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BROX is an (artificial) species name and an acronym* and Mr.44 just happens to be a male specimen. The sprites for this game is the first time I actually colored one (the existing concept art is pencil drawings) so I genuinely haven't thought of whether they're made from metal or Mr.44 just happens to be armored. In the original plans for Daemon Detective Tactics the BROX were meant to be a basic enemy that lived in sewer systems etc after escaping from the labs and becoming an invasive species (being a lab creation they lack natural enemies) but I never really went further than "okay, now I have a justification for putting Legally Distinct Balrog in my game"

* (it's never specified what the constituent words are, it's a reference to a super old unfinished Cave Story fangame named Tales of the Broxxus - which in turn brought back the rectangular enemies from the old beta screenshots, which is what the BROX species is based on)

Ah, that explains it (I've been testing in 2x / fullscreen all this time).

There's a different font asset for every size / screen resolution combination, but they should be the same ACTUAL font just at different sizes. So something must've broken with that when converting them to SDF rendering.

Perfect, having an easily reachable test case will make it easier to verify it's solved.

Thank you! ^__^

I feel like it's rushed in a bunch of places but letting everything fade into the dark and letting your imagination fill in the blanks does wonders for the end result.

That one sounds extreme enough that it might be on purpose (conservation of momentum and all that), I'll have to look into it. And you're 100% certain it's not because of releasing the jump button early when doing the running jump? (There's variable jump height so doing that will give less than a full jump)

It was not intentional. I forgot coins collected this way are a different object.

That one is a bug, it's not an intended mechanic. I guess it could be related to the code handling slopes? Every horizontal movement starts by trying to move you down, it should ignore aerial states but maybe something is weird with balloon floating.

It's very possible, I'll need to look into it.

I don't think I've ever gotten this much detailed feedback from a test player before, but I wasn't expecting to have hundreds of tiny things to fix in a project I released half a decade ago... :P

(I'm adding all these things to my todo list even if I'm not acknowledging them with commentary)

Both of those glitches probably could be fixed by disallowing interactions specifically in the phasing state, the codebase is such a mess I didn't really do proper state machines with behavior packages so I'm pretty sure interactions are handled entirely in the NPC / door objects instead of only being done in player states where they make sense.

I'll look into adding NPCs to those levels telling you about the mechanic, it's something I added pretty late so I might've just forgotten (the view being shrunk was a side effect of switching from 480x272 resolution to 640x360, normally it uses 320x180 because things just get too small when in zoomed-out mode so it's exclusive to multiplayer mode when players are far away from each other)

I could look into adding a new option to always have the camera zoomed out though.

I ignored the invisible block feedback since I don't want to completely trivialize the challenge by removing them, but if you insist I'll figure something out...

(I didn't change it because apparently I forgot to put it on my to-do list, since I made sure to fix everything on it. It's there now though)

And yeah, not sure what I would do with the redundant levels. There's a bunch of unused ones that didn't make the cut (like the invisible blocks beach level) so going for a reimagning with all-new levels would probably be the best option, or touching them up with the new mechanics I added through the development of DDG2 (slopes aren't used a lot, for instance, pretty much only in Monument Valley and Snow Queen's Castle).

Part of why I consider the boomerang sword stronger than the bomb is that it has more utility (it can block bullets and isn't affected by gravity so it's possible to hit some things the bomb can't), and likewise Paige's "increased sword strength" is actually referring to her attack animations having a much larger hitbox than anyone else and not the damage output. But it shouldn't be too hard to just fudge the numbers a bit for both those cases since there's already support for dealing fractional damage.

(I fixed the text issues on the store page, including mentioning the "more spikes" modifier)

That's worrying, neither of those things are happening for me. Are you on the Linux or Windows version?

I have a theory the savefile issue could be because reading savefiles is using a RNG-dependent obfuscation algorithm and the underlying RNG library has been silently changed since the previous version of GM so old seeds don't work anymore (so it erroneously reads extremely long array lengths and the infinite loop being parsed as a crash). The font issue, I have no idea (all dialogue should use the same font, and it's only scaled up or down depending on window size).

