Letter for Mimi 3 – battle mockup #1

lfm3 battle mockup

The monster sprites are from DawnLike, it is a really cool graphics set (and open-source!).

I am experimenting with different battle screens, this is the first test I did. The layout is inspired by the Shining Force games. This view should also be able to work well for touch-screen devices.

Letter for Mimi 2 – difficulty level

lfm2 pencil difficulties

I used the Newgrounds API to log when a player found a pencil. In the graph above you can see the number of times certain pencils were found. It is easy to spot that the pencils that did not require any items were easiest to find: the one in Mimi’s house, Yu’s house, etc. The island pencil requires an extra step if you had traded the green key with Freddy, so it is found least of all ‘zero step’ pencils. The others all follow within close proximity of each other, with Roxy’s pencil last. Perhaps that was the most difficult one, since it required the most number of steps to acquire. All in all not really surprising results, it is good to see the difficulty of each of the 10 pencils were received as planned: 5 easy ones and 5 more difficult ones. Some reviewers claimed the game could use even more puzzles and a longer story, so perhaps that is the way to go for the future.

Letter for Mimi 2 – version 1.0.1

I have updated Letter for Mimi 2 on Newgrounds and kcnhgames to version 1.0.1. There was a bug where Roxy would wander outside of the bounds of the interior of Boulder builders inc. It had to do with the way the characters are handled while they are off-screen (they are still there, but invisible). So in some cases they might wander off (when they are in the bounds of the current Flixel camera). I am not sure why this doesn’t happen with characters who wander in the exterior, probably because all the interiors are located at x <= 10 and y <= 30 and you can't get there in the exterior. For the fix I just removed the 'wander' movement type from Roxy.

Letter for Mimi 2 – wip #32

There was a memory leak in the game where the grass over-sprites kept accumulating after the player entered the exterior. I have fixed it and added a ‘hack‘ to force the garbage collector to do it’s thing. It now runs each time the player switches worlds, to ensure any remaining garbage is collected. I am worried that this might lead to incompatibility issues later on, I cannot foresee the consequences. I have also created a blog post which will open when you click the ‘walkthrough’ button in the main menu. For now it holds a place holder until I have the actual walkthrough up. In the past I made video walkthroughs and posted them on Youtube. This time I will make a written walkthrough. The idea behind this is when people Google vague key words such as ‘what does the blue key do in Letter for Mimi’ this blog will be more likely to get a high rank in the results.

I have decided to add the Newgrounds API to the game, and add achievements. Crossroads:2D was very popular and featured on the front page for a while, specifically due to the achievements. My hope is that more people will play it because of the achievements. The content of the game is finished at this moment and I am now working on the Newgrounds additions and polishing. I hope to release the game somewhere this week.