Although I must say I was rather dissapointed when I noticed Marle's set of techs (as well as Crono's and Lucca's if I remember correctly) had remained unaltered, whereas Glenn's, Magus' and Robo's where dramatically changed. Was there any special reason for this? (other than the fact that it must be hell to accomplish).
Agent 12 may have a different take on this, but I was especially worried about altering people's tech sets from their "classic" techs, seeing as some players might disapprove of the new techs. I took a huge gamble with Robo, Frog, and Ayla, and I did those because I felt dissatisfied with their original tech sets on a personal level. Only Crono was completely unaltered though; Agent 12 upgraded Marle's Haste into a "Haste-All" that affected the entire party; same with Lucca's "Protect."
In retrospect, I feel we should have changed Marle's simple "Ice" into a multi-hit "Ice Pulse." Multi-hit techs are nonexistent at lower tech slots, so it would have been unique. I can visualize what that would be like, and I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it to begin with. The multi-hit techs weren't too bad as far as code length (if I remember correctly, Agent 12 might remember very differently), so I think it would have been possible.
It's been suggested that either Marle or Frog should have had "Hexagon Mist." That was actually the first enemy-only tech I jumped at when I got into tech editing, but
the results were far less than what I had hoped for. Even Ice 1 is more impressive visually. It's possible that it could have been dressed up beyond the original through screen darkening effects and maybe some Sprite layer bubbles or something, but I never bothered with it more than the initial investigation; Frog's *Venom Mist seemed much more promising at the time.
Techs in Chrono Trigger are basically accomplished through event code as far as I can tell, or at least something analogous. It's not as simple as: "Hey, use this spell effect." It's more like: "Hey, initialize the tech. Call this sound. Call character animation x. Call character animation y. Draw Layer 3 spell effect. Hide Layer 3 spell effect." And that's just for the character, which represents one "object." The target enemy, incidental enemies, and little doodads that surround the caster each get their very own code. I can't even imagine how Agent 12 waded through all of the main code and figured out most of the functions. After he coded up the tech editor, it was just a matter of familiarizing oneself with the object system and using a basic hex editor to fill in some gaps in what the tech editor could do.
Yeah...I didn't notice any new Techs for Robo and Frog...What'd I miss...?
In short,
all of this.That was a demo reel for the new techs I was using to show Agent 12 and Chrono'99 to get feedback. Funny thing is, Robo's "Green Memory" might have been blue-looking had Chrono'99 not caught it. You can see earlier renditions of new techs for various characters
here and
here.Magus' "Soul Reaver" didn't make it in at all, because the coloration was too bright for a Shadow-innate badass. Plus, he would have sucked uber amounts of HP from CE enemies (Soul Reaver absorbed 5% of enemy HP), making him just a little too badass perhaps.
EDIT: Also, Robo's "Reactor" didn't make it in. I was going for a nuclear-weapon looking effect, but '99 thought it looked uncharacteristically like a water spell, and we already had two water users so we scrapped that one too.
