Hello all, happy new year! This is obviously the last devlog before the end of the year. I’ll try to keep it short. I think there probably won’t be too much to discuss anyhow. Lots of work happening, but this has been one of those months where all the effort goes into one system so there isn’t a wide variety of things to talk about. Admittedly, December is also one of those months where things are a bit touch and go because of all the holidays.
So, to get into it this month was about combat, as I believe I talked about last time. Good progress has been made, but there is still plenty to do. As a basic refresher the combat is going to be turn based. Below is an image of what the general battle screen will look like. As usual, you’ll have to ignore the temporary sprites. My drawing skills peak at using the fill tool to color in a box. Even the sprites that look completed may have another pass, so its all a work in progress.
Each turn the player will have a few points (AP) to work with. You can have two active classes giving you a total of 10 spells (5 from each class). Each turn you select the spells you want to cast and then select a target. Enemies will always perform one action per turn in response. To account for enemy speed however there is also a round based system in play. If you look in the top right it shows the turn order for every combatant in the round. Depending on how fast a unit is they may only get one turn, or they may get several during the round. Bar buffs the player will likely always go once per round.
You also have your familiar (which currently looks like a red box) which you will also control. The familiar attunes elements and has a more simplified set of commands per element. In addition, you can flee obviously and use items.
To touch on items I think they will be restricted to alchemy items for the most part. The idea here is that using items will either have a cooldown rate or you’ll only be able to take so many into a fight. This is mostly just to prevent item spam. The general idea though is that alchemy will have some damage or status items as well as basic things like healing potions. So if you want to go hard into alchemy to boost your combat performance you can.
Outside of that the other thing, that maybe doesn’t need to be said given the temporary assets, I’d like for there to be more info at a glance than what you currently see. Currently all you see are spell names to pick from. If you hover them you get a description but I’d like to add things onto the buttons like AP cost at the very least and perhaps other things like what buffs/debuffs they apply, etc. As I believe I said last time, the less you have to dig through menus or hover buttons and read tooltips the better. Aside from buttons, status effects should be visible as well so you can easily look and see what you or an enemy has applied at any time. I’m debating on showing enemy HP at any given time, so that might show up as well.
So there is obviously still a lot to do. The end of this month has been overtaken by the holidays, but prior to that I was at the point of implementing combat calculations. Without going into detail that basically means the math that calculates damage or other effects when you cast a spell. That’s a very large task, but once an algorithm is set it should come together pretty fast. I already know how damage is calculated via a spreadsheet I just have to make the code actually handle various effects and modifiers so it calculates correctly.
At this point a good chunk of combat is actually implemented. All the UI that you see in that image is functioning properly. I’ve also already figured out enemy stats and balancing for the first segment of combat. To explain that combat is effectively split into 5 levels (or 6 for the player). Depending on where you are in the world enemies will be at a certain combat level. This means if you wander around at night you may run into dangerous enemies depending on where you are. Outside of the mines though you can only be attacked at night so if you want to avoid combat ideally, you’d just sleep at night. That said the overworld sticks mostly to low level enemies, the more dangerous ones are deep in the mines or locked to a few specific areas.
Aside from all that, loot still needs to be set. Fighting enemies will yield items that you can use. Mostly stuff for alchemy, but some of the items have wider uses as I recall. I think one example was tailoring. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that, but where in the current version of the game you can just make cloth in the new version there will be a fairly simple tailoring system where you can turn cloth and other items into clothes which you can sell. Sort of just a way to flesh out those items and make them more profitable if you want to go that route. In terms of complexity it will likely be similar to something like smelting ore where you just click a button to craft the item assuming you have the materials.
That is mostly it for combat however. I’ve still got a ton of work to do, but once the holidays are done I should be able to focus more fully on it. I’m really hoping that by the end of January it is done or at least done in the capacity of the first combat tier. I’ll likely be adding combat in tiers as I add levels to the mine. The current plan is that the initial version of this that goes live will only have the first mine level. Which as a reminder there are only going to be 5 mine levels but they will be large and laid out more like dungeons to explore.
Aside from combat I’ve been working to get sprites added back into the game. I didn’t realize how many art assets there were until I had to start moving them all over. I’ve also been working on fleshing out characters and writing stories. I also just started working with my artists to look at the character portraits. Most if not all of them are getting a minor makeover. Something to make the characters more unique looking so they don’t all blend together as much.
I think that covers basically everything for now. Apologies that there isn’t really anything new to talk about. Combat was always going to be one of those big systems that was going to take some time to complete. I’m hoping that by the end of January I’ll have it basically done but we’ll see what happens. Anyway, thanks for sticking with me through this year. With any luck it will all be worth the wait. I hope you all had a good holiday if you celebrate. I wish you all a happy new year, and I’ll see you all in a month as usual.