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Progress Report

0.59 is out!

We've just uploaded a new build to our testing branch. This build adds in the new skill tree, which allows Pan to use the points obtained from mastering cards to become stronger.

New players (or players using the revert saves option) will start with at least 2 mastery points so they can obtain the Kung Punch move. Training with Sensei will allow you to obtain mastery points using the Hiragana character set.

Upcoming features include:
Display settings for vocabulary during combat. Swtich between Romanji (english) and Hiragana/Katakana readings, and enable or disable furigana (the characters above the Kanji which tell you how it is read).
Katakana, Kanji and unmastered card training modes with Sensei.
Story mode

Progress Report

Build 0.58 is out.

Another couple of weeks has gone by, and we have a new build uploaded for the last round of testing.

Here's the changelog:

New features:
11 new items- Enemies and chests now have their own unique loot
Enemy attack damage is now randomized from a range of values
Currency will now be displayed in the top left side of the screen while in exploration mode
Inventory can now be accessed while out of combat in exploration mode by using the attack/defense key (default q/e)
Pan's health bar will stay up while in exploration mode

Bug Fixes:
Fixed the PO Katakana card, it was displaying the イ character instead of ポ
Fixed a bug where Kung Punch could get stuck in an infinite loop if the enemy dies before the move finished
Fixed a bug where the background for the energy/health bars would stay open after combat
Fixed enemy animation not being paused when pausing a room out of combat

Progress Report

Devlog 100: Build 0.57

We've got build 0.057 uploaded to the Latest branch for testing. It'll be making its way to the default branch in a couple of days.

Here's the changelog so far:

Major fixes and new features:
Added a new foe. He can be found randomly throughout exploration mode.
Added Katakana cards, as well as the 7 Hiragana we were missing. They can be found in the move menu, the Katakana should be at the bottom of the list, while the Hiragana are at the top.
Added a chance to find an unowned card in each chest you loot.
Redid the character sprites of the currently existing Hiragana cards.
Reworked the power of Kanji cards.
Reworked the guessing GUI. The options are simplified and now appear in a cross.
Minor Fixes:
Replaced the "Sensei Hint" on the main menu with a padlock icon.
Replaced the Sensei Mode and Exploration Mode button text with icons.
Reworked loot system. Loot in partially looted chests will no longer respawn on loading a dungeon or re-entering a room.
Added new power number sprites.
Added using the cancel action to return to the main menu from the Sensei Mode menu.
Added text to Sensei Mode menu indicate how many rounds are in Sensei Mode
Increased text appearance speed during dialogue.
Stopped the key press animation after half a cycle.
Changed font for cards, the readings and translations should be more legible and require less scrolling text.
Fixed Sprite positioning in dialogue.
Fixed 'a' character size.
Lastly, here are a few more in-depth notes for anyone still reading this-

We have changed the static "Sensei Hint" on the main menu to a padlock. This only appears if the player has not visited Sensei. If you select Exploration Mode anyways, it will display a dialogue about visiting Sensei first, then disappear. Once this has occured, the Eexploration Mode button will be useable.

Also, we're redesigning the guess GUI. We've ditched the card background while the player is guessing, to simplify the GUI and hopefully make things easier. Once a guess is entered, the rest of the card will reappear while the mastery bar animates and the pronunciation is played. This is a work in progress, and we're hoping to get some feedback on it.

Finally, as this update includes the chance to loot Kanji cards from chests, we've put in an automatic save revert. It will reset which moves are assigned where, and which cards are assigned to each move. It will also reset the card pool.

We're trying not to do this kind of thing too often, but we're intending to start replacing Exploration Mode with Story Mode soon, which will reset things a lot more. Overall, we thought that since such a major reset is coming up, we would sneak this one in as well. We did this because we want some feedback on the mechanic, and we suspect that not everyone would revert their saves- even if we asked nicely...

Progress Report

Devlog 99: Resource Management

I think now is good a time as any to identify my future objectives for the game, what's already done and what remains to be done.

On the art side, I have a lot of things done and finished namely:
-New items
-New foes
-The Skill Tree
-New Rooms
-New Title Screen
-New Bosses

I've spent a lot of time here and there drawing those up. So there's a lot of content there waiting to be implemented. So you could say there's a bottleneck when it comes to art which is slowly being integrated into the game. The advantage with art is that unless there's some glaring mistake I somehow missed which makes things look sub-par, there's no backtracking necessary unless things look too outdated for my liking (which does happen over a period of 2 years).

