Aesthetic

Recently due to some changes in my career and other life circumstances, I've put Leafling into maintenance mode. I started the game back in 2018 as a fun side project to keep me occupied and it quickly became something really fun that I wanted to expand upon. After a year and some change in development, I felt the game was ready to show to the world in a minor early access. I applied for the Steam Partner Program, got in, and released my game in early access. Throughout the last few years I've learned a tremendous amount that many people will learn too late, and I would like to share that with the community. 1) Extensively bug test your project I know this one seems rather self explanatory, but it really cant be understated. No matter how much you test you will never find all of the bugs in your game. Players will always play your game in unexpected ways or do things you would have never expected, and this will always lead to unforeseen circumstances. Your job is to narrow down how many bugs that can be found by the playerbase as much as possible. In specific make sure you pay extra special attention to things that drop/grant items, affect a player's ability to progress, and grant one player the ability to negatively impact the experience of other players. 2) Design for the future - Now One big roadblock in development I constantly hit was short-sightedness. Often we think of cool new features, items, and systems that fit perfectly into your current game. Often, however, things that work well now may not work so well a year down the road with the inclusion of other systems, items, ect. Some of the most important advice I can give you is to plan your game in full detail from the very beginning of development, and if you are already in development consider what changes you can make to future proof your game. This will save you literally thousands of hours of development re-doing old content or reworking old systems in what can quickly become a spiderweb of systems. 3) Do something no one else is Even if you're making a game that falls into a more generic fantasy RPG theme, you can add appeal to your game by focusing on niche systems, ideas, or concepts that other games aren't doing, either in the gaming space as a whole, or just in the indie space. For Leafling I tried to focus on having the most fast paced, high skill ceiling, and engaging combat I could while also heavily leaning into an extreme level of player customization, however you can set yourself apart in a million ways, you just need to find what works for your game, be creative! 4) Players are not your friends After releasing your game you may start to build a respectably sized community. When this happens youll be exposed to a myriad of people with differing ideologies, personalities, and cultures. It can be easy to find someone you get along with a form a sort of internet-friend bond with them, however remember that once your game releases you are your brand image. What you do and say represents your game and vice versa. If you do or say something many people do not like your game will suffer from it. Be careful what information you share and with who, and what you say in certain company if you are trying to maintain a commercial project as any of it can be used against you in the future, even out of context, or twisted in dishonest ways. 5) Feedback is important - But only sometimes When your game is released you'll undoubtedly receive an enormous amount of feedback from an equally enormous amount of sources. Listening to player feedback is one of the most important things you can do as a game developer, but so is sifting through good, and bad feedback. When considering making changes based on player feedback try to focus on things that the majority of your core playerbase wants first and always weigh how one change can affect the gameplay experiences of different types of players. For example, we often had 1 or 2 very vocal players pushing for changes and since they were so vocal it was easy for their feedback to drown out more popular, yet less vocalized, feedback. Also always remember that you will never make everyone happy, so strive to make as many people happy as possible. 6) Weigh your publishing options While Steam is a popular and powerful publishing option, other choices like itch.io and others are just as valid. If you're confused about what publishing you should choose, consider the following pros and cons. Steam: Pros: *Mass Visibility *Great Networking Options *Free Included Updater *Community Hub *User Review System helps with feedback *User Friendly Dashboard Cons: *Application Fee *Terrible Support *Largely Unmoderated User Review System that promotes review bombing, dishonest reviews, and trolling/griefing *Discoverability based on unmoderated User Review System - Once you go below a threshold your game is effectively dead permanently *30% Profit Cut to Steam *If you make under $100 in a month, Steam will steal your money as they do not give payouts of less than $100. If you don't think your project will bring in a ton of money per month, do NOT launch on Steam, they will take 100% of your proceeds. Itch.io Pros: *Amazing support *Userbase is extremely welcoming and positive about new projects *Optional donation feature on game download *User friendly update panel *Free to setup *Negligible profit cut Cons: *Less visibility *More competition from similar indie games *Aged game profile screens *Not as much userbase traffic Thats all for now, if I think of anything else important I'll edit this post. In addition, I will be donating the Leafling Engine fork of Intersect to @jcsnider @panda @Daywalkr and the other current active developers to take what features they may salvage and add them to the base engine. I hope this helps someone and if you ever have any questions about anything feel free to ask here or shoot me a dm. Thanks again to jc, panda, and everyone else who keeps AGD running so people can keep passion projects like this alive.

