It's been awhile since I've last made a blog so I'll try to speed through as much as I can.
A big reason I didn't have much to say for awhile was due to some technical hiccups I ran through. So, typically since I work on Dawn of Djinn through a pre-existing editor, typically I can avoid the issues that would come along with scripting/making code. Including bugs. However, it turns out that you can still make bugs in the game by using either the text or map editing portions of this tool too much. Yes, I managed to create some game breaking bugs without touching a line of code. And it turned out that this happened all the way back in 2023 and only realized this a month ago. Since I didn't directly program any of Dawn of Djinn, the only way I could fix it was basically to start from scratch with a clean ROM. (Okay, I didn't have the heart to throw away all my work and luckily I save backups throughout the creation process, but that still requiring almost a year's worth of work to find a working backup.)
Luckily it's not AS bad as it seems since I don't have to redo testing and can copy and paste values from the broken ROM to the not broken one. But I did burn many hours of my spare time, more than I typically spend per-day working on Dawn of Djinn, over the course of a couple weeks to catch back up. If you're curious here's a clip of why the bug was so bad that I had to throw out months worth of work and not just ignore it. It's at least a funny glitch to watch in hindsight.
There are some silver linings to all of this though. For one, along the way I was also able to fix a visual bugs that for some reason only happened on a single grand Djinn fight. I was tempted to just leave it in and chalk it up to theming. But since I had to redo so much work to fix the Vault boat stuff, I figured I'd go a little further back to before this glitch popped up as well... (Minor spoilers to a grand Djinn fight BTW)
And since I had to redo map edits I decided to add some things that will overall improve the Dawn of Djinn experience. One thing I want to keep a surprise for now. But in order to do that change I had to put a Dawn of Djinn exclusive NPC into a different NPC slot. Which gives me the space to put a new NPC in its place. Since I couldn't think of anything better, I decided to import the ingenious lady sprite from Lost Age and sprinkled a little bit of diversity throughout the GS1 world. Majority of these edits changes literally nothing besides the sprite. But this does transition nicely to the last thing I want to talk about today.
Last thing to come out from having to redo map edits was the decision to add more "new" NPCs to Vault to better explain Dawn of Djinn mechanics in universe. One of these is a bard that explains/reminds players that there is a purpose to defending. Something that played a role in boss fights in version 1, that I was concern all players would figure out on their own. Don't worry, I didn't add anything too hand-holdy, I just decided to make someone who explained defending early on and hopefully foreshadow that you might get more use out of the defend command than you normally would in the OG game.
I think its especially important to make clear in version 2 because defensive Djinn have been a bit nerfed compared to version 1. So, there may be more cases were defending is your best option to avoid being devastated. The nerfing is also a big reason why I have to be so diligent with play testing boss fights in version 1, even if they haven't changed that much in version 2.
Beyond that, I've been mostly playing catch-up on the goals I wanted to achieve in the previous blog. Along the way I've made new versions of the easy/brutal keys (Now easy/brutal charm) that I plan to include as add-ons for version 2 of Dawn of Djinn. Along with stumbling upon a way to isolate the fast travel Retreat code/avoid toggle code as their own patches. I still haven't had a lot of time to test these patches yet. But they are available on my Discord if you don't mind that fact. I do plan to try and think of a way to share them with the rest of the Internet once I've had more time to try them out and assure they work properly.
I think I'll save the details of everything else I've been working on for the next blog as this has gone on for pretty long as is. The map/text editor bugs have been a major set-back, but I think a release this year is still possible, just much more likely to be more near the end of the year than I would like. Still not close enough to done to make any promises, but if things keep going along at this rate, I'll have to start thinking about things beyond just making the mod (videos to promote the release of the project, making new Github/itcho pages for the new project, Steamdeck graphics, figuring out where else I'm going to host the mod now that ROM hacking dot net is apparently no longer going to be a thing.... stuff like that.)
Hopefully it won't be another two months before the next update though.
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