Ghostlight Blog

Omega Quintet Closed Beta Applications Now Open!

Fri, 1st Sep 2017 | Posted by Ross

Hi everyone!

I've got some great news for you all as Omega Quintet is now ready to enter its closed beta phase! So, if you'd like to help us out and get your hands on the Steam version of Omega Quintet early, then be sure to apply, but you'll need to act quickly.

How do you apply? Simply send an email to: betaoq@ghostlight.uk.com with your name, date of birth and the technical specifications of your PC.

Applications will close promptly on Thursday 7^th September, so please make sure to get them in before then. As with previous closed betas, we won't be picking people on a random or first-come-first-served basis, so please do bear that in mind when you apply. What a ‘yes’ decision actually comes down to depends on a number of factors, such as how representative we feel the range of PC specs we’ve assembled for the beta is.

As we only have a limited number of places available for the beta, feel free to tell us why you think you’d be particularly suited to helping us with the testing phase of Omega Quintet. This may include information like details of any previous experience you’ve had in beta testing, or simply declaring your undying love for the genre :) In fact, please tell us anything that you feel is relevant which may help us approve your application.

That’s all for now. I’ll be back soon with more news from Ghostlight, but until then why not follow us on our Twitter and Facebook pages, our Youtube Channel and our Google + account, where we’ll be posting all the latest news from Ghostlight. You can also follow me on Twitter for a more personal take on all things Ghostlight.

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Omega Quintet, an adventure in bug squashing!

Thu, 24th Aug 2017 | Posted by Ross

Hi everyone.

Since our last update we've been hard at work on the PC version of Omega Quintet and I'm pleased to say that the game has been coming along very nicely indeed. The latest few builds have been really stable and we have also been able to squash a whole lot of bugs.

While the team keep testing here, I thought it might be interesting to give you all a brief overview of some of the bugs and weird problems we’ve been tackling during the transition from console to PC. Hopefully this will give you a little insight in to the kind of things we have to check and fix as we progress from a first playable build through to a full Beta.

As you may expect, we have to carefully check all aspects of each build from start to finish, and just one of the areas that has seen the most work recently has been the rather important save system. In the first build that we received from the programming team, the save/load looked like this:

Although fully functional, I think the kindest way of describing it was: "lacking details" ;-)

By the 4^th build, however, after some detective work from our programming lead, the save/load screen was quickly featuring a lot more information and was looking like this:

I think you'll agree that this is quite a lot more useful! Although, it still feels like there is a little something missing...

Now that's better! The 5th build saw the addition of a highlight over the currently selected save.

The 5th build also saw us begin to fix one of the other recurring issues with the save system. Up until this build, any attempt to load one save from within another would cause the game to crash.

While the 5th build may have fixed that issue, there were still some very weird things happening when I actually tried to do this.
For example, should you have the sudden urge to play Omega Quintet in 1st person view, there was a simple way of doing this. You just had to head over to the ‘office’ and then load a save you had made while within a dungeon and…

…‘voila’ first person view!:

In another example, the office doesn't typically contain a minimap, but if you wanted to make one appear then all you had to do was make your way to a dungeon and - from within the dungeon - load a save you’d made from within the office, at which point…

…a minimap would be displayed in the top right corner of the screen. Very strange :)

Perhaps the most confusing of these occurrences, was when I loaded a save that I’d made on the world map while I was within a dungeon. Doing that would take me to the world map as expected, but with a couple of differences. First of all, a minimap would appear in the top right corner again; secondly in addition to the standard world map menu, the list of options that were usually displayed when selecting a save point in a dungeon, would also be displayed! :)

Both of these menus would have an active cursor, and when I tried to select an option, the game would try to select the highlighted option on both menus:

I wondered what would happen if I tried this the other way around by loading a save made in a dungeon from the world map, and I quickly discovered that it made the game crash! ;_;

Thankfully, this was all quickly fixed in the 6^th build. I was really pleased about that because having to quit the game every time I wanted to change a save was quickly becoming quite annoying! ;)

One bug which turned out to be rather less helpful than I had hoped, appeared back in the 4^th build. In this build every time an enemy was encountered, rather than go to the trouble of making you defeat it, the game would just award you a victory and go straight to the battle results screen. Sadly, while I was able to get a nice bit of grinding done with this bug (he, he), I was unable to use it to really progress in the game. The reason was that I quickly got to a quest requiring me to perform a combo skill in battle - something that this bug made somewhat difficult! So, I was relieved when this pesky bug was fixed in the following build and I could again move forward with testing the game. Ah, the trials and tribulations of porting quality JRPGs to Steam for all you lovely people... ^_^

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Omega Quintet first playable build arrives!

Mon, 7th Aug 2017 | Posted by Ross

Hi everyone. Quite a bit has happened since I last updated you on the status of our games. While we've been continuing our work on Lost Dimension, the big news here this week is that the first playable build of Idea Factory's brilliant JRPG, Omega Quintet, has arrived! I've already done some of the early testing for it myself on Steam, and it's certainly been great to get my hands on this amazing game again :).

In most cases, testing the first playable build of a title usually involves seeing how far you can progress into the game before encountering easily reproducible crashes. These crashes are then feverishly reported back to the programmer to track down and resolve. While Omega Quintet isn't an exception to this, I’m happy to report that I managed to get considerably further than expected, especially considering that this is only a first build. Clearly, our lead programmer has been working mightily hard to produce a very stable version of the game first time around, with no major sound or graphical issues to report!

Now, I'm sure that having a first build may not sound like terribly exciting progress to some of you, but in fact, just getting the console game compiling and running on PC is a major step forward. It means that our lead programmer has successfully completed rewriting the console libraries to run on PC, and that’s possibly the most complex task in porting the game! The fact that the game is already fairly stable at this early stage is a very welcome bonus :)

Of course, this certainly doesn't guarantee that the rest of the port will be straight forward, but given the wealth of experience our development team has with Idea Factory’s well-crafted code, we’re very happy with this early progress and things are looking good.

So, what are the next steps? Well, along with the ever-present bug squashing which will keep us all busy for a good while, we will be reworking the User Interface to function with mouse and keyboard, integrating middleware where necessary and re-rendering the movies. We’ll also be adding new features such as cloud saving and achievements, plus generally adding as much polish as possible to the PC port to make it the best version we can. While it's too early to give you all a more precise release date, the good news is that we are well on course to get the PC version of Omega Quintet to you all this year :).

So far, one of my favourite aspects of the game has to be the music themed battle system. Of the many JRPGs I’ve tried, this has quickly become one of my most highly regarded JRPG battle systems. While it is at heart a turn-based system, the addition of precision range attacks and the importance of manipulating the turn order really add some hugely enjoyable complexities to the gameplay.

If you're wondering whether I’m being a little biased towards this game :) here’s what RPGSite had to say in their solid 7/10 review: "Far and away, the best feature in Omega Quintet are the battles themselves. Compile Heart put a lot of work into providing a complex system." I'm sure that all you JRPG fans out there are going to have a truly great time with this game and I'm really looking forward to being able to share more details with you over the coming months.

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