Portrait of Strange Relic: Beta 5.9 (updated 11/29/10)

[Zengar Zombolt]

I dunno, but I take the DOOM music and the fairy death sounds as a yes. :V

[KomeijiKoishi]

I dunno, but I take the DOOM music and the fairy death sounds as a yes. :V

...DOOM music? The stage was silent, and the boss music was the normal one.

[Serela]

...is Nightmare supposed to be impossible?

Srsly, the final card of the first stage has such huge lasers that you can't dodge them.

No, no, they're really easy to dodge o_o Should be a big gap inbetween each laser.

And there should be music, too. For example, Stage 1 Boss Theme.

[KomeijiKoishi]

Oh, that IS the music that's running. I just thought, in Nightmare Mode, I was going to hear NO REMORSE.

[CK Crash]

Remind me to make a not so harpsi-discordant version of Kana's theme. Either that, or you can use this vastly superior version if you can get permission to use it :V

[Stuffman]

The DOOM music file was a midi, which doesn't work right on a lot of XP-era boxes. Nightmare mode was just a (lazy) joke anyway, it won't be there in beta 6.

I'm still waiting on my next set of songs from Russ. He said he was out of commission for a while because one of his pieces of sound hardware died, but he's working on it again now. I'm curious to see how his versions of the remixes come out.

[Suikama]

Oh god Lei Lei's last spell on Nightmare ahahahaha

[MCXD]

It's currently part-way through the 3rd full week of July. How's it going, Stuffman?  :V

I'm pumped too, which is why this thread deserves to be resurrected.

[Stuffman]

I'm not procrastinating anymore, but I still dunno if I'm gonna make it. Remaking Stage 4 is taking much longer than anticipated.

[Angel on the Steps]

Good luck with the next beta I'm really looking forward to that one!

[Lord Phantasm Satori]

speaking of ressurrection, what happened to the guy who was working on the game with arc and ender in it? he released stage 5 early, but I haven't heard of any other news.

oh, and would it be possible to add support for taunts? you know, like a boss would say something or make a different sound when a spellcard is activated, when the fight begins, and when they are defeated.

[Chronojet ⚙ Dragon]

speaking of ressurrection, what happened to the guy who was working on the game with arc and ender in it? he released stage 5 early, but I haven't heard of any other news.

How dare you call Miss Lazuline a boy.

[Lord Phantasm Satori]

does it really matter? the fact that she is a girl doesn't change the point of my statement.

[Azure Lazuline]

I already responded to him in PM since I'd feel bad about posting here without actually adding anything to the discussion. There's no need to take this further. And no, I don't really care if someone calls me a boy, since everyone tends to default to using "him" when they're not sure.

[Stuffman]

BETA 5.9

As promised, I'm not done but I'm releasing what I have. I didn't get nearly as much polishing done as I wanted, but you can play all the remade stages and stage 6 up to the midboss (pictured above, the Prismriver Sisters)! Stage 6 is very early in production, it only works on Normal mode, if you play it on any other difficulty it'll be buggy and crash when you get to the midboss.

Also new is Lunatic mode! As I explained before, I am not a Lunatic level player and thus I cannot playtest at that level. PoSR Lunatic is thus probably extremely unfair but theoretically beatable.

Alright crap let's see if I can remember all the stuff I changed:
- Every stage is way different, Stage 4 is completely new. This is the big thing.
- Some changed spellcards and stuff. Stella got a bunch of stuff changed up.
- Since somebody pointed out that Josette's painting bombs take a really long time to go off but I didn't want to drop them, I changed it so that you only get the painting bombs as a deathbomb. Your focus bomb is the same as your regular one.
- Red type has a new bomb
- New custom shotsheet!
- Some more new songs (good ones, too!)

