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**TheHonorableRyu** · 09-08-2013, 04:05 AM

Re: Beta Test Thread: "How Badly"

I'm currently at Day 36 with 7035 gold and 2 items listed on DreamBay, with 3hr 38 min on the game clock. I'll respond with general impressions after I finish the game, but I wanted to list the biggest bugs I've encountered as early as I could so that you'll have time to look at them before September 14th.

At present I'm just going to list what I think are the most disruptive or distracting bugs I've found, and then list some of the minor stuff later, either in another post or by editing this one.

Major bugs, in no particular order:

Tutorial battle with the knight

There seemed to be something acting up with the battle event scripting. The knight didn't say anything about my first turn until I selected an action for the second turn. The knight's dialog (about Charms and Hexes) took place immediately after I selected an action for my second turn but before that action came out. After the dialog finished, the second action came out, and it did not autocrit like the knight predicted during the dialog. My third action didn't autocrit either, and knight said he thought I must have done something wrong. After that nothing else seemed to work properly with the battle events. When the knight told me to defend, I defended on my next two or three turns, and then his dialog about me having done something wrong came up again.

I also had taken 4 characters in my party for this battle, having added them in the tree house, and the HP, AP, MP, Crit, and Pri text at the bottom of the battle menu clashingly overlapped the bars of the fourth character. My guess is that I'm not supposed to have 4 characters in my party, and that this is also what may have thrown off the battle event scripting.

Slime of Your Life

After losing the event and being transported to the treehouse, my player character was invisible. I didn't want to reload an earlier save because the previous gameshow showing had been my best run up to that point, so I tried to see if I could manage. After barely managing to get out of the treehouse, my character was still invisible when in other locations, and during the gameshow. Eventually I got my character to turn visible again after going through a gameshow event, but I can't remember which one. (I lost a Lights Out event but I can't remember if that restored my visibility or if I tried the gameshow again and ran another event.)

Also, on my 2nd attempt at this event, the game instantly credited me as losing (the only event I've seen this happen on). While William Williamchester III was giving the intro, a row of 3 slimes were visible and walked down the path to where my player character was standing, and then they disappeared. When the event started, three explosions instantly took place where the slimes disappeared and the event ended with a loss.

Zombie Nation

I encountered the same bug you listed. What's odd is that after the first battle, the second battle initiates almost instantly and interrupts William Williamchester III's (premature) dialog, such that his dialog window carries over into the battle. When I win the second battle, the victory fanfare sometimes plays twice in a row and it looks like the EXP rewards get repeated as well.

Also, I've seen some glitchy things happen at the beginning of the map, before phase 1 actually starts. Sometimes the zombie graphics will disappear and not reappear until phase 1 starts, and sometimes the nearest zombie will get a question mark over its head and disappear as if it fell down a hole, even though it's in the middle of some grass.

Island Hop

The game instantly credited with winning as soon as the event started (after the instructions) on my 1st, 2nd, and 3rd times playing the event. During my 4th time, the event ran like normal. On my 5th time, the Beacon appeared at the starting point immediately after the event started, and hence I won immediately.

Lights Out

The event played as normal the 1st time I played it (though unfortunately my player character was still invisible from the Slime of Your Life glitch). But the game instantly credited me with winning during my 2rd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th time playing the event.

That several gameshow events grant instant wins on some occasions but not on others makes me suspect that there's some switch or variable being reused across multiple gameshow events, either accidentally or purposely but not being reset properly between the events.

Tone Death

During my 2nd and 3rd time playing the event, sounds were constantly playing in background. This did not occur during my 1st attempt at the event.

Items

I also encountered the same bug you mentioned about the cookie items. The strange targeting behavior also seems to change based on how many party members are in the active party:

2 party members: the item automatically applied to the 2nd party member, without any selection option
3 party members: auto-applied to the 3rd member, without selection option
4 party members: selection auto-highlighted the 4th character, but the selection can't be changed
5 party members: auto-applied to the 5th member, without selection option
6 party members: selection auto-highlighted the 3rd character, but the selection can't be changed (not sure why it would highlight the 3rd character, of all things)

Riverside

The free Fae Candy at the candy store didn't trigger on Friday, though the dialog for the little girl NPC outside the store did.

---
Minor bugs:

Band of Bothers

1. It's easy for the player to basically cheat by causing the game window to lose focus and thereby pausing the game screen. I can't think of any way to really prevent this short of locking the game to full screen or something.

2. On the ~8th-10th attempt at this event, I found that the first column of monsters is visible on the left hand side after the event has completed, for about a second before the scene changes to the contestants bench. This did not occur on my first ~6th-7th attempts at this event.

Memory Lane
1. Like Band of Bothers, it's easy for the player to cheat by pausing the game window.

2. On my 3rd and 4th attempts at this event, some of the item events (about a third of them) would show their "uncovered" graphic (sword, helment, roast chicken, etc.) and then change their graphic to the covered ? tables sometime after William Williamchester III started speaking. On my 6th attempt, some of the item events showed no graphic at all, and then changed graphic to the covered ? tables. These things did not happen during my first 3 attempts at this event.

Party Crashers

1. The player can't quite cheat at this event like the above two events, because if the window loses focus, when the focus is resumed the animations will sometimes skip/speed up for a brief moment and it's very easy to lose track of the real princess during this time. However, this also means that if the player did lose focus for any other reason besides the intention of cheating, and tried to resume as normal, it could cause them to lose the event.

2. On my 2nd attempt at this event, all the "imposter" events were visible standing over the map as soon as the map appeared. When it was that imposter's turn to walk into position, the event would disappear and reappear at the top of the map and walk into position as normal. This did not occur during my 1st attempt at the event.

