Posted August 27, 2022 by Danny Garay
First of all, thank you very much for your support!
Toziuha Night DR, is not a perfect game, but after having taken some time without playing it and replaying it months later with a fresher mindset, I can say that...
I'm still proud of the result, considering the zero budget and short development time working alone (6 months or so). Although it is true that I have managed to notice some bugs (and also thanks to several people who leave constructive feedback). So this latest update aims to solve them, at least most of them.
Let's start by talking about the difficulty, this game is clunky, with limited lives, little movement action. And this is completely intentional as I wanted to emulate a classic-vania experience.
But it seems that many have not realized that there is a way to change the difficulty... For this reason I have now added a message on the gameover screen (it appears only once).
Anyway, I have made some changes that will improve the experience if you play it in classic mode.
The bones thrown by the enemy "Skeleton" were thrown at different speeds randomly, this time I have put only one speed, but if the skeleton is facing you, it will throw the bone directly.
There was also an animation bug that made the enemy throw two or three bones consecutively, I have fixed it.
Continuing with the theme of the enemies, I have also lowered the HP of some of them, I have reduced a little the amount of bats that appear. And slightly changed the activation zones of some of them (for example the hand that comes out of the ground).
I have seen criticisms towards the hitbox system, due to how it was designed, a glitch can occur that if you hit an enemy quickly, the second hit doesn't count. Sorry for this is a problem that would involve rewriting this hitbox system.
Although on the subject of hitbox sizes, as you can see, there is a fair amount of room for error for the player.
Xandria's hitbox (blue box) is already smaller than the sprite. And in the case of the enemies, they have a large area to take damage (highlighted in red) and a small area that causes damage to Xandria (highlighted in yellow). Because the boxes are rectangular, but the sprites have different shapes, maybe because of this some people think that the hitboxes are wrong.
Reduced the activation time of Elemental Circuits and also the mana cost (now it takes 10 MP to activate them). Xandria also uses magic, please use it.
You have a number of lives, if you lose them all you must start from the beginning of the Stage. This is how a classicvania or very retro games (the ones I grew up with) work.
For the lowest difficulty mode were active some checkpoints to avoid repeating some sections of the stage.
In this update I have enabled some checkpoints for the classic difficulty level (in Stage 2 before facing the boss and in stage 4-1).
These checkpoints are activated (if at the moment of dying, you had obtained the key) so if you die, without having obtained any key, you start from the beginning of the section.
For this update, I have changed some lines of dialogue to avoid comparisons to a certain game about vampires and an anime about alchemists. I really love the references, but apparently most of you don't...
Just know that the alchemist rank Xandria will get will now be called "Official Alchemist".
I have also removed some lines of dialogue for the reason I explained before and also to avoid giving too much text or sentences that are not necessary.
I have also changed some mistakes in the Spanish language that I hadn't noticed, keep in mind that I wrote all the dialogues in two days.
Generally speaking, the story hasn't changed, the characters' motivations are still the same.
This was a game mode that was pending, but now I had the opportunity to program it. There is no obligation to play it and it won't unlock anything new. It's just a little challenge for people who really know how to play against bosses, although in this mode some cheats were added to slightly change the way to fight.
I have fixed a couple of bugs related to the physics of subweapons and other very small improvements. But if any new problem appears related to this new update, let me know.
Toziuha Night: Order of the Alchemists (OotA). It will be the sequel game in the form of a metroidvania (in which this whole project started in general).
To solve all the technical problems of Toziuha Night DR, OotA was restarted, this means that the game design, art and source code was made from scratch, using all the experience I have acquired so far.
I have a Youtube channel where I explain all this process and other topics related to the development of the game.
Toziuha Night OotA will truly be the game in which I want to stand out, call it my masterpiece and the one that will define whether or not I am able to continue being a full time indie developer.
Toziuha Night OotA is being funded thanks to proceeds from Toziuha Night DR and donations from patrons on ko-fi. thank you for your support!