Programming is a whole different process because bugs happen. Every time features are added (which is the very idea of Early Access), bugs happen. They're quite simply impossible to precisely foresee but their future presence is a certainty. What then happens is that more time needs to be spent fixing said bugs which isn't time invested adding new features (which is what I ultimately strive for).

Implementing feedback is another aspect of Early Access. It's important and necessary. The caveat with this is limited resources.

Super Toaster X has been for me mostly a creative endeavor. It was a project to funnel my creative juice, to make an artistic vision a reality. To this day, I haven't touched a penny from the hundreds of hours I've worked on that game and I'm not too bothered by it. I mean, some financial reward would be nice but it doesn't demotivate me from working on the game.

Some people have criticized the game for being sold and not given for free. I think it's important to address the conception that the game should be free and discuss the reason why it's being sold in the first place.

When I started getting involved in game development two years ago, I figured I could work on this as a side project. The thing with game development is that it doesn't involve a single set of skills but rather require a vast array of abilities covering not only graphical art but also music and programming.

Any developer wannabe is then faced with either developing the skills they lack or finding people who can already have them. If you ever doubt about this, read up the credits of most video games out there, it should give an idea about how many people and skills are involved in making them.

Which brings me back to fees involved in game development. Even though I don't make any money working on the game, all of the game's resources are funneled on hired hands. To sum things up, the game isn't being sold for the fame and riches of the developer but rather to actually wrap up the game and finish it thanks to those people who can perform the tasks I'm not handling.

In an ideal world, we'd all work on this because we're passionate about it. I could then include just about every feature you could ever dream of. Reality proves to be different however which brings me to the point I wanted to make about resources.

Basically, the current resources in EA must be invested in three different categories:
a. bug fixing
b. adding features
c. taking in feedback

All three are important but the resources to administer to each are limited. It's all about making the right decision about the actual features to make sure the game progresses forward at a steady pace while fixing bugs and improving the game based on feedback without running out of resources and selling the game short.

Basically, for those wondering if the current asking price isn't too much, it doesn't even cover what I'd like to implement into it and I'm not making a dime from it. I feel like it's important to shed light as to what happens behind the scenes at times.

There's also that the game is very niche, there's always the risk of going against the current, especially in indie game development.

Just letting you guys know what's going on at the moment and what's upcoming for the game.

Progress Report

Devlog 98: Skill Tree and Upgrades

Hello guys,

I revamped the older skill tree which was awkward and not to my liking:



For one thing, it was too complicated with stars and locks and everything. Needlessly complicated that is. It's like I was trying to integrate too many ideas at the same time and the whole process became bogged down in the details.

One level up system which I really enjoyed was how Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII. In my opinion, it is the epitome of character progression.

I also love board games so I decided to work on those inspirations to come up with something:



Here's my explanation of how it all works:

1. Level Up Stars: Level up stars are acquired when a vocabulary card has been guessed correctly enough.

The progress bar goes up every time the card has been identified correctly until it's finally mastered:


2. The Toaster Token represents Pan. Moving around the board costs 1 full star to convert blue tiles to orange ones. Half stars required to backtrack on already "conquered" orange tiles. That's what I'm thinking at the moment but this is open to tweaking of course.

3. The Horned Token moves around the board sort of like the hammer brothers in Super Mario 3. It blocks access to certain upgrades and the foe it represents must be vanquished in order to process further into the progress tree. Might end up make it stationary though.

4. Padlocks block certain paths entirely. Certain objectives must be met in order for them to disappear. This can be to accomplish certain things in the story or complete achievements. I feel like this adds a lot of depths to the game itself. This was inspired by Wolfenstein: The New Order gameplay mechanics.

This is a first try at a layout and will likely change as testing continues.

What Else?

I'm redoing the title screen entirely. The current version is very rough and I don't like it at all.

For one thing, this week, we'll replace the text on the toasters on the menu with icons to make things presentable:

Story:


The animation is slightly improved but the following icons will replace the text:

Sensei Mode:


Options:


Tutorials:
I'm not quite down with the tutorial rooms and I'm still working on it.

Layout:
We'll dump the pixel art text (1) which was taking too much room and add a star in the upper left so that the player knows when a card has been mastered:



(2): This is where the Master Star goes.

(3): Also this week, the cards will now have different power ratings:



(4): That won't be there anymore, we already have the furigana for that.

So basically most of the work remains in the actual coding to the game.

Get in touch if you have comments about the current build, thanks!

Progress Report

Devlog 97: Introducing Tutorials

Hello guys,

Some users have voiced (valid) concerns about the lack of clarity about the game. I think we've been working on the game for so long that the mechanics have become second nature to us.

We've discussed this issues together and decided on an accessible and pragmatic way to make the game easier to understand.

