Devlog (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

I'm still feeling pretty sick. I hope to feel better by the end of the week, I'm just focusing on staying hydrated and sneeking some work in where I can.

So what have I managed to get done. I've been creating the new fighter UI components.
So what I wanted was a very simple core UI component I can use for any fighter that contains all the information you need to use some strategy in the combat.

However, I'm avoiding using exact numbers because the combat isn't going to be that technical. It should be a fun distraction rather than super difficult.

So this is what I've come up with.

You can see a few different details.

I opted for a classic health bar because it gives a better status than just a "Brain".
The fist / brain / magic shapes are type of the character. These are also the Types for abilities. In most cases humans would be a physical type, while a ghost would be an ephemeral or Psychic type. 

So the smily faces are the SubType. These are Happy/Sad , Naughty/Nice and Scary/Cute.
The sub status can change during combat and is on a sliding scale. The icons will shift as you use abilities/effects that can modify the Sub type. The little faces change as these types shift.

For instance John is Scary/Naughty/Happy
While Richard is just Nice but normal happy/cute stats.
The Player is completely Neutral.

Some enemies will shift during the battle while others will start with a specific sub type. I've updated the messaging system so I can popup messages wherever I need to, this could be on the character when you apply an effect or a warning for a non functional ability.

I've also added a spot where you can see status effects on characters. That way you don't have to remember what status effects have been applied. This system is a good start but I will need a mouse over tooltip to give a little more information when you hover over certain things. But that might be a longer term update.

Things are making more sense for the moment and I've got most things sort of ticking along. I need to clean up how some of the messages work but I hope that this system makes visual sense.

I now need to do a pass accross the player interface and update your fight wheel along with the ability buttons. I want some selection popups on the GUI fighter stats along with better selection effects generally.

My goal is to basically create a full fight from start to finish including all the meta options like wait/run/fight ext. Once that is working I'll hopefully have the core "fight" system done. I'll still have to add abilities and enemies and how to activate a fight, but those are all part of the greater "game".

So with the combat engine ticking along I'm starting to think more long term about what the project will need. Once I've got all these major components working the last big step will be save files for the whole game, and level loading. I'm currently thinking about weaving those tasks into the full "game".

I reaaly hope the last "demo" will be the next combat demo. After that I want to start work on the game world. But this is going to throw up a number of challenges that I'm going to have to overcome. Challenges like upgrading how the game is being hosted on itch.io. As the game grows the game might exceed the upload size.

(Edit; I have done more research on this so the size limit might have a solution);
I'll basically need to integrate more closely into itch.io for proper patches and download construction. Basically using their command line integration to create proper game updates. Some of these tasks are a little slow because I have to do a little learning on the fly.

These problems are still a little way off but I need to start planning for them now. So that is the current state of the combat and the project.

Hopefully I'll have another update later this week.