There's no alternate ending. When making the game I felt like adding a happy ending would ruin the weight of the story.

I don't want to replace the final boss' powerup, the boomerang sword is the strongest powerup in the game and logically that should be used for the highest point of escalation in the game (the final boss).

Noted down everything else. (A lot of the grammar mistakes are because I was legit a lot worse at english 6 years ago, I still mix up is/are occasionally because of my native language being plurality-agnostic so even thinking about verbs having alternate forms depending on target is an alien concept)

I'm not sure if there's a better way to tutorialize freezing enemies to use as platforms given that there are alternate ways to get height (Matt's double jump, the rocket powerup, the hikkori powerup, Drake's uppercut) so there's no way to FORCE a player to do it to proceed.

(I think I just happened to be online at the time, I try to check my messages once per day but I'm not really a "consistent schedule" kinda person)

Yeah, good point... having a backtracking teleporter means I only need to change ONE instead of having to untangle the spaghetti that's the actual level. I'll make sure there's a penguin cop there TELLING you it leads back so it doesn't unintentionally screw with curious people because the level is already painful enough as-is.

When replaying I noticed Snow Queen might have the fewest number of attack patterns out of any boss (warp damage, icicle stomp, bullets), which feels weird. I'll probably have to do something about that and then having a better weapon will even it out.

The idea with Reinforcements is that you'd only get them once per day so they're essentially a finite/limited resource compared to buying stuff in the shop, but I didn't figure out a good way to do that so they reset every time you quit to the title screen. The other limiting factor is that you gotta REACH them for the powerups, so you'll only have a limited selection until you've unlocked every world while Jason just sells everything from the get-go in the museum. For a sequel I'd figure out some better way to handle both that and the shop (like having you gradually unlock new powerups as you progress - you have everything from the get-go here because I figured I wanted the game to be speedrun-friendly and let you route with as few limitations as possible)

I don't remember my intentions from 9 years ago on a level-by-level basis, but I do remember having a bit of a general troll outlook on the powerups given in levels: they shouldn't be the best tool for the job, they should be the worst powerup for the job whenever possible (outside of the levels that introduce a new powerup that should show them off in a positive light) so that you don't end up having a trivial experience because you always get the powerup you need right when you need it. The only real exception to this is giving you the cat sunflower / balloon cake when there's a climbing / tricky jumping section coming up, but even there I would often hand them out before a combat section (or have a second powerup that replaces the active one right before the part you need to climb, etc) so there's still a bit of challenge involved in getting the powerup to where it needs to be.

(That said, I replaced the mega buster in that level with a bomb now)

The teleporters are implemented in a way that's absolutely horrible (destination coordinates are hardcoded numbers in the sending teleporter, the receiving end can't be traced back without checking every possible sender) so I don't know what I can reasonably do here. (When test playing I got lost for like 20 minutes trying to figure the exit path out, lol)

I noticed the Umi-bozu unfair hand damage during test playing other bugfixes and fixed that already. 👍

I'll see what I can do with the collision issues (the current version of Game Maker has a completely different collision engine so maybe it'll be fixed because of that). The floaties are only ever approached from the top so for them I could probably cheat and make them a lot taller than they are visually so it's not possible to clip through them. I've not observed the issues with falling through 2x2 blocks myself so I gotta look into that... maybe the sword is the answer, since it could affect your hitbox (melee animations use a different sprite from everything else and while they SHOULDN'T affect collision masks, "shouldn't" and "won't" aren't the same thing...)

Coloring the chains yellow gold would be possible, I don't think they're used anywhere else where it could clash.

Enemy projectiles being destroyed offscreen is a feature so I don't wanna fix it even if it IS a cheese, generally if something is unfair in the player's favor it's OK as long (as it doesn't trivialize the game)

Still not sure about the best way to handle ice blocks, it's gonna be frustrating for the player if it's too easy to destroy them accidentally when a puzzle requires you to freeze an enemy to use as a platform.