Apex Mode glitch

Sometimes a character will start a battle in Apex mode. (I'm not entirely clear whether this is supposed to happen every time that it does--do Crit counters carry over from previous days? And sometimes I feel like it happens even if I didn't notice any recent Crits.) When this happens, the character often won't act after selecting their turn, but will take their action immediately after the other party member has finished selecting their action, almost as if it were functioning like the default turn-based battle system

Walkthrough event.

I was able to walk through the statue on north end of Riverside.

Replayed message after Pyretti scene

This one is pretty minor. On day 1, I talked to Pyretti at the treehouse enough times to trigger the flashback scene about how Nytes and Pyretti first bet at the Bakery. When the scene changed back to the treehouse took place, the message about talking to party members and using the ladder to leave treehouse when you're ready to begin your day replays. Again, pretty minor, and possibly helpful, but it did feel slightly awkward or possibly unintended.

Description texts running outside windows

A number of description texts for skills or items run outside the text window so that they're not entirely visible. Examples include:

Skills: Tailwinds, Tidal Wave, Breath of Fire, Palisade of Flames
Items: Pizza, Insanely Polished Sword

Typos

1. In the description text of the skill Crosswinds, subsequent is spelled "subsuequent"
2. In the description text of the skill Wind Sheath, "TP" is written where it should read "AP."

--
EDIT #1: Added more to the list of major bugs

EDIT #2: Added list of minor bugs.

**Wavelength** · 09-08-2013, 09:05 AM

Re: Beta Test Thread: "How Badly"

Wow! I am SO lucky to have you testing my game! That is one impressive list of major bugs.

Gold Balance: You're a bit ahead of the curve right now for the third goal, which is supposed to be the hardest. Did the first two feel close, or were they (delicious, delicious) cake?

Tutorial Battle: Great catch!! You're right about the four combatants screwing things up. I have a lot of conditional checks in there for Nytes' status. When you are in your Treehouse, you are never selecting a battle party, but rather temporarily adding so you can, for example, equip them or use a Cookie on them. Near the end of my own testing, I added the freedom to do this to days 2 and 3, which produced this unintended consequence. I will add event lines to remove all other allies before the battle begins.

Slime of Your Life, Island Hopping, and Lights Out auto-success/failure: Looks like you didn't have the slime of your life after all.

I do re-use a lot of switches and variables across events. I'll try to reproduce these, check through the code, and figure out which ones are to blame.
UPDATE: I just reproduced this, surprisingly, on Tone Death (as well as Island Hopping). I'm almost sure, now, that it's a matter of the CHALLENGE SUCCESS and CHALLENGE FAILURE switches not properly being reset between events.

Invisibility: I experienced a lot of bugs with invisibility and black screens as I was creating the game. I thought I got them all - but apparently not. I've had to play Lights Out while invisible a few times for testing purposes - it is NOT easy! XD
UPDATE: I'm seeing some strange auto-loss behavior on the first Slime to hit the switch. But so far I have not been able to reproduce the invisibility bug. Are there any more details you can give me regarding what was happening in your game, the game show, etc., before this happened?
UPDATE 2: Seems like Zombie Nation and its Pits may have been the culprit for the invisibility...

Zombie Nation: The battle/text/fanfare behavior is exactly what I was seeing as well. It's as if the game is trying to go through every loop before it completes the first one. I'm probably going to completely change the way Phase 2 works for the 1.0 version.

Tone Death: I found this bug once, but couldn't ever replicate it again. Thanks for confirming it! I'll see if there's any good way to reset the note-player.
UPDATE: So far, I've been unable to reproduce this bug.

Riverside: Offhand I'm guessing it works once, and then doesn't reset the "New Friday" switch. Should be an easy fix.
UPDATE: I just succeeded in getting the Candy on two consecutive Fridays. I'll look into the code behind it and see if there are any obvious smoking guns; if not, I'll ask you to play around with some variables and test this one again.

Cookies: Thanks for doing all that testing on the behavior! I know there was one time I had all six characters in my party, and it locked on the FIFTH character. So there's probably some hidden factor at play. Maybe you can help me figure it out? Here's the code on, for example, the Rainbow Sugar cookie:

Item's Damage Formula - for actor in $game_party.members; actor.remove_state(59); end; b.add_state(59)

