Getting close

As you might have surmised from our lack of updates lately, we’ve been working hard on getting Breath of Death VII ready. We didn’t make our March deadline, but we’re awfully close. Today, I spent most of my time going through dungeons, fighting monsters, and adjusting ability and enemy stats so that everything’s properly balanced. I also did a good amount of debugging. Some of the more amusing bugs I fixed today include:

A character’s stun spell had 100% success rate against monsters that are immune to stun.
Escaping a battle results in entering random battles with every step you take thereafter.
The game allowing the player to use multi-character unite techniques with a character even though that character was already doing another unite technique that turn with a different character.

Most of these bugs have been very easy to fix – just add a line of code here, an extra clause here, or switch a < sign to a > sign – but it’s given me a newfound appreciation for just how much goes into creating an RPG and making sure everything is working as it should.

In any case, the game is getting very close to the point of being ready to submit to playtesting. 2-3 weeks after that, the game should be finished and available on XBox Live for all to try. I’ll keep you all posted.