A well Deserved Update 9/18/2009 by Ramza
Ramza The Creator	I figure I'll start by explaining my last news post a bit more. As of June 1st, 2009 I am no longer employed. I foretold this almost a full month before it occured (and no, it was not through my own fault that I was canned). That, in and of itself is pretty impressive, I have to say. Now, as for what I've been doing for the last 3 months: Been working on a horde toon in WoW (Shattertusk-Drenden). Started playing DDO, once it became free earlier this month. Many drunken stupors, too much to remember. And, last but not least, work on Vengeance! Frankly speaking, I don't see myself playing DDO much. It's basically like they stole their business model from Maple Story, but never borrowed the hypnotic area musics, or fast early levelling. Basically, nothing more than an mmo where you grind for 20 ranks (in four D&D levels) and then either be forced to pay them money to continue to level up, or grind dungeons until you find some little medal thing to level past 4. From what I've heard, it ain't easy to do. Anyways, with that out of the way, I have a lot of Vengeance progress to report. First of all, when I was bored of mapping, I decided to randomly code systems to be used far later in the game (this way when I actually get to that part of the game they'll be all set for me to use them). The Magic system for the game is about 80% of the way done. It is substantially different from the original game, so I will give a brief overview of it here: A mana stone is used to unlock a character's Magical abilities (not to teach them spells directly like in MC). Once a character has their magic unlocked they will begin to accumulate 'Essentia Points'. These points are used to buy spells, change elements and purchase skill upgrades. More on these in a sec. Before a character can use his EP, his base element must be set. Setting an element will make that character learn black magic of only that type from that point on. It also affects which skills may be raised through the training system. For 100 EP the base element can be changed. Any spells already learned will remain, and abilities already trained will also remain. The character will essentially drop one element to immediately learn a new one. Each element has two abilties that can be trained. Either HP or MP, and ATK DEF SPD and MAG. Each rank you put into an ability for that element will increase it's cost and effect. HP for example would cost 15 EP for rank 1, and would raise your HP by 73 or so for that rank. Rank 2 would raise it by roughly twice that amount for 30 EP. Rank 3 would raise it by three times that amount for 50. If you switch element to something else that has HP the rank will reset to the new element's level, so the cost would go down, but so would the effect. The ranks are saved, so switching between elements doesn't net you more HP at lower cost, either. EP are gained by moving around in maps that have enemies on them. They will also only be awarded on maps where the enemies pose a decent challenge. (no camping the meridian forest for hours). All enemies respawn, so it isn't easy to try to farm the points. All characters have a favored element and a nonfavored element. When a character is in his favored element, the spells will cost less EP to learn, if he's in a nonfavored one, they will cost more. There is no additional effect for this at this time. Multiple bchars and battle animations have been completed for Vance and Meagan, as well as the next few characters you meet up with as well. I'm holding off on finishing the spell learning system until I know the exact names of the spells, and the number of spells there will be. The whole system is very dynamic, it merges well with the rest of the cms shell. I'm quite proud of it, actually. I have also added a difficulty setting to the game as well. Some people were making complaints that the game was way too hard. The first boss in the Meridia Forest is a bit tricky, and despite leaving hints towards various ways to get strong enough to beat him (new gear in meridian stores, defensive harmony, etc), some people just don't have what it takes to beat the guy. So, for those people I have included an easy mode. Easy mode will only affect boss battles, it doesn't make them super easy, but it takes a lot of the high damage and "omg heal" moments down to a few. It also lowers the boss monster's attack power and their HP. This is to make the game more appealing to those who don't like pulling their own hair out while playing a good rpg. I still advise you to try to play the game on normal mode before switching to easy mode. Why make the game easier if you don't have to? On that note, Alucard hooked me up with a hacked version of rm2k3 which removes the title screen, as well as some other handy features. There is now a title screen menu, as well as some new splash screens before it. Also before starting a new game it will ask you to set the difficulty (which can also be changed in the cms shell for future reference). All in all, like I had said in the previous update, a few days of good hard work on the game should see a second demo released soon. I'm not gonna give you a good deadline, since I'm never any good at meeting them anyway, but keep your eyes peeled and it'll be here before you know it. I've also uploaded some new screenshots to tantalize you with the new systems. I even made a video of how they work in action. You can find it in the downloads section. Enjoy! ~Ramza