Run Common Event: Rainbow Sugar Cookie

* Show Choices: Raise Attack (ATK +2), Raise Defense (DEF +1)
** When Raise Attack (ATK +2)
*** Control Switches: #50 (Cookie Switch) = ON
** When Raise Defense (DEF +1)
*** Control Switches: #50 (Cookie Switch) = OFF
* Branch End (Cancel is disallowed)
* SCRIPT: for actor in $game_party.members
~~~~~~~~~if actor.state?(59)
~~~~~~~~~$game_variables[3] = actor.id
~~~~~~~~~actor.remove_state(59)
~~~~~~~~~end
~~~~~~~~~end
* Conditional Branch: If #50 (Cookie Switch) == ON
** Change Parameters: Variable [#30: Item Target], ATK +2
* Else
** Change Parameters: Variable [#30: Item Target], DEF +1
* Branch End
* Change State: Entire Party, Remove State #59 (Dummy State 1)

I just tried changing b.add_state(59) to a.add_state(59) in the battle formula, and adding ' ; 0 ' to the end of it, but neither one had any effect on this bug.

If we can't solve this in the next few days, I'll make it so that the Cookies don't do anything by itself, and a Treehouse event consumes them to raise your stats via eventing. Not nearly as cool, but better than losing control.

Once again, man, THANK YOU for finding all this.

**TheHonorableRyu** · 09-08-2013, 10:42 AM

Re: Beta Test Thread: "How Badly"

Originally posted by Wavelength View Post

When you are in your Treehouse, you are never selecting a battle party, but rather temporarily adding so you can, for example, equip them or use a Cookie on them.

At this point, is there a reason to have it so that you have to add the characters to your party? Messages with the other characters (e.g., Rhyss at the Library, Pyretti with the girl in front of the candy store) trigger regardless of who is or isn't in your party, and of course you select your two party members before entering the gameshow anyway.

Why not have all six characters in your party whenever you're in the treehouse? Almost any time I wanted to use a Cookie item, check stats, or equip characters I wanted to have all six characters in my party to look at for comparison. It just seems like a minor inconvenience to have to walk over and select all of them every time.

Slime of Your Life, Island Hopping, and Lights Out auto-success/failure: Looks like you didn't have the slime of your life after all.

I do re-use a lot of switches and variables across events. I'll try to reproduce these, check through the code, and figure out which ones are to blame.

Invisibility: I experienced a lot of bugs with invisibility and black screens as I was creating the game. I thought I got them all - but apparently not. I've had to play Lights Out while invisible a few times for testing purposes - it is NOT easy! XD
UPDATE: I'm seeing some strange auto-loss behavior on the first Slime to hit the switch. But so far I have not been able to reproduce the invisibility bug.

Yeah, I somehow managed to get around the first corner during invisible LightsOut, but didn't get much farther than that!

This is just a wild guess, but on my first attempt at Zombie Nation I actually fell down a hole before any of the zombies, and it wasn't after then that I experienced any of the major bugs. There may be no causal relationship at all, but it's possible that it could be one of those unexpected outcomes (that you, as the creator, are less likely to playtest through) that throws other things off.

Riverside: Offhand I'm guessing it works once, and then doesn't reset the "New Friday" switch. Should be an easy fix.
UPDATE: I just succeeded in getting the Candy on two consecutive Fridays. I'll look into the code behind it and see if there are any obvious smoking guns; if not, I'll ask you to play around with some variables and test this one again.

If it's any help:
-I'm almost certain that I didn't visit the candy store on a previous Friday. I purposely visited the candy store on a Friday to see the event for the first time, wondering how it would play out. When nothing happened, I checked my inventory and saw only the 1 x Fae Candy that I knew I previously got as a reward during the gameshow.
-I visited the candy store on a Friday during the second arc (the 7500 gold loan).

Cookies: Thanks for doing all that testing on the behavior! I know there was one time I had all six characters in my party, and it locked on the FIFTH character. So there's probably some hidden factor at play. Maybe you can help me figure it out? Here's the code on, for example, the Rainbow Sugar cookie:

Item's Damage Formula - for actor in $game_party.members; actor.remove_state(59); end; b.add_state(59)

Run Common Event: Rainbow Sugar Cookie

* Show Choices: Raise Attack (ATK +2), Raise Defense (DEF +1)
** When Raise Attack (ATK +2)
*** Control Switches: #50 (Cookie Switch) = ON
** When Raise Defense (DEF +1)
*** Control Switches: #50 (Cookie Switch) = OFF
* Branch End (Cancel is disallowed)
* SCRIPT: for actor in $game_party.members
~~~~~~~~~if actor.state?(59)
~~~~~~~~~$game_variables[3] = actor.id
~~~~~~~~~actor.remove_state(59)
~~~~~~~~~end
~~~~~~~~~end
* Conditional Branch: If #50 (Cookie Switch) == ON
** Change Parameters: Variable [#30: Item Target], ATK +2
* Else
** Change Parameters: Variable [#30: Item Target], DEF +1
* Branch End
* Change State: Entire Party, Remove State #59 (Dummy State 1)

I just tried changing b.add_state(59) to a.add_state(59) in the battle formula, and adding ' ; 0 ' to the end of it, but neither one had any effect on this bug.

I'll take a closer look at this later. For now, which part of the scripting do you intend would allow the player to select their target? I'm guessing the item scope in the database is set to "user"?

I'll respond to the rest of the contents of your post in future posts.

I added a minor bugs section to my previous post. I also did complete the game a few hours ago, and I'll respond with overall/balance comments as well.

**Wavelength** · 09-08-2013, 10:48 AM

Re: Beta Test Thread: "How Badly"

Nice list of minor bugs, too.

Band of Bothers:
1) This was in my head when I was designing the memory/concentration games, since I remember people talking about how they'd write down the orders in Hell's Dining Room. I couldn't think of any good way to create the game without making it abusable by using tools outside the game (i.e. freezing the window, screenshots, etc.), so ultimately I decided it's part of the game experience and if the player wants to cheat, it's no skin off my beak.
2) It's interesting that you escaped this minor display bug for so long. Once the more major ones are out of the way, I'll see if I can figure out the cause of it. But it won't be before 1.0.

Memory Lane:
1) As above
2) I want to check to see whether those graphics change between displaying and starting the event. If they don't, this bug may be worth investigating for 1.0.
Update 9/10: I just checked and it looks like the things hiding under the tables do change between the display bug and the start of the actual event. Therefore this cannot affect gameplay, and I don't need to investigate a fix for it until a later version (v2.0 or so). This was still a good catch, though, thanks Ryu.

Party Crashers:
1) In your face, cheaters! XD
2) Heh, bet this one was funny to see. I actually had never seen this happen, probably because of the way I tested the event. It's definitely one I want to correct if possible. Question: when this happened, was the Guest of Honor the same (between the King, Princess, Tycoon, and Rabbi Ben), or different, than the previous one?

