Week 2

There's your sneak peak at the brand new world map. This particular tiny section is from Vega, the continent where we start the adventure. The way the travel system will work is via choices and pictures. I've tried to make something that's both fun and visually pleasing. I've yet to implement it ingame, however, which may turn out to be a bigger mountain of work than I thought.

Onto this week's progress!

Done this week:
- Finished Andras and Ahden world maps, and it was no easy feat! They're both pretty massive continents with a lot of locations. By comparison, Maia and Geldion are pretty tiny and shouldn't take more than a day to finish.
- Mapped one of the resting/waiting areas of the arena.
- Unsuccessfully attempted to add another puzzle to chapter 2, then scrapped the idea altogether.
- Fiddled with audio and switched some MP3s to an .ogg format so they'll take a lot less space.
- Figured out what makes the download size of the project so huge.

To do next week:
- Maia and Geldion maps.
- Start eventing cutscenes for Chapter 3 (yes, I'm that far behind).
- Finish up database.

Changes:
- After a very long look at the size of the project, I've figured out where some of the size is coming from. Parallax maps take a bit of space, sure, and I've got 410 battlers for the 410 database enemies. But the biggest bulk of the size is from the animations folder. I haven't finished the database for skills yet, but the custom animations I've included so far have bloated the size of the project by 90mb. It's not that I have a whole lot of them, but it seems that quite a few of them are 5-8mb in size. So, as much as I like custom animations, a lot of them are going to have to go. I'll save a little room for the super special effects, but the rest of it will be using smaller and simpler animations.
- I'd been balancing skills and battles via arbitrary numbers, but it's tough to guess how much players will level, especially since I'm opening up areas where they can grind. So, I've taken another look at the battle system and changed some skills to work via percentages instead. The other advantage of this is that it will make each battle just as challenging as the next and give me more room to script interesting bosses.
- I'm leaning in favor of releasing a partial chapter to get some feedback. It's going in a slightly different direction than the rest of the game has been so far. There's more complexity, so I'm very interested in seeing what everyone thinks.