Basically, we'll use a room-by-room basis. Every room will teach a different concept about the game until has been covered. That should make things a lot clearer.

Just wanted to announce it's being worked on.

Announcement

Hotfixes

As the title says, we've just uploaded a new version to the Latest Version Branch. We will set it to the default branch once we've gone over it again in a final round of testing.

If you don't want to wait those couple of days, you can opt into the latest branch through the Betas tab in the Super Toaster X properties menu.

Here's the changelog for 0.056.

New Features:
10 New Kanji cards. These cards should appear at the top of the card pool within the move menu.
Card mastery system, which is the beginning of the character progression system.
Items are now lootable from chests, and can be used in game. So far it's only cheese, but we'll be adding more.
First pass of word pronounciation system.
Faster Exploration run speed (200% of previous).
Added lights to draw attention to side doors.

Fixes:
The card timer is no longer hidden by the card name background.
Moved the 4 previous Kanji cards up in the card pool, they are just below the new Kanji cards instead of at the bottom.
Fixed move menu to properly update card image and play SFX while scrolling.
Reworked dungeon loading to prevent the map showing up while making or loading a dungeon.
Fixed Xbox controller start and back button.
Fixed a bug where cancelling a move would leave the card sprites in place.
Uncovered and fixed a bug with Vocab Card Lists that was giving potentially game breaking errors.

Progress Report

Devlog 96: A Sound Decision

Hello guys,

This week, Jeff has been hard at work coding on the game in order for us to integrate our backlog of things.

The pronunciation sounds should be implemented this week.

The card mastery system is already coded in as well. We're aiming for a new release next week.

A special thanks to eplipswitch for providing his Japanese expertise and voice for the pronunciations. You can find more about his translations and other work here:
https://rpgmaker.net/users/eplipswich/

In other words, game is progressing nicely.

Progress Report

Devlog 95: To pronunce or not to pronunce, that is the question!

Hello everyone!

I prefer to give regular updates about the project especially since it's in Early Access, I feel like it's the right thing to do for the people who have trusted and invested into the project.

Pronunciation
I'm currently pondering whether or not to implement the pronunciation of words into the game. I would, of course, give the option to turn them off but I was wondering if this is a request a lot of people have.

It's not something we had in mind when we started with the project but it's something that could possibly be implemented without too much work. The challenge is finding someone reliable to record all the words.

XP system
The next task at hand is to implement the skill tree and upgrade system. The art is all done for this, it's a matter for Jeff, the programmer, to code it into the game.


I've talked about this system before but it goes like this:

Every time you guess a card correctly, its individual meter goes up. Once the meter is full, the card is mastered and you gain a skill point to invest into the skill tree.



Art

Art wise, I'm working on some new rooms to visit when you start the game to act as a tutorial.





Those are, of course, WIP but this is to let you know what's going on.

Giving Feedback

I want to reward people who provide detailed feedback and suggestions by having them as cameos into the game (subtle ones). The more you comment and suggest, the better the game becomes. Case in point, some suggestions made by some of you guys have already been integrated into the game.

Sleep well and take care!

Progress Report

Devlog 94: Steam We Go!

Hello guys!

So it’s been a couple of weeks since we’ve been on Early Access so now is as good a time as any for an development log regarding the game. I’ll simply include the upcoming changes for the next build.

Upcoming changes:

*Sax_7 requested a way to make side doors more visible. We’ve added a light to indicate the presence of doors on the side of the screen.

*Behind the scene: Jeff, the programmer, has coded a tool to quickly import art to the game. I have quite a lot of stuff which is done and waiting to be implemented: new foes, items and other animations. This will make us faster and more proficient to add things to the game engine.

*Behind the scene: Jeff is working on another tool to quickly add vocabulary cards to the database. I have a list of 10 new words I want to include to test out the new tool and add more diversity to the current list which is very limited.

The new words; all part of JLPT 4.

あが 上、る　る、上がる、 to rise (v.)
あか　赤、ん　ん、ぼう　坊、赤ん坊、baby (n.)
い　意、けん　見、意見、opinion (n.)
いし　石、石、stone (n.)
うで　腕、腕、arm (n.)
えだ　枝、枝、branch, twig (n.)
かべ　壁、壁、wall (n.)
かみ　髪、髪、hair (n.)
くも　雲、雲、cloud (n.)
こ　子、子、child (n.)　

This might not seem like much but having those tools will certainly streamline the already finished content which is just waiting to be coded in.

Keep the feedback coming! As you can see, everything is read and at the very least considered.

Thank you for reading,

TT.
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