Apex Mode: Characters can start a battle in Apex Mode if they get their 5th Critical by finishing off the last enemy in a party. Ideally I'd like them to start at 4 CP in the next battle if this happens, but programatically I think this would be very hard to do. I'm okay with the idea of characters starting in Apex. What I am concerned about is that this can temporarily break the Individual Turns system, as you described in the second part of this bug. I appreciate you pointing this out, since I had seen similar behavior a few times and wasn't able to attribute it to the first-turn Apex. Finally, the carry-over of CP between days was intentional, because originally crits were harder to get than they are now, but it would also be easy to change. This is one I'll probably decide by player feedback. Do you like that it carries over, or does it seem too irregular to you?
Update: It looks like this gives your other character(s) one free turn. While I'm not thrilled about this, at least it works in the player's favor. Let's look out for any other times where the "Single Turns" system breaks... if this is the only spot, I'm okay with letting it slide into 1.0, and correct for 1.1 (a minor update after 1.0) once I have the time to extensively test the consequences of fixing it. If it's causing any other problems, I'll try to get it for 1.0.

Walkthrough: I'll fix this immediately; thanks!

Replayed Messages in Treehouse: This can be reproduced in any day with a message (such as a 'You have 3 days left to raise Gold' message), by leaving the Treehouse and then returning to it. Or, as you noticed, by triggering the Pyretti flashback scene. I intend to add switches and conditional branches to each Message in 1.0, so that this doesn't happen.

Description Texts: Much appreciated. I knew some of these existed, but hadn't been able to track them all down. Any items that you or the other testers find where text runs over will be corrected for 1.0.

Typos: Thanks! Will correct these immediately.

**Wavelength** · 09-08-2013, 11:24 AM

Re: Beta Test Thread: "How Badly"

Originally posted by TheHonorableRyu View Post

At this point, is there a reason to have it so that you have to add the characters to your party? Messages with the other characters (e.g., Rhyss at the Library, Pyretti with the girl in front of the candy store) trigger regardless of who is or isn't in your party, and of course you select your two party members before entering the gameshow anyway.

Why not have all six characters in your party whenever you're in the treehouse? Almost any time I wanted to use a Cookie item, check stats, or equip characters I wanted to have all six characters in my party to look at for comparison. It just seems like a minor inconvenience to have to walk over and select all of them every time.

Yeah, I think that's a good idea. I can see it being a problem at Riverside, where I think you're shown the attack/defense increases for items for only the first four members of your party, but still, I think you're right; it's probably worth it to just have all six members available outside the TV Studio.

Yeah, I somehow managed to get around the first corner during invisible LightsOut, but didn't get much farther than that!

Future versions (probably starting in 2.0) will have a way to play any minigame you want without visiting the Studio (either as a separate Gameplay Mode, or as a function of the Home Game collectible item). If I ever get around to introducing "Hardcore Challenges" to these minigames, I think Invisible Lights-Out will have to be one of them!

This is just a wild guess, but on my first attempt at Zombie Nation I actually fell down a hole before any of the zombies, and it wasn't after then that I experienced any of the major bugs. There may be no causal relationship at all, but it's possible that it could be one of those unexpected outcomes (that you, as the creator, are less likely to playtest through) that throws other things off.

I'll definitely try this! It makes some level of sense, since I wasn't able to to replicate the non-battle bugs you found, and I haven't fallen down a pit since April. Thanks!

If it's any help:
-I'm almost certain that I didn't visit the candy store on a previous Friday. I purposely visited the candy store on a Friday to see the event for the first time, wondering how it would play out. When nothing happened, I checked my inventory and saw only the 1 x Fae Candy that I knew I previously got as a reward during the gameshow.
-I visited the candy store on a Friday during the second arc (the 7500 gold loan).

Thanks for the details. Still unable to reproduce this one in play, but haven't checked the code yet.

I'll take a closer look at this later. For now, which part of the scripting do you intend would allow the player to select their target? I'm guessing the item scope in the database is set to "user"?

Yes, the scope is set to "user". I figured the game itself should let me choose who to use an Item on, so I didn't script anything to give that selection. What I'm intending is that the player selects the target, then the item's damage formula adds State 59 to the target, then the player picks which stat to increase. After that, the game should populate Variable 30 (in my post, I accidentally typed 3 instead of 30, but the code correctly says 30) with the ID of the actor, and then raises the appropriate stat for the actor whose ID is populated in Variable 30. The stat-increase part of this seems to be working correctly most of the time, but the natural in-game selection of an actor is fubar'ed for some reason.

I'll respond to the rest of the contents of your post in future posts.

I added a minor bugs section to my previous post. I also did complete the game a few hours ago, and I'll respond with overall/balance comments as well.

Congrats on completing the game! It sounds like even with the weird minigame behavior in some spots, and having to dodge Slime of Your Life every time, you managed to hit all three goals without cheating. Nicely done!

Please let me know (whenever you get around to your overall comments) the general levels of your characters at the end, and approximately how much Gold you finished with (before paying off the 15K balloon payment).

Can't wait to hear your overall thoughts.

**Wavelength** · 09-08-2013, 12:24 PM

Re: Beta Test Thread: "How Badly"

I just reproduced the invisibility by falling down the pit in Zombie Nation! I think I may have figured out what's causing this. Here's my theory: the Zombie Nation pit uses the Move Route functionality to turn your character invisible. Most other places use Transparency: Off, which is corrected with Transparency: On. I know the Library's door uses Move Route to do this, so I immediately went there after failing an Invisible Island-Hopping. That made my characters visible again.

So I'm certainly going to add a Move Route: Player Invisibility Off to the core Game Show loop. I'll also examine the Zombie Nation pits to see if there's anything that's likely to screw up other minigames. Hopefully I don't get eaten by a Zombie while I'm down there. Wish me luck!

EDIT: Hey, I'm wondering... do you remember if maybe you played Slime of Your Life shortly after Zombie Nation? SoYL is not an event where you'd necessarily notice that your character was invisible, since you don't move around. I have a feeling the Zombie Pit (or maybe another Move Route: Invisible) caused the invisibility, and you only noticed it after you were transported back to the Treehouse after those wacky Slimes got you.

