Development Blog

Posted by Alonso Martin

Hey guys, it’s about time for another update! This one’s a bit lengthy, so I’ll cut straight to the point.Lots of stuff has happened! Other than making sure the project is walking fine on all fronts, that the team members are getting enough feedback/guidance with their work, and taking care of the administrative/legal/production side of the project, I’ve also worked these past weeks on doing some room/area adjustments to accommodate the new widescreen mode, and adding pretty cool mechanics to the game.

The Spellswitcher
One of these new features is the Spellswitcher! But allow me to give you some context before i explain how it works. After getting some friends to sit down and play around with the game, I realized the way the game handled spell-switching wasn’t very convenient in some situations. You were basically given the option to scroll through spells in realtime with two shoulder buttons, or use the Pause Screen to select the desired spell—overkill. This setup lent itself to complications in special situations.

Let’s suppose you wanted to freeze an enemy and then electrocute it for added damage. Once the enemy was frozen, you had to quickly tap the shoulder button to get to the electric spell. But because you had to do this in real-time, the enemy could become unfrozen if you were too slow, or maybe you scrolled past the spell you wanted and used the wrong one. With enough practice, you could master this system, but it still felt like the design was conceived in the wrong way.

I went back to look at how some of my favorite games handled such situations. Coincidentally, they all had the same pause-menu solution for switching skills/powers—guess that’s where I had inherited my design from. And none offered any shortcuts during gameplay for the same effect. Even if it the process was quick, I’d still rather keep the player out of menus for something as frequent as switching between spells.

But then I looked at Secret of Mana, and I remembered they had a much better way of handling it:

HFA needed something like SoM’s item rings: summoning them stops time, but they don’t take you away from the game. Everything’s just dimmed a little, and you’re given control over a very simple but effective interface. More importantly, because time is stopped, you’re able to come up with gameplay strategies for the following 2-3 seconds if you need to—something you couldn’t do if the action is obscured by a pause menu.

With that in mind, I developed the Spellswitcher for HFA. The video below shows how this feature gives you a lot of control over very precise movements in special situations. Please excuse the poor quality! :D

Click here to watch the VineWith the Spellswitcher, now you simply press & hold a single shoulder button, use your d-pad to select the spell you want, and then you just let go! Much, much better.

And because all the action is paused, you’re now able to react better to dangerous situations, or quickly change spells to attack enemies in the way you need to. If your Fairy has any spells, they’ll also appear in the SpellSwitcher (as seen in the screenshot at the top). More options will appear in the Spellswitcher as the spell count increases, giving the player an easy learning curve.

This might seem like a simple thing, but it does make a big difference with how spells are used. And more importantly, now each player can decide what pacing they want to play the game with when it comes to fighting.

Naturally, you’re still able to switch spells in the Pause Screen, as well as read some information about each one of them.

And what about the now unused shoulder button? Well, I went SOTN-style and mapped it to the Backjump skill, of course!

Private Livestreams
If you pledged for the Private Demo tier or above ($50 or above) and you’d like to peek into the development process of the game, you should drop into our private livestreams! Maybe you’d like to give us your feedback on things we might be doing at the time, or maybe you’d just like to watch us work on the game. We have these private livestreams more often than the public ones, and it’s a nice, direct way to stay in touch with you guys and show you what’s being worked on.

If you already have an account in the forums and have private-backer access, click here to join the private livestreams. If you haven’t yet registered an account, or haven’t yet applied for private access, click here for instructions.

Also, be sure to follow our twitter account to get noticed when we go live!

About update intervals
I apologize about updates not coming as often as some of you might like them. I do try to manage my time to be able to push out informative updates here and then, but because I’m basically in charge of the whole show, I might lag a little behind due to the stuff that needs to be done. Rest assured, I’m working very diligently on the game. I really appreciate your patience and support!