This is a great thread, MusicalKitty! Love the images and helpful info for new players.
Thanks for posting it. :D


    

I've completed a few more updates to the prototype that I wanted to make everyone aware of. The most notable are the updates to the starforce menu layout and functionality. Enjoy!

April 30th, 2016
- Updated the robot select menu with better tooltips, showing whether or not the robot has maxed out any stats
- Updated the stat booster items to show a victory message to the user when they've maxed out their base stat, also revised coding a bit to fix a few calculation bugs
- Updated in-battle stat display to also be aware of max stats and dynamically show the star when the base stat is or has been maxed
- Updated the starforce menu with the improvements already made to the World build of the game where robot mugshots are shown in a grid and can be scrolled through to find which stars you already have and are missing

@TheDoc :

Your first request was mentioned in the chat too and is on my short list to hopefully be added by the end of the weekend, so no worries. :)

The second request takes a bit more work, but is another item on my slightly-longer list. I fixed this issue/feature in the dev build, but not in the prototype yet. Once I implement the change and force them to share, I'll also update Reggae's shop so you don't have to buy each ability three times.

Thanks for the suggestions and I'll post about on the news thread when I'm done.

Alright everyone, the scariest update ever has been implemented.... the Battle Point Reboot of 2016! This day shall be remembered forever - either fondly or otherwise - as today is the day leaderboards changed forever.

To anyone whose ranking has gone up, congratulations! To anyone whose ranking has gone down... I'm so sorry. To sum up all that's been updated in this patch, please see the list below:

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- Battle Point Reboot of 2k16 patch applied to the game and all save files, battle points are now equal to the sum of all the best mission records in a player's game rather than something you grind infinitely.

- Any battle points lost during the update have been converted to zenny, so please check your PMs for a message with the details of the conversion. This zenny will be more useful as development continues, so if you can't find something to spend on now then please be patient until I can provide more.

- Leaderboard generation has been optimized slightly to speed up load times.

- Players who created their account on or before today and lost battle points due to the update have had their legacy battle point record added to the final text of their profiles.

- New section added to the leaderboard listing all missions completed by a player and their records of min/max turns, robots, victories/defeats, and most importantly points. A total count of all points for a given player character are listed at the bottom.

- Updated the stat booster items to have permanent effects after battle, permanently incrementing a robot's bonus stats by the boost amount. This should make it much easier to max a robot's stats, though the price of these items has gone up considerably...

- Bonus Missions and Player Battles no longer reward battle points and instead reward zenny now, so hopefully this helps with the above a little.

---

I am preparing for the pitchforks and cries of lost work/effort, but I believe this was the best decision to keep the prototype fair going forward and prevent it from eventually imploding in on itself. Thank you to Mikey (yes, Mikey) for this excellent idea (and I'm not being sarcastic).

I tried to be fair in the compensation and I've made sure to keep your records on your profile, so I hope you'll all cut me some slack as I (slowly) try to improve upon the base game.

Besides, the more stable and balanced I make the foundation, the easier and more likely it is that I'll be able to build upon it and add more significant content in the future.

Thank you all for your comments and for discussing some of them further with me in the chat room. I'll try to respond to the others when I have answers and/or when I implement related solutions. Thank you for your patience. Until then, here are today's updates:

Grenade Man

April 17th
- Grenade Man uploaded to database and added to list of omega factors so he'll appear in-battle (thanks MegaBossMan!)
- Kalinka's Shop updated so her wish-list changes more frequently and is based on currently mission fields
- Robot stats have been capped at 5x their base at level 100 and can no longer reach 9999 outside of battle
- Any overflow from previous grinding on existing robots has been converted into zenny for the player
- A new "System Bot" was created to PM players of important news and patches applied to their save files
- Updated the chat with new Mega Man themed emoticons (thanks MegaBoyX7!)

@TheDoc :

Thanks for the kind words! It's hard sometimes but no matter how much I try, I can't stop thinking about the RPG. I've been working on this thing for what - over 6 years now(?) - and I can't stop relating everything I do in my day-to-day life back to programming this project. Every new game I play my mind is flooded with ideas for the prototype and sometimes it's enough to make me stop playing the new game all-together and run back to my computer. It's unfortunate that the back-end portions of the MMRPG World took so long as there's been very little to show the community, but I'm glad that I'm finally getting close to finishing that portion of the update. A complete rewrite of the mission and battle system is up next. >_>

Regarding BP, see my response to TailsMK4 above - I don't know if a full "reset" is the answer (incoming pitchforks and all) but a more gradual, soft-reset might be the answer. I also addressed the Starforce mechanic in a previous reply but was definitely thinking about your comment and testing. I'm going to see what I can do to boost enemy defenses a bit or at least make the post-game more difficult (as that's when you start collecting Starforce and overpowering yourself). Oh, and Rain Flush has also been kind of un-nerfed a bit. Test it out and let me know what you think.