**Kefka Jr.** · 09-08-2013, 12:55 PM

Re: Beta Test Thread: "How Badly"

Wow, now this is testing!

I'm downloading the game now. With my French Connection it'll be a while before I have it, but I'm glad to be part of the team.

**Wavelength** · 09-08-2013, 01:14 PM

Re: Beta Test Thread: "How Badly"

Also, I looked through a few of the events that use the CHALLENGE SUCCESS and CHALLENGE FAILURE switches, and indeed they sometimes don't reset as they should. I added lines to the Game Shop Main Loop to turn these switches off, as well as a switch that's used to check to see whether the player is KO'ed (this could be the reason for the Auto-Loss on SoYL).

I'm going to look through the events to make sure there aren't any other factors causing the Auto Wins/Losses, and test these events to make sure that the fix I just made solves the problem. But I'm going to do so after the 1pm NFL games

Once I've gotten most of the major bugs out of the way, I'll probably release a 0.1 version of the Beta (probably tomorrow night). This is strictly optional for you, Ryu, since you already completed the game and I don't want you to play through twice unless you really want to. But I think it will be useful for the other Beta testers, plus you'll be able to play any of the minigames you enjoyed but weren't able to play properly due to bugs.

**Ωbright** · 09-08-2013, 03:10 PM

Re: Beta Test Thread: "How Badly"

MAN...Ryu finished while I was still downloading...

**Wavelength** · 09-08-2013, 07:02 PM

Re: Beta Test Thread: "How Badly"

It's very cool to be taking on these final few challenges all together!

Kefka & Obi - I know you're both very busy with different things, so thanks a ton for trying to make room in this short time window I've given you! Looking forward to having you try it and hearing your thoughts.

If you don't think you'll have time to finish the game, you can use the "Time Control" Beta Utility option to skip through things as you need to. It's perfectly fine.

Ryu - I looked into the code behind the "Faerie Friday", and everything looks good to me. Here are some of the switches and variables to work with if you want to try to reproduce it:

Variable 23 is the day of the week. It is evaluated and set in the Treehouse when the "New Day" eventing takes place. It is also evaluated and set when you change the Day # using the Beta Test Utility. It is used in both the girl's dialogue (outside the candy shop) and in the candy store event.

Variable 13 is the Day #. It is NOT used in the Candy Store event, but it is used to set the Day of the Week on the menu. Although it's possible there will be discrepancies between the Day shown on the menu versus the value stored in Var 23, I don't see any place this would happen in practice.

Switch 51 tracks whether or not you've already gotten the Fae Candy. The candy store event sets it to ON when you receive the Fae Candy (and I believe ONLY when you receive the Fae Candy). It is set to OFF as soon as you choose to leave Riverside.

I'm still in awe that you played through the entire game on the first day of Beta, and by the looks of it the other beta testers are in just as much awe. Finding all those high-priority issues so quickly was a giant help to this effort. Thank you.

For all of you - I think the Auto Win/Loss problems are probably the most significant ones found so far. The good news is that you should be able to solve most of them (for the span of one event) by setting Switches 11, 12, and 13 to OFF. You can do this in the Beta Test Utility, which should negate at least the first instance of this bug each time you reset these switches. I'm planning to release the 0.1 version of the game tomorrow night, with this bug and several others fixed.

Also, note that you should be able to solve any Invisibility bug (which I also fixed for v0.1, I think) by visiting the Library. If you encounter an invisibility bug that is not fixed by entering the Library, let me know immediately.

One more thing - at Ryu's suggestion, I'm going to make it so that all six characters are in your party except when you're at the Game Show (or otherwise in battle). However, it's best if the player has some way to move around the players in their party. I was thinking I'd change the "Add X to Party" option for each character in the Treehouse to a "Move Up in Party" option, which would remove all five other characters in your party, then repopulate them all in a fixed order.

So for example choosing "Move Up in Party" for Pyretti would populate the characters as Pyretti-Tielle-Kai-Rhyss-Ismaria (Nytes still remains in the first spot), whereas choosing it for Rhyss would populate them as Rhyss-Ismaria-Pyretti-Tielle-Kai.

Does this sound like it would be pretty user-friendly to you? Any better ideas for keeping all six characters in your party most of the time, while allowing players to move them around if necessary?

**TheHonorableRyu** · 09-08-2013, 09:33 PM

Re: Beta Test Thread: "How Badly"

Originally posted by Wavelength View Post

EDIT: Hey, I'm wondering... do you remember if maybe you played Slime of Your Life shortly after Zombie Nation? SoYL is not an event where you'd necessarily notice that your character was invisible, since you don't move around. I have a feeling the Zombie Pit (or maybe another Move Route: Invisible) caused the invisibility, and you only noticed it after you were transported back to the Treehouse after those wacky Slimes got you.

I think it's very likely. I know I did play Slime of Your Life shortly after Zombie Nation because I remember that destroying a bunch of zombies with Pyretti's Spitfire, getting a lot of EXP, and leveling up, was part of what I considered my best run at the gameshow up until that point such that I didn't want to reload a previous save when I found that my player character was invisible. I was somewhat disoriented by the Zombie Nation glitch (winning to my surprise after only two battles and the associated glitches) and focused on trying to remember and figure out what just happened, so I probably didn't realize that my character was invisible until after I was transported to the treehouse. At the time I interpreted it as the Zombie Nation glitch affecting a further glitch during Slime of Your Life, but since you were able to reproduce the invisibility by falling in the Zombie Nation hole alone, that's probably got to be it instead.

Yes, the scope is set to "user". I figured the game itself should let me choose who to use an Item on, so I didn't script anything to give that selection. What I'm intending is that the player selects the target, then the item's damage formula adds State 59 to the target, then the player picks which stat to increase. After that, the game should populate Variable 30 (in my post, I accidentally typed 3 instead of 30, but the code correctly says 30) with the ID of the actor, and then raises the appropriate stat for the actor whose ID is populated in Variable 30. The stat-increase part of this seems to be working correctly most of the time, but the natural in-game selection of an actor is fubar'ed for some reason.

