itch.io

Thanks for the information! I've found the source of the boulder bug and fixed it! I'll look into the enemy aggro timer bug and also do another play-through of the game for further bug testing before releasing the new patch. I definitely appreciate you taking the time to help me improve my game!

Concerning the ghosts getting stuck in objects, that's an unfortunate side effect of the method I used to create their AI behavior. I can't recall for what reason, but I needed to turn the "through" command on when the player enters their region in order for them to function properly. The side effect of that being that if the player escapes their region while the enemy is - for example - inside a pool of water, then the "through" command will be turned off, and result in the enemy getting caught there. Unfortunately, I don't think it's worth spending the time to completely rewrite every enemy's behavior for this game when I would rather focus my time on my current project.

Concerning the battles, other than the bosses, none of the enemies use troop commands to create battle behaviors. Enemies will use skills randomly (within some basic conditions) determined by the skills I assigned them. The MP restoration can feel random, even though it is not. Most skills that hit the player will restore MP. The problem with this game's design philosophy is 1: "most skills" is problematic. Ideally, it should be ALL skills. 2: MP can only be restored by getting hit, which creates 2 different unwanted behaviors: 1) The player is encouraged to get hit (sort of a masochistic game). 2) The player is punished when an enemy misses their attack.

If you liked the core foundation to this game but (understandably) hate the bugs or ill-conceived construction of the game, you may be interested in the game I am working on. It resolves a lot of these problems: The on-field, wandering enemy AI has proper behavior without relying on weird usage of the through command. I also removed the cool-down aggression timer entirely; defeating an enemy will clear it from the map until the map is reloaded. The MP (now officially called Confidence Points - or ConP for short) formula and general philosophy is far better conceived. All enemy actions on the player character will restore some amount of ConP - this still has the side effect of missed actions not restoring ConP. However, the player has other ways of generating ConP: guarding will restore ConP, as well as using your basic attack will restore your ConP. (Also, enemy hit rate has been increased, so enemy's have a higher chance of hitting the player). There is also an improved starting formula to determine the player's starting ConP so you don't start at 0 (and there are a number of difficulty options the player can set to adjust how the ConP behavior works too!)
That, among many other improvements: Way, way more custom work including tons of plugins, more levels that include puzzles that are more interesting than just "push a boulder", NPCs, and actually - coincidentally - just this week I've been working on battle AI, so battles also include some scripted enemy behaviors.

I wish I could promise you a date (or even relative time frame) for it's release but every time I make that promise I way underestimate the workload ahead. So all I can say is: it's coming.

Once again, thanks so much for the feedback!