Yeah, overwriting the float cake is a special case because you need to have SOME means of attacking a boss for the fight to be possible (I forgot about that, it's been 6 years...)

The chains are supposed to indicate chandeliers (every chandelier has chains and there's no troll chains that just end in the middle of nowhere)

Frozen enemies instantly shatter and die when hit by melee attacks, though you'd need to either be in multiplayer or have a reserve whip to hotswap to in order to do this. (They also don't become solid if the player is partially inside them upon creation so if you're close enough you can slip through them, but it's hard to do that without being in contact damage range...)

I'll add "faster screen scrolling" and "tells for Icon of Sin" to the todo list. When refamiliaring myself to the game I also noticed its divekick attack has like zero warning so that'll also need some tweaks.

(So far a lot of the things you've suggested have been fixed and I've started to chip away at the compatibility issues)

I try to stay on the most recent version of Game Maker since I need to make sure all my asset packs work whenever Yoyo changes things, but it didn't occur to me to check if all my games still work (it's been years since I opened the DDG2 project last so there's been a lot of changes in the meantime). Thankfully it doesn't seem to be a super complicated thing to fix.

I've been trying to avoid reusing the same theming for too many levels in a row so it might've been a weird choice, but I'll have to check if I need to re-evaluate it. (Nice Day is supposed to be the 'main' overworld theme that shows up whenever a level is just kinda generic even if it IS inside a themed world) 

Anyone can get the painting, there's a sequence of invisible blocks below that are the "regular" way to get it.

I like that idea for the boss, that should be a pretty doable.

All of the others are noted down on my todo list.

I've noticed some other issues that'll need fixing as well (updating the project to the latest version of Game Maker broke some stuff) so it might be a pretty large patch.

I think my reasoning was - if the first boss doesn't start you with the most basic powerup, it's harder to escalate from there over the course of the game.

I also dunno if you've noticed, but if you have any powerup active, the freebie from the boss doesn't override it so you can use whatever you're comfortable with that way - though having to re-equip it on death is a bit of an issue... maybe I should look into pulling from the inventory automatically if there's enough leftovers of the same loadout when retrying bosses?

I don't have any active plans to make the remake of the first game (I wanna finish off Burgertale before I take on another BIG project) but I have a bunch of ideas for DD games (3 more spinoffs 2 of which are platformers, some sort of "Daemon Detective Gaiden Collection" which combines the first and second game and brings it up to spec with modern Game Maker, and of course the main RPG thing that I've kept putting on the backburner because I'm waiting for technology to mature enough that I can make my dreams reality).

Nice catch, I can't believe this has been around for 6 years!

Map navigation being faster should be pretty simple to implement by holding the run button, I'll see what I can do with the boss (since all of its animations are baked in it might be a bit of work to add a new one and adding one of those newfangled "!" zones when nothing else has them would feel a bit weird)

Done~

(Don't expect me to playtest anything you've made in the foreseeable future though, just in case :P)

Welcome back! It's kinda dangerous having gamedev friends because of the "plz play my game" scam but there was a whole lot of stuff in the scammer's messages that didn't line up (especially the typing quirks)

Your jump height increases to 6 blocks when you hold down the run button and 8 when running at max speed, no special ability is necessary

This isn't supposed to happen, where is this happening? (Which level + which ability is missing)

I don't want players to accidentally delete their saves ;-;

Not in-game, so the only option is to manually delete them from the save folder. Type in this path in a file explorer window to be taken there. The savefiles are named burgertale_savefile0 for the first file, 1 for the second and so on.

