Tag Archives: ephemeral unnatural balance

EUB Patch 1.01

EUB released a bit over a week ago, and we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from players about what they love about the game, as well as what they don’t like. We’ve been working this past week to fix many issues and better balance the game, and we’re proud to release version 1.01.

BALANCE CHANGES

We’ve made a lot of balance changes to the game to lower the difficulty and make the player characters easier to use.

PLAYER BALANCE

RIN

Rin should be able to handle stages well with her spread shots. She should still do acceptable damage to bosses. We’ve increased her ability to do both.

  • Massively increased unfocused shot damage. It’s painful now!
  • Changed her focused shot. She will do more damage to enemies directly in front of her at higher power levels, and her shots will spread less to the sides.

KASEN

Kasen is the forward focus shot. She should do more damage than the others, but her spread being too narrow and her rocks firing infrequently made achieving this difficult.

  • Options are now further to her left/right, giving her wider range.
  • Fires rocks more frequently. DPS should be kept the same, but missing a rock is less of a damage loss.

TOKIKO

We’re not going to change her a ton for now – instead we’re making her options go back to her earlier so she’s a bit harder to use. You’ll have to stay focused more to keep her options in place.

  • Tokiko’s options now snap back to her 33% faster (15 frames —> 10 frames).

ALL

More damage is more fun! Bombs will be better at destroying enemies.

  • Bombs do slightly more damage

ENEMY BALANCE

The game has generally been made easier. If you thought that Easy Mode was way too hard, please feel free to give it another try!

  • Easy, Normal, Hard, and Lunatic have all been made easier. The changes made are proportional to how low the difficulty is (Easy Mode is much easier, Lunatic has barely been touched).
  • Extra and Elite Extra have also been changed. Extra has been made quite a bit easier, while Elite Extra received minor changes.

There’s too many balance changes to list every individual thing, but here are some notable ones:

  • Bubble bullets have a significantly smaller hitbox. Large glowing bullets also have smaller hitboxes.
  • Changed the pattern of the lasers fired by the stage 2 midboss’s nonspell on Easy and Normal.
  • Significantly reduced the difficulty of the stage 2 boss’s first nonspell.
  • Significantly changed the patterns fired by the stage 3 midboss.
  • Significantly changed the pattern fired in the stage 4 boss’s second spell on Easy and Normal.
  • Significantly changed the pattern fired by the stage 6 boss during their first nonspell.

NEW STUFF

  • We’ve added a manual to the game! It goes into detail about how the game works and explains the Discord mechanic.
  • We’ve added a new option to turn off Discord’s screen inversion effect. Instead, you’ll get a circle around the player indicating that you’re in Discord. This should be very helpful for people who dislike the effect.
  • Added an unused version of the Extra boss theme. It can be listened to in the music room if you manage to hear the current version of the Extra boss theme.
  • The missing music room comments have been added to the game.

BUGFIXES

  • Fixed a bug where life pieces generated through Discord could be duplicated.
  • Fixed a bug where Stage 4’s second midboss had the wrong spellcard name on certain difficulties.
  • Fixed a bug where Stage 6’s theme looped improperly.
  • Fixed a bug where spellcard histories would display improperly. They were always recorded properly.
  • Fixed a bug where Momiji’s first spellcard would not become more dangerous during Discord on Hard and Lunatic.
  • Fixed a bug where replays would break horribly during the Extra Stage.
  • Fixed a bug where the Extra Stage would error if played with Kasen in Japanese.
  • Fixed a bug where it was possible to bomb during Spell Practice.
  • Fixed some typos.
  • Fixed many visual bugs/issues.

KNOWN ISSUES

  • Extra Stage replays might desync during the last attack. If you want to be extremely sure that your gameplay is saved, you might want to record the game while playing Extra. We are trying our best to fix this!
  • There are some spacing issues during Japanese endings. These will be fixed in a later patch.

EUB System Overhaul: Hitboxes!

This somehow became a lengthy rambling post, if you want to look at the shiny hitboxes check the pictures below

Howdy. It’s me, Trickysticks, here with the first devlog in quite a long time. Porygon Productions has been a bit quiet lately, but we’ve definitely been putting work into the game. A lot of what we’ve done since the last update is fairly boring technical stuff, such as updating ancient code to be compatible with all of the new libraries we’re using, lots of bugfixes, and fixing Porygon’s efforts to break half the game by misspelling things. Whoops.

One of the less boring technical changes has serious impact on gameplay, though. There have been changes to one of the fundamentals of how all danmaku-based games work: hitboxes.