If the scope is set to User, wouldn't the common event just run without any other target being selected? And if the common event doesn't have a scripted way to target other party members....

I'd expect Scope-->The User to work properly in battle, since your party members take turns being The User. But in the item menu screen there is no "The User." To illustrate, in most JRPGs if I wanted to use a healing potion outside of battle I wouldn't select who would use the potion on someone else unless each party member had separate inventories, which isn't the case in How Badly?. Could it simply be that instead of Scope->The User, what would work in menus outside of battle is Scope-->One Ally?

One more thing - at Ryu's suggestion, I'm going to make it so that all six characters are in your party except when you're at the Game Show (or otherwise in battle). However, it's best if the player has some way to move around the players in their party. I was thinking I'd change the "Add X to Party" option for each character in the Treehouse to a "Move Up in Party" option, which would remove all five other characters in your party, then repopulate them all in a fixed order.

So for example choosing "Move Up in Party" for Pyretti would populate the characters as Pyretti-Tielle-Kai-Rhyss-Ismaria (Nytes still remains in the first spot), whereas choosing it for Rhyss would populate them as Rhyss-Ismaria-Pyretti-Tielle-Kai.

Does this sound like it would be pretty user-friendly to you? Any better ideas for keeping all six characters in your party most of the time, while allowing players to move them around if necessary?

I think there's an (unused) "Formation" option on the menu screen. I tried to select it during my playthrough, but it was perpetually grayed out. If you enabled that function would it do what you needed?

EDIT #3: Here's an rpgmakerweb thread about locking the hero (in our case, Nytes) to a position in the party for use in the Formation command, in case you wanted to use this method while still always keeping Nytes in the first spot. If you didn't use the Formation command, the method you described would be just fine, but in that case would it be a good idea to wipe the Formation command from the menu, since the player can't select it anyway?

EDIT:

Originally posted by Wavelength View Post

Ryu - I looked into the code behind the "Faerie Friday", and everything looks good to me. Here are some of the switches and variables to work with if you want to try to reproduce it:
....

I'll definitely give it a try. It seems like there's not much that could go wrong with something like this, and yet I'm sure that the event didn't trigger on the Friday I was there in Riverside. It's a fairly minor glitch, since it's probably almost always better to do the game show on a Friday, but still this is the biggest head scratcher, IMO. My only other guess at this point is that the "Got Fae Candy" switch was somehow accidentally triggered by another event such that it was On before I entered Riverside.

Another EDIT: I decided to load my latest save and first-thing check the value of Switch 51: Got Faerie Candy using the Debug crystal. The switch does in fact read ON, even though I'm not in Riverside.

As far as debugging when the switch would have been turned on outside of Riverside, it's likely that I did not save my game after visiting Riverside on the Friday the free Faerie Candy event didn't trigger or any time thereafter. (I did the gameshow every day it was available, used the Library on most off days, tended to hoard money rather than spend money on items or equipment, and got my money through DreamBay rather than through selling items and equipment during the last half of the game.) That is, it's likely that switch 51 was turned ON once before I entered Riverside on that Friday, that I reloaded my save when I saw that the candy store didn't give the free Faerie Candy, and that Switch 51 simply stayed ON from before without having to be turned ON a second time.

**Simplest fix for v1.0: Turn Switch 51 OFF whenever you enter Riverside. It could take forever to find where in the events Switch 51 would have been accidentally turned ON.

Please let me know (whenever you get around to your overall comments) the general levels of your characters at the end, and approximately how much Gold you finished with (before paying off the 15K balloon payment).

Can't wait to hear your overall thoughts.

I'll say more later, but here's some basic tidbits:

I finished the game with about 24,000 gold and a Jewelry Box on DreamBay before the 15K payment. I got very good at bidding by taking notes on previous outcomes. So I could fairly reliably get the events I knew I could succeed at (Zombie Nation: I could reliably get down to 7 or less zombies and win the battles easily; 8-bit Cheater: fairly easy to win, just got to count on taking some damage; Memory Lane: jackpot; Don't Count Your Dragons; Ogre Loaded, Tidal Sequence, and the other battle events once my levels were higher) and avoid the ones I couldn't (Ice Scream: due to being bad at it and not being able to get lower highest bids; Slime of Your Life: due to being bad at it and the auto-loss glitch; Tone Death due to the sound glitch). I think I got to the final showdown and won every time during the 3rd arc.

I barely made the first and second deadlines (even with the autograph and hidden 500 gold freebie for the first) with something like 2511 gold and 7534 gold, because I was still getting a feel for the bidding and gameshow events. I accepted a lot of mediocre runs without save scumming. It's hard to take my playthrough as standard, because it was affected by auto-wins and auto-losses/sabotage, but overall the money goals felt fair.

Ending levels (without having used any of my six Chocolate Monster cookies):

-Nytes, Kai, Rhyss, and Ismaria: lvl 6
-Pyretti, and Tielle: lvl 7

I think I liked playing as Tielle, Pyretti + Nytes (tie), Kai, and Rhyss + Ismaria (tie) in that order.

-Tielle, Pyretti, and Nytes learned effective ~30 AP/MP skills early on and it always felt like I had enough AP with them.

-With Rhyss and Ismaria I usually felt like they were behind the AP curve. Higher spell costs plus low AGI (less turns to build AP).

-Kai's tanking properties are solid, but I often felt like I actually had an AP excess with him, because most battles had multiple targets/enemies that could be killed individually (with one party member's spells + Kai's normal attacks) before his Scopes could pay off.