I look forward to your future assistance in playing around with the new admin panel and adding new content. I'll take screenshots of the thing sometime and post it - right now MBM and I are the only ones who can access it as it's only Admins/Developers. I'll probably open it up to mods and contributors too, but not until things are more complete and less prone to accidentally deleting stuff. :P

@Tom Light :

Thanks for your comment! As for your question... uh... you see... :S

Now that the Prototype and World projects are completely separate, I guess I can start considering other content options. No promises, of course, but the MM5 robot master sprites are all complete at this point and the MM9 ones will be very soon. If it weren't for the abilities still needing to be created, the field backgrounds needing to be designed and animated, appropriate support mechas to be selected, animated, and given their own abilities, then we'd be ready to go! :P

But seriously, it does require a lot of work to add new characters. I'd prefer to only release character when all the ones in a set are complete, but who knows... maybe I throw a curveball and group them some other way. Abilities would definitely need to be created first, and with the MM2 - MM4 robots only having a T1 ability each it feels wrong to move onto MM5+

Sorry if it sounds like I'm the one whining - I kind of am - I just dread the amount of work it takes for even just one new robot. Oh well. I'll figure it out and I'll try to give you guys something new this year. Something... Thanks for playing either way! :P

@MegaBossMan :

It's okay, I kind of sprung the launch dates on you last-minute. At least you made it out in time to party with us! We definitely owe you a huge thanks for the sprites as they are fantastic, though that will become more apparent to everyone else as each week rolls on and they are released. ;)

I'm glad you like the Starforce changes and the core throwing mechanic - they're both such simple ideas and yet it took years of over complexifying to get it right. At least, I feel like we got it right or - at the very least - closer than we've been before. Player battles are the true test of "balance" in mechanics as both sides have access to the same power. The single-player is a lot easier to adjust to compensate - as mentioned it wouldn't be a horrible idea to have some targets hold their own Starforce levels. I need to find a better way of displaying Starforce levels in-battle without it being too overwhelming, but once I do I'll be able to incorporate it more into the main game.

Yesterday I looked into the bug you mentioned and made some adjustments to the code to fix. I turned on the debug mode and watched each calculation in real-time to make sure things were making sense. There were a lot of oddities regarding which modifiers were being applied when, but I think I have it all figured out now. One of the biggest things I noticed were the percentage-based secondary effects being way off. An ability might say "10% chance of boosting speed" but when it actually happened it would apply Starforce and core boost other things that turned into sometimes >100% values. Not good. This has been corrected in all abilities that have secondary effects so you might notice some changes in battle. It's also worth noting that I removed the damage-to-self mechanic of Rain Flush. It's too buggy and Pokémon doesn't do it with Surf so why should I? (jokes!) :P

@TailsMK4 :

As mentioned I un-nerfed Rain Flush a bit. Hopefully it's not too horrible now. If you (all) could play around with it and maybe suggest any numeric tweaks? Like, maybe the damage amount? Maybe it should only hit the target side? what do you think? Or is it viable know? Let me know as I honestly wanted this ability to be way cooler than it turned out to be. :|

I know we've all gone back and forth about better incentives for player battles and it's hard to come to a complete consensus, but I really like the item idea. I'm not sure if it should be a current item or a new one, but I like the idea of distancing player battles from BP grinding. We could even have different tiers of items based on how well you do in that battle and/or how difficult it was, which robots appeared, etc. It would have to be an end-of-battle thing, as robots dropping items is turned off in player battles at present. Either way, excellent idea.
while thinking about this I realized how cool Party Balls from MMPU would be as enemies in battle...

Regarding battle points, it's really quite sad how out-of-hand it's gotten and I'm sorry for that. I mean, I should have foreseen it happening - obviously players were going to use player battles to grind when they have the highest BP in the game and the flavour text flat out encourages you to do so - but I guess I didn't realize the extreme devaluation effect it would have in the long run.