If I tell Danmakufu that a 10 pixel by 10 pixel area on an image is a shot, then it’ll take whatever’s in that area, render it, and give it a hitbox. Simple enough – it gets tedious with a few hundred bullets but that’s life. It helps that there’s ways to automate this process. This explains why shot sheets look like this.

Hitboxes are generated by finding the center of the rectangle you give Danmakufu, and drawing a circle or oval with a radius that’s a ratio of whatever dimensions the rectangle is. In other words, big rectangle = big hitbox, small rectangle = small hitbox. This is simple, but it works…for regularly shaped bullets. For generic round shots and bubbles, and even some more oval-shaped bullets, this works fine! It’s when you get to more special bullets, like the infamous knives, that this system starts producing weirdness.

The hitboxes have always erred on the side of generous because of this, and it’s worked until now. For the sake of being more accurate to what the bullets actually look like, we’ve done a small overhaul on some of the more weird bullets. How?

We’re using more than one circle.

Amazing.

Anyway I’ve rambled on long enough, here’s some pictures of the changes. Note that multiple circles mean more collision detection, and more processing power needed. We’ll use these bullets sparingly.

Before:

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After:

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Quite the change, isn’t it?

Link

We’ve hit a major milestone in EUB’s production: We’ve finally released a 3 stage demo to the public! Special thanks to all the testers and other contributors to the project.

The demo itself is hosted on Bulletforge, at this link.

For those who wish to get a taste of the game before playing it, we have both a trailer and a playthrough video up on Youtube.

Updated because ExPorygon doesn’t check things before he releases them. Totally not my fault! -Trickysticks

DevLog 8/8/15

Greetings once again internet!

I’ll get right to the point. Development on Ephemeral Unnatural Balance HAS continued, as those screenshots from a month ago have shown, but not as fast as I would have liked (BIG surprise). I also found out that getting registered to sell goods at conventions is a bit more difficult than I thought. Combine that with my failure to release even a 3-stage demo, and I think it’s obvious that I will not be finishing EUB before year’s Touhoucon. I WILL be going though, and may even be able to host a panel on Danmakufu. If that happens, I’ll be sure to distribute a 3-stage demo at the con and will have it up for general download not long afterward.

TL;DR I will not be finishing EUB in time for Touhoucon, but I will make it next year. I WILL be finishing the 3-stage demo by the time Touhoucon comes around, that is a PROMISE.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me list some of the new features added:

-Completed Stage 2 on all difficulty levels. Stage 3 has also been completed on one difficulty and in the process of being balanced for the other three.

-Discord can now be ended early by pressing the Discord key again. The Balance gauge’s remaining value is preserved when ending Discord in this manner.

-A new Discord scoring system for spellcards. While Discord mode is active during a spellcard, a bonus value will steadily increase from zero. As long as the spell is captured, the player will be awarded whatever value the bonus has reached by the time the spell ends.

-Updated portraits from Sixten for the entirety of the first 3 stages. I’m working on updating the sprites right now, they should be ready for the demo. Here are a couple of samples:

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-Stage backgrounds have been overhauled and enhanced by gtbot, especially stage 1

-Updated player sprites for Rin Satsuki by DeityDiz:

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He has also been working on replacement fairy sprites, although they have not yet been implemented:

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That’s about all for the big updates. Trickysticks will be along shortly to post a video of the updates to stage 1 and probably stage 2 as well. Thanks for reading and have a good day!

Stage 3 Bosses sneak peek

Now for the stage 3 bosses, Aya and Momiji. Here’s a peek at some of their spell cards and attacks.

Stage 3 Screens

More shots from the heavily WIP stage 3

Guest DevLog – Trickysticks & Playtesting

Greetings internet! This is ExPorygon Trickysticks, resident playtester/co-streamer/Porygon harasser. Primarily the last bit.

Ephemeral Unnatural Balance started as concept in early 2013, with production starting late 2013/early 2014. Along the way multiple people joined the team working on this, including SpectralNexus’ wonderful musical contributions and my wonderful compacity to annoy spur Porygon into action. I have a bit of background in Danmakufu as well, producing some scripts every now and then.

EUB is coming along nicely, and Porygon comes up with excellent danmaku patterns both himself and from our suggestions. Concepts are one major part of the process, but implementation and testing are another thing. A concept can be amazing but if it’s not fun to play, too hard or too easy, it needs changes.

