Claiming Xodius - New demo and Updates news

Claiming Xodius v_koi update summary

• Adjusted character speeds to be more reasonable
• Changed some monster stats, drops, and item preferences
• timing of melee attacks feels more responsive
• Auto-blocking makes shields more useful. Simply having a shield equipped gives characters a chance to block
• Characters choose moves by weighing them, rather than randomly picking
• Ally AI has been changed to keep your party closer to the player
• The game world has been entirely opened up because of the coming changes to the map editor. So there's a lot more to see and do
• portraits have been temporarily disabled
• Screen fades out when player dies

Movement will not be changed in the foreseeable future. I know that 4-directional movement isn't the most amazing thing in a game with this kind of perspective, but it's not something that should be messed with right now. The movement is just too derply embedded in the game.

Download version Koi for windows! Yes, all the versions have been fish names.

Mapping News

The last news update was about the map editor, and how it is being made more user friendly so that anyone could use it. A lot of restructuring has been done with the editor; layout, organization of maps, event editing, the freakin undo button that should have been in it from the beginning. Undo... saves everything. Maps have been destroyed -covered in a rectangle of doors- with a single click of the mouse.

With the editor updates, the way that map files are formatted has been entirely redone, meaning that all the maps from the demo will essentially be scrapped... Which is good and bad, but mostly good. Since none of these maps can be used in the final game, I've decided to open up the entire game world now, instead of waiting until the final release. The goal of the demo right now is to make it an entire game in itself while the rest of the engine moves on.

Major reason for the new format is the max block height was only set to 3 before... no matter what. Nothing could be taller than 3 blocks. And that made me crazy. There's also a lot of events that could do more if they only had more arguments. This could be done by converting the old maps in some way, but because of the other changes, more flexible eventing will be part of the new format. And finally there was so much junk in the old files. The file sizes were still quite small, but there were too many -1s and that's bothersome.

Why is the map editor so important?

I'm glad you asked~
The map editor is not just a tool for the developer(s) of Claiming Xodius, it's going to be a tool for everyone. With the final release, you will be able to expand the game world by downloading or creating content and importing it into your game. Got a lot of ideas for this, but you'll hear more when it really starts to come together. The demo of Claiming Xodius is somewhat of an experiment to see what can be made using the editor.

Who's making this game anyways?

lvlhouse games? Yeah, so right now, lvlhouse is mainly just me. Austin Molina. A 22-year-old comp-sci drop out. I do the programming and pixel work. Which is why most things take forever, but it's come this far. Then there's Wesley Wyatt, 24-year-old sound wizard working for The Man. He's done all the music and sound for the game. You can find his SoundCloud here. He's also been someone to bounce ideas around with and we're thinking of making some other games after this project. It can't get much more indie than this, right?