On the to-do list:
- Finish the damn game
- Maybe do some more work on Lunatic (I will need help with this, I'm tempted to just scrap it)
- Music doesn't loop right still
- Still haven't implemented replay-friendly code
- Enemies in stage 4 need to explode when they die!
- Want to improve Kana's special effects (electricity, object auras)
- Kotohime still has some bullshit that needs adjustment
- New scoring system - this will be exciting and offer a new gameplay mechanic, wait for the next beta!
- Will adjust how many lives you get once the game is finished and I can judge how many are needed, will be tied into the new scoring mechanic. (Until then just Continue like a mofo)

Okay that's all I can think of for now

HAVE AT IT

[Stuffman]

Oh yeah, one more thing, I'd like to hear about how your framerates are doing while playing it, at least compared to 5.5. A lot of stages got improved graphics but I'm worried a bit about performance. Especially Stage 4, though I tried to optimize as best I could.

[Schezo]

Hmm, on normal I got a few slight drops from stage 2 but nothing major.  Stage 4 constantly dropped 4-6 frames with multiple drops to 42 or 53.  It made the dodging hard and yeah.  Stage 5 only dropped when a huge cluster of bullets came on the screen with 1-2 parts of the enemies and on the bosses last spell it would drop every time the bomb went off (although it may have been designed with that in mind  :V).

I do enjoy the new stages and boss optimizations though, great work with the amazing backgrounds.

[Suikama]

It's about time man BV

Edit: There are some oddly cut pictures here and there such as the stage opening picture and jossette's sprite. I think you added an extra pixel when setting a rectangle for some things.

Also got an error and crashed around stage 6

---------------------------
ScriptError「J:\Games\Danmakufu\dnh\script\PoSR\PoSR_Game_Main.txt」
---------------------------
Scriptファイル
J:\Games\Danmakufu\dnh\script\PoSR\PoSR_boss6m_e.txt
が見つかりません(1470行目)
↓
      CreateEnemyBossFromFile(GetCurrentScriptDirectory~"PoSR_boss6m"~difficulty~".txt",cx,-20,0,0,0);

      WaitForZeroEnemy;

      Wai
～～～

[Chronojet ⚙ Dragon]

This is beautiful. Though...

:V at EEEB. People need to use this type of gimmick more often.

[attach=1]

[Furienify]

You are a damn artist, Stuffman. These stages are much better.

Suikama: What shot type were you using? I made it through with Impressionist Red without errors.

[Stuffman]