This is where I come in! With helpful feedback like “this wave of bullets is too slow” or “there’s not enough time between cycles of this attack” or “You should add Momiji Spark”, I help ensure that the game is the highest quality it could be. Look forward to another demo, and eventually the full release!

DevLog 3/10/15

Hello internet, ExPorygon here. At the behest of my wonderful friend Trickysticks, I have decided to try to keep up a proper Devlog for Ephemeral Unnatural Balance. Each day progress is made for the game, I’ll note it here with occasional screenshots, audio, and video clips as well.

But since I’ve not done a single one thus far and quite a lot has changed since the first release, this warrants what I’m going to call a Dev Rundown. Basically, this is a larger version of the typical Devlog and chronicles all significant changes since the last one. Since this is the first one, I’ll just describe all the big changes since the release of v0.11, which was the single stage demo.

Ephemeral Unnatural Balance’s development has been progressing rather slowly. My wonderful work ethic is 100% to blame for this slow progress but I’ve been picking up the slack as of late. Stage 2 is nearly complete and ready for private testing, with only difficulty levels being left to implement. Stage 3’s bosses have also been finished on one difficulty and half of the stage itself as well. Fortunately, all player characters have already been mostly completed far in advance. The second player intended for the demo release needs a slight rework, but she’s mostly ready.

Nearly all music tracks for the game have also been finished. The only exceptions are the Stage 4 theme, Stage EX theme, Ending theme, and Credits theme. There may be a few additional tracks that I might decide to add, but that will be done at a much later date. Once I’m comfortable releasing a video of Stage 2 I’ll be sure to release the appropriate tracks here as well. I’ve also been tweaking a lot of the tracks I already thought I had finished as some of them are older and not quite up to my current standards. Because of this, any music heard in any release of EUB is subject to change in the next version.

On another artistic front, I now have an official artist for the game. I’ve decided that the existing character portraits present in v0.11 will instead serve as placeholders for official commissioned art specifically for the game. I’d like to present the official artist of Ephemeral Unnatural Balance, Sixten! Sixten is an experienced Doujin artist who is responsible for a number of manga-related works. I highly recommend checking out his website.

Here are a couple of examples of some of the character art that will be present in the game:

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With all that in mind, I’m also making another announcement. I have decided that I’m going to showcase the full finished game at this year’s TouhouCon. For those who don’t know, TouhouCon is a new western Touhou specific convention that started last year. It’s held in Anaheim, California, USA and takes place during the weekend of September 18-20. In addition I plan to sell physical copies at the convention if possible. Right now the tentative plan is to sell physical copies (to help make up for the production costs) and to distribute digital copies online for free after an undetermined period of time following the convention.

This means that all assets lifted from copyrighted sources (i.e. ZUN) that are currently present in the game must be replaced before the final release. Here’s a brief list of what you should expect to be replaced in the upcoming versions (excluding character portraits):

-Shot graphics
-Enemy sprites
-Background textures and sprites
-Sound effects
-Player shot and bomb graphics

Fortunately, I have plans in motion for replacing nearly all of these. For boss sprites, I’ll be making my own out of the art that Sixten is providing for each character. It’s a bit of a time consuming trial and error process, but I’ve managed to find a way to manipulate still portraits into animated sprites as you can see here:

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Generic fairy sprites will be a bit more tricky as I lack any portrait to manipulate. Fortunately, I know one or two spriters that can hopefully provide the missing sprites. I just hope that they don’t look out of place next to the new boss sprites. For background textures, I’ve found a number of websites out there offering a variety of images and textures for commercial use. Many of these textures have already been put to use. Sound effects used to be something that I worried about until I found this amazing library of sounds, all free to use commercially. You may recognize many of the sounds in this library, as multitudes of japanese developed games also utilize it. Finally, shot and bomb graphics are either going to be made by myself or one of my acquaintances. In fact, my friend AchySolrock has already developed new player graphics for nearly all the players as you will see in the next showcase. Anything not listed has either come from a royalty free source or was made from scratch by myself. This includes the various visual effects and system graphics.

TLDR: I’m gonna try to sell the game, so graphics, sounds, etc. are subject to change.

Well, I think that about wraps up this Dev Rundown. These rundowns won’t be very frequent, maybe once a month if enough gets done during it. Unlike a certain other person coughSparencough I won’t be using this Devlog as a glorified diary of developments. What this means is that future Devlogs will not be nearly as wordy and may sometimes just consist of a bulleted list. In fact, not even future Dev Rundowns will likely be as long as this post was.

Thanks for reading and don’t hesitate to drop a question if anything comes to mind!