To change the background just swap out the "background.png" file located in Resources/GUI If you want to change how things are positioned there are .json files you can edit to change the size, name, and more for UI elements. You can find them in Resources/GUI/Layouts. These do not require any programming knowledge to edit but they can be a bit intimidating at first. There are a few guides around the forums you could follow to aid you.

Without source edits you cannot make an Event walk to another map as they are connected to the map they're saved on. There is, however, a pretty easy workaround if you're just using it for a cutscene of some sort, which is to have the event set a Variable when the Event reaches the border of the map that hides the event on the original map, and triggers a copy of the event on the next map.

The Leafling Online Team is searching for a trustworthy, capable, and experienced C# Developer with prior experience working with Intersect for commission work and potentially a long-term business relationship. Leafling is (currently) the premier Intersect project, pushing the engine and its capabilities to the absolute maximum and achieving mild, yet unprecedented for these hobbyist engines, financial and critical success on Steam, with over 100,000 registered accounts. Due to the now cumbersome size of the project we're specifically looking for Coders who are capable of performing simple edits for reasonable pay, as well as being comfortable signing a contractually binding Non-Disclosure-Agreement. Requirements: *Must be a citizen of the United States or Canada *Must speak fluent English *Accepting of commission style payment *Previous experience working with the Intersect Engine *Integrity when handling proprietary assets *Willingness to sign an NDA *Must be at least 18 years of age Benefits: *5% of all game proceeds per month while under contract *Competitive and negotiable pay *No obligations, work when you want to *Work with a passionate team to fulfill our mutual hobby of making games *Listing in credits along with professional reference (for what its worth) *Help make Intersect games even bigger! If you're interested in working together you can DM me on here, or message me on Discord @Aesthetic#9715

Conditionals are a standard feature of the engine, they check if switch is true or false, or if a variable is set to a certain number, to decide what to do. As for bound spells, that just prevents the player from unlearning the spell via Right-Click. Event commands should still remove the spell. If you have no conditionals at all, then the script should be working, but it's hard to tell without knowledge of all the moving pieces in the script.

I may be able to help but I'd have to see the full Event script. There are often conditional conflicts that cause this type of thing. My first question would be are you using a condition in your Event? Something like "Player does NOT know Spell X". Because if so, the moment your player learns Spell X, the event would stop firing because it no longer fulfills the conditions.

Looking fantastic Shen! Great work, you and Rory did awesome translating the style to Intersect. Eager to see more

We created some new Raid mechanics as well as new visual tell markers for players. So far fight quality has improved dramatically.

This all all extremely valid, if I could add anything it would be to definitely have any and all custom code work peer-reviewed by a friend, or perhaps pay a fee to another skilled programmer to look through the work and have another set of eyes on it. When we first launched on Steam, we had numerous features that worked great on the front end, but under the stress of dozens of players fell apart instantly and could have led to serious and irrevocable damage to the game. But also don't be afraid to completely branch out! Intersect is amazing as a base, but it's open source for a reason. If you have big aspirations and Intersect doesn't quite cut it for you, theres nothing wrong with using Intersect and branching out from it to create your own custom engine from it, just make sure you have the capital, time, resources, and motivation to keep up with it, learn from your mistakes, and keep working hard. People love to trash on Intersect, even within this own community, often referencing weaknesses of the engine or "It's an intersect game it cant do this" ect, but that's the joy of Open Source projects. The **only** limit is how much time and work you're willing to invest.

Wooo! Great work guys as always, features lookin extra thicc this time around

Game is fantastic! This has a bright future ahead of it @Daywalkr keep at it man, I've definitely got my eyes on this gem

Nice! This looks fantastic @Shenmue you can expect me to be online for launch

Well, since you seem to be versed in coding, ill post the link to the touched up version Cheshire made if you want to peek around and see if you can fix it up for your client, but beware as updates to intersect could break it or cause merge conflicts.

I'm not sure if it made it into the base engine, but Leafling uses a Tag system i believe was brought over. You can assign Tag to items like for example "Bow" and then put conditional checks on your spells for if item equipped has "Bow"