I'd really like to implement that monthly "event" I foreshadowed in the chatroom before. Some kind of global event like a dark pulse or comet or something that comes around once a month or once a year (pending) and "drains" battle points from all players. The amount that it drains would be percentage-based and uniform across the entire leaderboard. Every single player's total BP would go down by 1% (for example) which would - over time - fix this problem without shuffling anyone's relative rankings. I'd program it so that your BP could never drop below 1 point, but it would never get that way unless you flat-out stopped coming to the RPG. And if you did that... maybe it's better that your rank slowly falls over time while newer players have a chance to rise up? Veterans could stay on top by continuing to play, which is only fair. Of course, I feel like I'd need express permission from the community to do this and I'm not sure everyone would be okay with it...
hint, hint, someone should make a poll...

@MegaBoyX7 :

I'm still debating what will and won't be transferred to World as much of it might be too different and incompatible with the new structure. I need the freedom to rename images and move files around in the new system before launch, and if I tried to import legacy posts that reference those file names... we'd have a lot of broken posts. Not to mention the fact that almost every thread in the mechanics, strategies, and bugs forums would be outdated and irrelevant (and confusing to new users).

I'll try to import some stuff, but expect a mostly clean-state as far as the community is concerned. Remember, I'm not taking the MMRPG Prototype offline so your posts won't be lost - they just won't carry over to the new MMRPG World. :P

@ThatOneEnderMan :

Yeah, thanks again the Strike reminder. ^_^ And the core throwing may be fairly weak overall, but there will definitely be instances that it makes sense. At the very least it's a great option when the opponent has ridiculously high life energy or defense and you can barely make a dent otherwise. A super-effective core throw would deal 20% plus an Energy Break would knock off another 15% all in the same turn. At 25% damage output each turn it would take only 4 turns to theoretically knock out any target - no matter how big. Who knows, there may be other instances where throwing cores is the only way to complete a battle...

Also, I noticed you a long time ago! :P

@ThatOneEnderMan :

As far as I remember, you can not use Player Battles to grind any more (no EXP or stat bonuses) so the Starforce nerf shouldn't affect grinding in that context. Unless you mean grinding for BP, in which case I'm sorry for the inconvenience. :|

Regarding Rain Flush, I'm going to keep playing with the values until I get the balance right but I want it to be as similar to Pokémon's "Surf" as possible. That move is widely used and well liked, so they've gotta be doing something right. I'll get there eventually.

The "New Game +" idea is something I definitely like, but what I'm doing with world is more akin to unlocking bonus content in the final version of a game by playing the demo. You'll have to start at the beginning on the campaign like everyone else, but I may allow you to import certain items or carry over specific progress or records - maybe even unlocked robots or some of your battle points - but the exact details are still pending.

As far as the website and game being optimized for mobile, my answer is "yes". I also enjoy checking the website and playing the game on my phone and other mobile devices and the current version of the prototype is not very mobile friendly. As you mentioned, I already started improving on this in the dev version and those changes will absolutely carry over to the mmrpg-world.

Lastly, thanks for mentioning Strike Man! I didn't realize finding him was a problem so I looked into it and found that it was a code issue. The robots from MM10 were not being included in the mission generation functions, so he nor anyone else from that game would appear. I've since updated the code and he should start appearing in battle normally. Let me know when/if you find him. :P

@Meta :
@StupidStudiosN :
@DaCrashBomber :

Thanks to the rest of you for your feedback as well and I'll let you all know of any future developments. :)

Hello everyone, and thanks for your continued patience.

I've come with news of a small update to the Dev Build of the game and a new screenshot to boot.

I've restructured the starforce panel in the main menu to appear and function more like an excel sheet, as was suggested by the community many months ago to great reception. It is now very easy to see which stars you have already and which ones you need simply by scrolling through the robot master mugshots on each side.



Be sure to try it out yourself on the dev build and let us know what you think. Any feedback on the other updates Boss posted about above would also be greatly appreciated. The new hold items are really changing the meta game in (what I believe to be) a good way and the more feedback and testing the better.



With everyone's help I have confidence that we'll be able stabilizable the dev build and then we can finally apply it to the main website.

Thank you!

Hey guys! A new batch of updates have been completed on the developer's preview build of the prototype. See below for the highlights or check the GitHub page for the full list.

- Added new ability subclass field for further categorizing items into consumable, holdable, collectible, etc. Also added sorting patterns for new attack/defense/speed programs.

- Created placeholder files for the new energy/weapon/attack/defense/speed programs - the first exclusively holdable items.

- Increased accuracy of the break moves to match their boost counterparts.

- Updated the MM5 robot masters with their new alts.

- Added subclass of consumable to the score balls.

- Added subclass of treasure for the two screws. They will have no other purpose than to sell.

- Added the consumable subclass to all the pellets, capsules, and tanks, yashichi and extra life. They will not be holdable.