-Tielle felt like the best character to me. Energizing Charge, Enervate, and Chain Lightning were all useful for destroying multiple or single foes. Her Invigoration healing spell is really quite useful, and I felt like I usually had enough AP: the extra AP gained on KO with Energizing Charge is great.

-It seems like Rhyss can tank pretty well and defend to accrue AP for his high cost spells, but since so many battles have either 1) multiple enemies, such that you'd want to take out a bunch right off the bat to avoid taking big damage from multiple attacks, or 2) speed/turn-based outcomes, such that bad things happen if you take too long, I didn't find many situations to try it. It looks like I just got a very useful skill with him (Torrential Rains at level 6), but I had completed the main game by then.

**Wavelength** · 09-08-2013, 11:24 PM

Re: Beta Test Thread: "How Badly"

Originally posted by TheHonorableRyu View Post

I think it's very likely. I know I did play Slime of Your Life shortly after Zombie Nation because I remember that destroying a bunch of zombies with Pyretti's Spitfire, getting a lot of EXP, and leveling up, was part of what I considered my best run at the gameshow up until that point such that I didn't want to reload a previous save when I found that my player character was invisible. I was somewhat disoriented by the Zombie Nation glitch (winning to my surprise after only two battles and the associated glitches) and focused on trying to remember and figure out what just happened, so I probably didn't realize that my character was invisible until after I was transported to the treehouse. At the time I interpreted it as the Zombie Nation glitch affecting a further glitch during Slime of Your Life, but since you were able to reproduce the invisibility by falling in the Zombie Nation hole alone, that's probably got to be it instead.

Thanks for the extra details - so far my fix seems to have worked here.

If the scope is set to User, wouldn't the common event just run without any other target being selected? And if the common event doesn't have a scripted way to target other party members....

I'd expect Scope-->The User to work properly in battle, since your party members take turns being The User. But in the item menu screen there is no "The User." To illustrate, in most JRPGs if I wanted to use a healing potion outside of battle I wouldn't select who would use the potion on someone else unless each party member had separate inventories, which isn't the case in How Badly?. Could it simply be that instead of Scope->The User, what would work in menus outside of battle is Scope-->One Ally?

Booyah! Nice call on this one; I set the Cookies to One Ally and they all worked perfectly.

I think this is a bug in VX Ace, though. I tried doing the same thing with healing items, and the selection locked onto a character, usually the last character that I had viewed in the Status screen. If this was intended, it means that you basically cannot create an item with "The User" and "Usable Anytime" and expect it to work correctly.

At any rate, I don't NEED To create a User-only item that's usable from the menu, so it'll work for me! Thanks for this great catch.

I think there's an (unused) "Formation" option on the menu screen. I tried to select it during my playthrough, but it was perpetually grayed out. If you enabled that function would it do what you needed?

The problem with this, and the reason why I disabled it for the entire game, is that it lets you change someone else to your first character and, for example, walk around as Tielle and talk to another Tielle. There's no way to lock one character in place in the party, is there? (I suppose I could code something that automatically changed all the positions back, but it would be unintuitive to the player.)

EDIT: Just saw your third edit. Thanks a ton for this link! I will probably use Modern Algebra's script in v1.1. But with just a few days left until the contest, I'm really paranoid about adding someone else's code into my game, so I'll use the remove-add cycle as a stopgap.

EDIT

:
I'll definitely give it a try. It seems like there's not much that could go wrong with something like this, and yet I'm sure that the event didn't trigger on the Friday I was there in Riverside. It's a fairly minor glitch, since it's probably almost always better to do the game show on a Friday, but still this is the biggest head scratcher, IMO. My only other guess at this point is that the "Got Fae Candy" switch was somehow accidentally triggered by another event such that it was On before I entered Riverside.

Another EDIT: I decided to load my latest save and first-thing check the value of Switch 51: Got Faerie Candy using the Debug crystal. The switch does in fact read ON, even though I'm not in Riverside.

As far as debugging when the switch would have been turned on outside of Riverside, it's likely that I did not save my game after visiting Riverside on the Friday the free Faerie Candy event didn't trigger or any time thereafter. (I did the gameshow every day it was available, used the Library on most off days, tended to hoard money rather than spend money on items or equipment, and got my money through DreamBay rather than through selling items and equipment.) That is, it's likely that switch 51 was turned ON once before I entered Riverside on that Friday, that I reloaded my save when I saw that the candy store didn't give the free Faerie Candy, and that Switch 51 simply stayed ON from before without having to be turned ON a second time.

Here's the weird thing, my friend: Switch 51 should be turning OFF every time you leave Riverside, even if it's already OFF. There's no opportunity for it to stay OFF. Weird, huh?

Also, thanks for the details about the general flow of your gameplay. I'd love to hear this kind of thing from everyone who plays, because ideally I want all kinds of different strategies to be balanced well against each other, and I feel like I'm only halfway there at best.

I'll say more later, but here's some basic tidbits:

I finished the game with about 24,000 gold and a Jewelry Box on DreamBay before the 15K payment. I got very good at bidding by taking notes on previous outcomes. So I could fairly reliably get the events I knew I could succeed at (Zombie Nation: I could reliably get down to 7 or less zombies and win the battles easily; 8-bit Cheater: fairly easy to win, just got to count on taking some damage; Memory Lane: jackpot; Don't Count Your Dragons; Ogre Loaded, Tidal Sequence, and the other battle events once my levels were higher) and avoid the ones I couldn't (Ice Scream: due to being bad at it and not being able to get lower highest bids; Slime of Your Life: due to being bad at it and the auto-loss glitch; Tone Death due to the sound glitch). I think I got to the final showdown and won every time during the 3rd arc.

