itch.io

Hi all! Important, but ultimately small, update to the demo, so I thought I’d post this as a forum post instead of doing a full devlog update.

• Asset loading at the beginning of the game has been sped up. This is a work in progress, but load times are already quite improved.
• A softlock bug reported by a user, wherein you could get permanently stuck on the overworld map by hugging the solid tiles at the edge of the Brywood prior to the grain escort quest, has been fixed
• Signposts now have a special hint marker above them to indicate that they can be interacted with.
• Only the currently-interactable actor now shows a marker, rather than every actor within talking range of Zalia.

~Clarissa

A new bug has been spotted in the wild: if you learn the Mantle skill, and then grab a ledge, and press the Attack button to stab while you’re hanging, you get stuck, suspended in air next to the ledge, forever. You can act (mostly just stabbing and changing your facing direction), but you can’t move.

At any rate, this has been fixed now. But at the time of this writing, it’s very late in the evening, far too late to push a fix. (The perils of a tiny team: no backup squad!) The patch will be uploaded sometime around midday EST tomorrow, 9th June.

Just wanted to leave this note here in case anybody else encounters this bug, but I also felt it was too small to post an entire devlog update about. :)

Thanks to the folks who pointed this out to me! Y’all are the best!

~Clarissa

Hi, adventurers!

I’ve decided to convert the comments section to a community message board, to help keep discussions better organized. Unfortunately, that means all the nice comments everybody has left so far are now hidden, as you can’t have both comments and a message board at the same time, and Itch.io doesn’t migrate content from one over to the other. My apologies to everybody who commented, but it couldn’t be avoided.

~Clarissa

Thanks! I’m so glad you’re enjoying it!

~Clarissa

Hi, adventurers!

Soon, I’m going to be converting the comments section to a community message board, to help keep discussions better organized. Unfortunately, that means all the nice comments everybody has left so far will be hidden, as you can’t have both comments and a message board at the same time, and Itch.io doesn’t migrate content from one over to the other.

I am going to keep comments active for at least another day or two, since there are still active conversations going on, and I want folks to be able to see my replies.

Catch you on the other side!

~Clarissa

Thanks! Yeah, a good friend of mine pointed that out to me, and it was an eye-opener. :)

Hi! Clarissa here. Thanks for playing. I’m glad you’re enjoying the gameplay! Zelda II really is one of my favorite games of all time, but there are definitely some rough edges to it. My hope is that Enigma Heart has helped smooth some of those out, and added on to it while retaining the essence of what made Zelda II what it is.

Regarding the story… you’re not wrong. As a writer, I do tend to get a bit long-winded, especially where dialogue is concerned. And I don’t really have an editor to keep my more indulgent creative tendencies in check. So when feedback like yours comes through, there’s always this moment of “Huh… yeah, that stings but I can totally see it.”

I personally like when a story takes its time, and that’s reflected in my style even when I am doing my best to rein it in. But I also understand that “Get on with it!” feeling. So based on your feedback, I did a little editing: some tweaks here, some trimming there. I can’t guarantee that, overall, the story moves any faster, but I do think the pacing en route is better, especially when it comes to Zalia and Esme.

What’s changed, and what hasn’t

Because, when it comes to those two, you’re absolutely correct. Right from the opening moments, I start ringing bells like a town crier, shouting “THESE LADIES ARE GAY FOR EACH OTHER!” Which is fine for some stories, but I think it’s also fundamentally at odds with my preference for a slow burn. They’re automatically making googly-eyes at each other, but then 20 minutes later, they suddenly don’t know how to talk to each other without dancing around their feelings.

So that’s part of what I’ve tried to improve with the edits I made today. Zalia and Esme do still become smitten with each other kind of quickly, but I’ve found that by editing out some of the more obvious heart emotes and tweaking certain lines of dialogue, the growth feels more natural. For example, Remont no longer assumes they’re married; he hems and haws about it for a second, and settles on “together,” leaving us – the viewer – to fill in the blanks.

Or, in most scenes where Zalia and Esme are being overtly romantic at each other, I’ve edited it so it’s one-way: if Zalia’s expressing herself, Esme now tends to clam up, and vice-versa.

Anyways, I feel like I’ve rambled a lot by this point. (Told you I’m long-winded, lol.) TL;DR: it may still be a little bit slow, but I feel like the pacing is better overall.

Thanks for your feedback! It’s greatly appreciated!

Heya there. Thanks for playing, and for the videos. Been super busy in the lead-up to Next Fest, but I’m really looking forward to checking these out!

~Clarissa

Hi there,

• On an Xbox controller: “X” button
• Nintendo: “Y”
• PlayStation: Square
• Keyboard: J

If you’re a keyboard player, I admit, I’m not one; I play exclusively with a controller, so the default layout probably isn’t very good. (I’m open to suggestions!) However, all controls can be reconfigured to your liking by going to Options -> Rebind controls.

~Clarissa

Oh wow. Okay yeah, the program is just straight-up crashing before it has a chance to export a log. That’s disappointing. What’s your hardware setup? I’ve got an AMD GPU myself, but it’s only in my Windows test machine, and the game works fine there. I don’t have a Linux machine with AMD currently set up; the Linux box I dev the game is Nvidia. (I should try to get an AMD-Linux solution sorted out.)

~Clarissa

Yeah! If you’re on Linux it would be in:
~/.local/share/EnigmaHeartDemo/logs

On Windows:
%localappdata%\EnigmaHeartDemo\logs

Oh, I’m sorry to hear the game’s been crashing on Steam! Can you recall what you were doing – where you were in the game and whatnot – when the crashes happened?

I’m so happy you’re enjoying it so much anyway!

~Clarissa

Yep, absolutely!
~C

Thanks!! 😊

So sorry it took so long to reply; I’m still getting the hang of the whole community-engagement thing. It’s nice to stop coding every once in a while and look around for a change. 😅

I appreciate the kind words! I really hope Enigma Heart does Zelda II justice, and even goes beyond!

Oh, and you’re welcome on the Linux build! The game is actually developed on Linux, for Linux. (It’s the future!) 🐧💜

~Clarissa

Very interesting! Acronia does use floating point operations here and there, but I figured they would be emulated in software if not supported on the user’s hardware.

I will absolutely check this out and see what I can do about it. May just be a compiler setting I missed. I would definitely like the game to be able to run whether there’s an FPU installed or not.

Thanks for letting us know!

–Clarissa

No preference! I think The Lobdegg was simply using DOSBox-X at the time, so that’s what we went with when we re-released their original prototype.

It’ll work in any flavor of DOSBox: stock DOSBox, DOSBox-X, DOSBox Staging… they’re all good. We currently use DOSBox Staging for our releases.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention! It looks like both the batch file and DOSBox config file were improperly set up. Probably reverted to an old version in an update.

I’ve updated the Windows version of the self-playing demo with a fix, and it should be okay now. Let me know if it isn’t, and I’ll take another look! :)

–Clarissa

Thanks! :)

Yeah, it’s definitely a work-in-progress. The enemy behavior is one of the weakest aspects, and I hope to improve it in future versions.

I hadn’t given any thought to a tutorial level. It sounds like a pretty cool idea. I’m hoping that whatever the first level ends up being (it may not be the one that’s in there now), will teach the player how to control the game just by presenting them with challenges, kinda like Mario.

There’s no sound just yet. I do hope to give some kind of audio feedback to collisions. The enemies passing through the player is intentional; I figured making them block the player would be unfair in 2D. I would like to add some kind of effect, like a small knockback or something, as long as it’s not too punishing. :)

Thanks for your feedback! I hope you stick around for more!

–Clarissa