Also got an error and crashed around stage 6

~~~

J:\Games\Danmakufu\dnh\script\PoSR\PoSR_boss6m_e.txt

That "_e.txt" indicates it was looking for the easy mode file, which doesn't exist; like I said, Stage 6 only has Normal mode right now.

Stage 4 constantly dropped 4-6 frames with multiple drops to 42 or 53.

I was afraid of that. I'll have to see if there's anything else I can do to optimize it.

Out of curiousity, was it worse when you got to the part with the office buildings or about the same as the rest of the base? I'm wondering if it's getting slowdown because it's trying to draw so much, or because it's running through so much code in the drawloop.

Stage 2 probably just has a little too much fog crap going on right now, that might be easy to improve...

[Schezo]

It was about the same as the rest of the base.

[Suikama]

That "_e.txt" indicates it was looking for the easy mode file, which doesn't exist; like I said, Stage 6 only has Normal mode right now.

:colonveeplusalpha:

[Iryan]

 :*

I could list all the things I love about this release, but then we would he here all night, so I will instead just say what I liked about the changes/additions as well as what may need to be improved.

Lurves:
1. Great improvements on the stage danmaku, especially in stage 3 and 4. The former tediousness some segments had is pretty much gone.
2. Great improvements on the stage backgrounds and style, especially stage 4. The fairies with guns and the SoEW Stage 1 homage made me giggle like a little girl.
3. I love your new shotsheet.
4. I like where your story seems to be going. Of course, you always had the best portrait art and best dialogue here, anyways. :3

Creeteeshism:
1. The difficulty of normal mode is pretty much extra mode throughout. If this is intentional, then no problem, but I just thought I'd mention it.
2. Stella's midboss card still bugs be, not anymore because the attack kills you suddenly, you fixed that, but because the arrow bullets looks washed out when used as a laser, especially against the bulet background. Not sure what to do about that, though.
3. While Kotohime's final was somewhat bullshitty in the previous version, her new final I find somewhat annoying and disrupting, mainly because of danmakufu's inability to switch smoothly between the different levels of slowdown.
4. For some reason the dialogue with Rinnosuke didn't appear for me. You might want to look into that.
5. Just a thought: You may want to add an effect object that signals where the bullet spawning takes place in Mask of Red Death.


But otherwise, yeah, well, what can I say?

Great Garage product or greatest Garage product? 

[Suikama]

Oh man hiding the edge of the mountains of stage 2 behind a layer of cloud was brilliant

oh my god Stella's spellcards :*

oh my god stage 4

The difficulty is fine up untill stage 5 where it reaches UFO levels at parts

[RainfallYoshi]

One thing I noticed is that Impressionist Blue's bomb completely wrecks the Prismrivers' shit. It may have to do with the bomb hitting the entire screen and there being 3 targets taking damage from it but it essentially does 3x the damage it would normally do. If you aren't worried with capping the card you can completely wreck it with little effort.

Perhaps you could give them more damage resist or health to compensate?

[Stuffman]

2. Stella's midboss card still bugs be, not anymore because the attack kills you suddenly, you fixed that, but because the arrow bullets looks washed out when used as a laser, especially against the bulet background. Not sure what to do about that, though.

I could make a special high-res arrow bullet just for her!

4. For some reason the dialogue with Rinnosuke didn't appear for me. You might want to look into that.

Oh, I forgot to mention this in my To-Do list: I took it out when I was working on the stage because I got tired of skipping it when I was playtesting, but actually, I am going to remove it from the final version since it kinda interrupts the flow of the game and shift the plot information elsewhere. The Rikas will go into detail about what the forest is, and Kotohime will explain that Rinnosuke had something stolen there. I just didn't get around to rewriting dialogue this release.

One thing I noticed is that Impressionist Blue's bomb completely wrecks the Prismrivers' shit. It may have to do with the bomb hitting the entire screen and there being 3 targets taking damage from it but it essentially does 3x the damage it would normally do. If you aren't worried with capping the card you can completely wreck it with little effort.

Oh whoops. Yeah, two problems here:
- I remembered to give Merlin and Lunasa bomb resistance but not Lyrica, so they're taking about double damage right now from actual bombs
- A bunch of Josette's bombs spawn regular bullets, which are not subject to bomb resistance (this was brought to my attention a while ago, I just hadn't gotten around to changing those bullets into spell objects since I couldn't think of anywhere it mattered in PoSR)

[Iryan]

I could make a special high-res arrow bullet just for her!

That would obviously work.  :derp:

Oh, I forgot to mention this in my To-Do list: I took it out when I was working on the stage because I got tired of skipping it when I was playtesting, but actually, I am going to remove it from the final version since it kinda interrupts the flow of the game and shift the plot information elsewhere. The Rikas will go into detail about what the forest is, and Kotohime will explain that Rinnosuke had something stolen there. I just didn't get around to rewriting dialogue this release.

Yeah, that is probably better. I didn't mind as much back then, but overall you are right. The only problem could be that the end dialogue of Rika and Rikako could get a bit too lengthy, but I am confident that you can handle that.  :3

[Serina]

My Danmakufu crashes when i start the game, but i can see replays. Crazy.
Anyway, by the replay i noticed that the bullets look really pretty and the background too!
Also, this game is awesome. The Kotohime fight is one of the most wonderful things i ever see. hahaha

[sumisumi]

Great update.  This version actually lags less than the last one for me, (the previous version lagged a lot on stage 5.)  New bullet sprites add a nice touch, and the extra polish on the backgrounds is of course nice.

The new stage 4 definitely stands out more than before, and I'm going to have to join Iryan in having giggled like a little girl from the SoEW reference.

The sound effects could probably be a little less obnoxious, though.  Especially during Kotohime's fight, (where it can be hard to hear the song,) (and especially especially during Ginny's midboss card.)  Maybe have louder music?

And I absolutely love the Omnidirectional Extra Extra Extra Bomb.  Kotohime is great.

(It's too bad the next version won't be final, by the way.  Will it have a finished Final and only lack extra?)