shortcuts across the city (although at the moment only the western and central areas are available.)
I've replaced the food drops from the enemies in the GFC Attack sequence to regular synthesis items (which you can't really USE yet, but can be sold for some quick cash.)
I've finished making everyone you can get compatible with every type of Elemental Ring currently available (only exceptions being Splice with ice and both him and Speedy with fire, and Tab with healing.)

And as a bonus I made a really cool new piece of equipment.

Spoiler:

There's very little standing between me and a demo release, but everytime I turn around I get that itching feeling that I'm forgetting about something important. Turns out, this last time I was. I forgot to make any kind of battle sprites whatsoever for Tails, and he joins your party! Fortunately, he doesn't stay long enough to see any kind of battle so I got off lucky.

I'm gonna do one last sweep through everything and make sure that I haven't left any game-breaking bugs lying around. I've found a good number of (albeit less critical) bugs in the past couple weeks alone.

Well I suppose an update is in order.

Turns out I was forgetting way more things than I thought possible. I hadn't realized just HOW buggy and broken everything was. From sequence-breaking oversights to softlocking events and Crystal's game-crashing field ability being left in. Hoo boy. A big thanks to EllyTheDragon for bug testing for me. While the past few weeks have been slightly stressful I've managed to find the time to knock out a good portion of the issues--but there's still plenty left for me to work with.


On the bright side, some of these bugs got me thinking and I wound up making some new things to play around with in the future.

Spoiler:

Soon though. Soon it will be ready.

Well I kept you all waiting long enough for another update.

After a long time of...stuff happening, I finally managed to get my crap together long enough to create another bugtesting demo for EllytheDragon to help me with. I thought that this time it would be a relatively seamless run with only a few bugs and glitches left in.


I couldn't have been more wrong.

We found no less than forty issues to deal with; from simple oversights to legitimate, game-breaking problems. Skits softlocked the game, the journal was capable of breaking just about everything possible, jumping and field abilities were active during half the scenes out there causing potential to break things even further...hoo man it was a mess.

But nothing I can't handle. I've managed to fix just about everything that came up, including the extra 10 or so bugs that showed up while I was fixing the old ones.
Meanwhile, I've done some serious balancing since the first test run; from changing up the items and enemy drops to making certain battles and enemies a whole lot easier to deal with in the beginning. The attack on GFC is especially notorious for all of the above problems.



In the meantime, I've been doing some spriting for both characters and especially tilesets. Been coming up with concepts for new areas that'll appear far later in the game.

Spoiler:

I can't say when everything will be ready just yet, but we're really close now.

I'm kind of disappointed in the lack of progress this month, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised since the holiday rush kind of sucks the life out of anyone who has a job. Free time as well.

After crunching those past 40-something bugs I wound up finding yet another large batch of glitches--some of which seemed to have come out of nowhere as they weren't present during the last few bugtests--and others that make no sense as I specifically spent hours making sure said things don't happen and yet they happen anyway. Soooo...I've been slightly overwhelmed. I took a break from messing with bugfixes 'cause my creativity was crying out. "I don't wanna fix the same things over and over; I wanna work on something new!" So I went back and sprited for a bit.

Then I got sick when I was supposed to make a post on the 15th (Splice's Birthday) and it's kinda been up and down hill ever since. So unfortunately I don't have a lot to show.
But on the bright side, with the holiday season ending, I suddenly have a good chunk of free time that I plan to use catching up with stuff like this. Wish me luck!


At least, better luck than this schmuck

Happy new year!
I didn't get nearly as much done over the weekend as I planned. But I haven't been completely negligent. I've gotten started on a couple things I've been putting off for a while. First off, Violet's "Change Stance" move has been created.

Spoiler:

I may have mentioned it before, but Violet's abilities are going to be divided between two different stances, so that she'll be able to have animations for every skill she learns from other party members. That was the solution I came to, and I think overall it'll make her a very interesting character to handle in the long run. Seeing as I just coded the stance changes, I don't have any new sprites to fill in the part of the Defender stance, so I opted to use the old one to show the difference.


As for more relevant news, I've begun the next tutorial sequence.



With the Leader Flag obtainable, you'll be able to play as different party members and all the abilities they come with. These will be popping up all over to show each individual character's abilities as they come.

Ran into a minor roadblock when I realized I had required spriting to do if I'm to showcase Violet's abilities in this sequence.



Working on Violet's swimming animation. And yes her ability in question is swimming related; in fact she's one of the few characters to have more than one ability.

Working on multiple things recently. Not gonna bore you with the incredulous amounts of bugs I've had to fix over the past several months year. But here are some of the main things I've been doing since the last update in January.

Ice Physics and Splice's Passive Ability:

New Skits:

New Character Select:

Greenflower City Remake:

I think it's probably past time for a more formal update.

So, first of all, I finished that character select.

Spoiler:

That being said, the majority of the work that followed consisted of bug testing, bug fixing, and adding more skits. I expanded on Greenflower Zone a tad by making the Cat Chao Garden locked behind a side quest rather than being accessible from the start.

Spoiler:

The other things I've worked on are less interesting to talk about. I've been working on completely re-balancing everything after I fixed a game-breaking bug that stacked Splice's stats. Splice himself has had a slight overhaul with his twin-dagger style as well.
The next thing, or character rather, that I wanted to look at is Crystal. Her sprites are all incredibly outdated and she has a significant upgrade available to her once you reach Greenflower Zone. The aforementioned sidequest will introduce her second chao, Light, into the party.



Here's a bit of a before and after comparison of their sprites. Light acts as a permanent upgrade to Crystal, raising some of her stats and allowing her to use more chao related abilities.