- Added the holdable subclass to all the cores so they would appear properly in select menus.

- Added the collectible class to all the shards as they have no other purpose than to collect (until they fuse into holdable cores, of course).

- Added code for selecting and equipping (or un-equipping) held items to/from a robot master. Right now only cores can be held, but the code here should support all kinds as long as they are subclass "holdable".

- Equipping cores to any non-Copy Core robot will expand their ability compatibility until removed. Copy Cores will only change colour if equipped with a core item.

- Added support for deferred damage/recovery (for abilities like Crash Bomber), and better flags for weakness/resistance/etc. modifiers (for abilities like Drill Blitz).

- Updated Crash Bomber to do normal damage (rather than a percent) based on the user's attack at the time the bomb is created. Made it so triggering too early decreases damage proportionately. Buffed the total damage to a high amount as a tradeoff.

- Updated Search Snake to ignore position modifiers and attack for normal damage regardless of the range so the ability has more utility.

- Updated Drill Blitz so that it specifically ignores resistances and immunities using the new damage option flags. Also buffed the ability slightly.

- Updated the various in-battle target displays (scan, switch, etc.) to be aware of held-items. Held items will now show in the hover popup and the robot's button will be coloured appropriately if that item is a core.

Thanks for playing, and please let me know what you think! :P

The alternate colours for all MM5 robots masters are now complete - this include the two starforce alts AND the darkness alt that all the MM1 - MM4 robots already have. I'll try to get the MM6+ robots done in the next few weeks as well, and then I can focus on some of the other graphic-related work (like abilities). :)

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[[robot]{gravity-man_alt9} [tab]Gravity Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{gravity-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{wave-man_alt9} [tab]Wave Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{wave-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{stone-man_alt9} [tab]Stone Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{stone-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{gyro-man_alt9} [tab]Gyro Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{gyro-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{star-man_alt9} [tab]Star Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{star-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{charge-man_alt9} [tab]Charge Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{charge-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{napalm-man_alt9} [tab]Napalm Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{napalm-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{crystal-man_alt9} [tab]Crystal Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{crystal-man_alt9}]{empty}

The darkness alts for the MM4 robots are also complete. Here are their formatting codes:

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[[robot]{bright-man_alt9} [tab]Bright Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{bright-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{toad-man_alt9} [tab]Toad Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{toad-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{drill-man_alt9} [tab]Drill Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{drill-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{pharaoh-man_alt9} [tab]Pharaoh Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{pharaoh-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{ring-man_alt9} [tab]Ring Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{ring-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{dust-man_alt9} [tab]Dust Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{dust-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{dive-man_alt9} [tab]Dive Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{dive-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{skull-man_alt9} [tab]Skull Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{skull-man_alt9}]{empty}

@Bt Man : I only have two days a week to work on the game and make progress on the update. Finishing these alts is high on the priority list right now because they're part of the story and parts of the game "break" without them. Once the MM4 darkness alts are done I can spread the work around more to other areas of development.

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[[robot]{needle-man_alt9} [tab]Needle Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{needle-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{magnet-man_alt9} [tab]Magnet Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{magnet-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{gemini-man_alt9} [tab]Gemini Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{gemini-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{hard-man_alt9} [tab]Hard Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{hard-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{top-man_alt9} [tab]Top Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{top-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{snake-man_alt9} [tab]Snake Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{snake-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{spark-man_alt9} [tab]Spark Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{spark-man_alt9}]{empty}
[[robot]{shadow-man_alt9} [tab]Shadow Man Σ[tab] [robot:left:base]{shadow-man_alt9}]{empty}

* Looks like I made these ones too dark compared to the others. Expect revisions in the next few days and the MM4 ones to finish up the unlockable batch. Revisions complete, they all use the same darkness levels now. :)

@Bt Man :

Sorry, I was trying to get the formatting correct and test to make sure they actually worked first. Thank you, though - I'm glad they turned out! Some might need tweaking, but overall I think they're pretty cool. :)

All these "dark" alts are saved in the 9th slot of unlockable RMs and can now be used with the following code in the community:

[robot:left:throw]{cut-man_alt9}

So far, only the MM1 robot masters have dark alts created, but eventually I will create sprite for all unlockable RMs. These are NOT the same as Greyscale or Gameboy sprites (which may or may not come later) but are distinctly "dark" versions of the master that tie into the other dark elements in the update's story. When more RMs have dark alts available I'll post here to let you guys know (or get MBM to).

@Tobyjoey :

Thanks Toby - I'm glad you like 'em. And hopefully the damage to the community's RP section isn't too bad. :P