Wow!! Even with all the insider knowledge I have, I'm probably batting just over .500. I'm guessing, and hoping, this means you became unusually good once you got a feel for things. There's one other possibility - it's going to be this "learnable" by most people, and I'm simply not good at my own game.

It's actually quite a satisfying feeling to lose fair and square to my own game, when it happens. Makes me feel clever. More clever than I am, perhaps.

In my experience the Dragons and Zombies are too easy (and will be buffed before v1.0), but the other battles sometimes caused me a lot of damage at lower levels. At higher levels it's obviously supposed to get easier, but I'm trying to come up with a good way to balance the curve. Originally, the weapons/armor bonuses were smaller, as were their prices (so that the tradeoff wasn't so large between hoarding gold versus equipping). What scared me about doing it that way was the possibility of players getting, say, three top-level items for the price of one DreamBay treasure. That's not a fun progression. So I went with how it is now, but I wonder whether it's ever worth it to buy stuff for battle when Gold is your score.

The 2.0 version, or maybe even a later 1.X version, will occasionally give you the opportunity to fight (or decline) a random battle (with 3 party members) before visiting the Library, Playground, Bakery, or Riverside for EXP and item drops. If I get the difficulty right, maybe that will help give equips more utility.

I barely made the first and second deadlines (even with the autograph and hidden 500 gold freebie for the first) with something like 2511 gold and 7534 gold, because I was still getting a feel for the bidding and gameshow events. I accepted a lot of mediocre runs without save scumming. It's hard to take my playthrough as standard, because it was affected by auto-wins and auto-losses/sabotage, but overall the money goals felt fair.

Those numbers sound like you had to sell a few items you already had on you in order to win the day, which I'm happy to see, because it means the early balance isn't as easy as I thought.

Oh, and Slake says thanks.

Ending levels (without having used any of my six Chocolate Monster cookies):

-Nytes, Kai, Rhyss, and Ismaria: lvl 6
-Pyretti, and Tielle: lvl 7

I think I liked playing as Tielle, Pyretti + Nytes (tie), Kai, and Rhyss + Ismaria (tie) in that order.

-Tielle, Pyretti, and Nytes learned effective ~30 AP/MP skills early on and it always felt like I had enough AP with them.
-With Rhyss and Ismaria I usually felt like they were behind the AP curve. Higher spell costs plus low AGI (less turns to build AP).
-Kai's tanking properties are solid, but I often felt like I actually had an AP excess with him, because I could most battles had multiple targets/enemies that could be killed individually (with one party members spells + Kai's normal attacks) before his Scopes could pay off.
-Tielle felt like the best character to me. Energizing Charge, Enervate, and Chain Lightning were all useful for destroying multiple or single foes. Her Invigoration healing spell is really quite useful, and I felt like I usually had enough AP: the extra AP gained on KO with Energizing Charge is great.
-It seems like Rhyss can tank pretty well and defend to accrue AP for his high cost spells, but since so many battles have either 1) multiple enemies, such that you'd want to take out a bunch right off the bat to avoid taking big damage from multiple attacks, or 2) speed/turn-based outcomes, such that bad things happen if you take too long, I didn't find many situations to try it. It looks like I just got a very useful skill with him (Torrential Rains at level 6), but I had completed the main game by then.

Love this kind of feedback!

I was aiming for a Level 7-8 finish for the oft-used characters, so looks like that's working well.

Tielle's probably my favorite to play as, too. At the early levels she's probably the best in battle and it's a lot of fun boosting my AP.

Ismaria's actually one of my favorites, as well. There's no one right way to play the Time class, but I loved trying to get multiple consecutive turns with Chrono Blast, Flash Forward, Timeblazer, and the like. My initial feel was that low Agility was needed to prevent this from getting too out-of-hand, but I'll carefully watch her practicality and listen to feedback on her.

It's troubling that you didn't feel the Scope skills were worth it. They're supposed to be the signature of the Light class. Do you think it would be a good idea to lower the cost of those skills (or maybe to rebalance monster stats to make them tankier), or do you think a bigger rework of Kai's stats and skills is needed?

Rhyss' slow, expensive, style was intentional, but in my most recent playthroughs I've had a similar experience to you and I'm thinking I overdid it. I'll probably raise his Agility slightly and improve the cheap spells a little.

Looking forward to any other thoughts you have, whenever you feel like posting them!

**TheHonorableRyu** · 09-09-2013, 03:20 AM

Re: Beta Test Thread: "How Badly"

Originally posted by Wavelength View Post

Here's the weird thing, my friend: Switch 51 should be turning OFF every time you leave Riverside, even if it's already OFF. There's no opportunity for it to stay OFF. Weird, huh?

Does the trigger for this happen when you touch the Riverside exit and choose to leave? If so, then what I was trying to say earlier is that I think that there wasn't a time when I actually left Riverside so as to turn that switch OFF. I simply reloaded a previous save on that Friday that I didn't get the free Faerie Candy, and I didn't enter and leave Riverside and then save my game any time after that.

**Wavelength** · 09-09-2013, 09:58 AM

Re: Beta Test Thread: "How Badly"

Originally posted by TheHonorableRyu View Post

Does the trigger for this happen when you touch the Riverside exit and choose to leave? If so, then what I was trying to say earlier is that I think that there wasn't a time when I actually left Riverside so as to turn that switch OFF. I simply reloaded a previous save on that Friday that I didn't get the free Faerie Candy, and I didn't enter and leave Riverside and then save my game any time after that.

Oh, I understand what you're saying now!

I find it very weird that reloading a previous save wouldn't reset all the switches to the previous save state, but if that's how it works, then yeah, it would explain why you repeatedly didn't get the Candy.

It would still leave the question of how that switch got turned ON in the first place, though, unless I'm missing something. Because the only place I intentionally turned it on was inside the event where you actually get the Candy.

And yes, the trigger works exactly like you're assuming.

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