First put this in its own script,

function inventory_get_qty(item_id) {
      for(var c = 0; c < global.inventory_items; c++){
          if(global.inventory_item[c] == item_id){
              return global.inventory_qty[c];
          }
      }
      return 0;
 }

Then you can draw the quantity with,

draw_text(0, 0,tsprintf("POTION %", inventory_get_qty(item_POTION)))

You can, you just need to read out the correct number of items (using the new inventory_get_qty function I suggested)

Yes, it's wrong. The inventory is populated in the order you obtain items, so item_POTION could be placed anywhere in the inventory. inventory_qty[item_POTION] reads inventory slot 0 but ANYTHING could be there.

Create a function like this and it can check how many items you have,

function inventory_get_qty(item_id) {
     for(var c = 0; c < global.inventory_items; c++){
         if(global.inventory_item[c] == item_id){
             return global.inventory_qty[c];
         }
     }
     return 0;
}

As far as I know, no OS-specific functionality is used, so it should work on every platform including the phone, console and web versions of Game Maker.

That would work too, you could use an array instead of a single sprite for battle sprites and then pick the slot of the array using the skin variable.

E.g. in the example I posted, you would read it with:

spr = global.monster_data[monid,mond_SPRITE_BATTLE][amp_SKIN]

Currently catch rate is calculated the same way for every monster (in itemuse_catch), the easiest way to allow it to be different would be to add a new stat mond_CATCHRATE for catch rate in init_monsters/init_monster. It's a number that you multiply the final ball_catch_rate value with in itemuse_catch, which is 1.00 for normal catch rate, higher numbers for easy monsters and lower numbers for stronger ones (e.g. legendaries could have a catch rate of 0.10)

For skins I think the easiest way would be to have a new AMP stat, which is rolled when you generate a monster using some formula (e.g. always 0.001 chance to be shiny which is rolled for every monster, player_step_fill has a table of regional varieties which only applies in certain rooms, etc). The skin would normally be 0 which is the default skin but higher values represent other skins. The monster's sprite would simply have multiple subimages (one for each skin) and the one representing the current skin is drawn everywhere the monster's sprite is used, instead of always using subimage 0 like we do now (do a search for all occurrences of mond_SPRITE_BATTLE to find them all)

E.g. here we draw spr with subimage zero always, we would want to draw it using the new skin variable instead.

So you'd modify it like so,

var skin = amp_read_var(AMP_CLIPBOARD,amp_SKIN)

draw_sprite_ext(spr,skin, ...)

amp_earn_exp returns four things, one of them is all moves the monster could potentially learn if it levelled up. You'd need to do something similar to what the battle win state does: store the list when earning EXP, extract the moves specifically, and then have a loop where you take one move at a time, spawn a menu asking the player if they want to learn that move / learn it directly if there's room, and when the menu is destroyed, move on to the next thing from the queue (or proceed if the queue is empty)

Thanks, will try! ^_^

I might not add a lot more features to this engine specifically though... the more complicated it gets, the harder it gets to use... :P

For everyone that has a face currently, they use a bespoke cutscene init script instead of cis_polyliner_npc. But it's very simple to add.

Add a new variable "my_face" to obj_npc_polyliner which has type "expression" and default value NONE:

(this is the variable you'd change in the room editor for the NPCs that should have faces; you'd do it the same way you update messages but use the name of a face sprite instead)

Edit cis_polyliner_npc to pass on the my_face value to the dialogueevent's face_sprite:

And finally a stupid change, edit obj_shopmenucontrol's Step event at line 214 to set my_face to NONE before calling cis_polyliner_npc. It really shouldn't use this function but I was lazy so I reused it instead of making a new one for shopkeeper dialogue, lol.

Yes, all assets that are included can be used in things you make (unless I explicitly say they can't be, in the documentation for a particular project). The only thing you're not allowed to do is to resell them as an asset pack, so using them in a game is allowed.

Credit is optional (I'm not expecting most players of a game to be interested in the code or stock assets that were used to make it... :P) but if you want to credit me I'd recommend a standard CC-BY 3.0-style credits tag ("ASSET NAME by CREATOR NAME [newline] <URL to where you got it from>", with the <>'s actually being there in order to denote the start and end of the URL).