February Progress (Patreon)

Hello everyone and welcome to all the new patrons! The support this month has been phenomenal and I want to thank every one of you for helping to make this game a reality. 

As you guys know I released the first version of the dungeon prototype one month ago and since then I've continued work to improve and expand on this initial experience of the game. Its been a productive month so I'm going to go over everything I've worked on and a little bit about the coming month and beyond.  

Character Controller

The first thing that I wanted to tackle was improving the character controller. The old one was written at the start of development and really needed an overhaul to expand the range of movement for the player. The new controller has a greater range of motion and will let me continue to add and tweak special actions for the characters to explore future environments that will be less linear in nature.

Related to this I also reworked the enemy encounters so that now they trigger on contact. This opens up the possibility that some encounters will be avoidable if the player manages to evade them. In the future I want to add patrol paths for enemies to give them a bit more life and make evading them a little more challenging.

New Character

A new character has been added that will join the hero's party. Ash is a dark elf warlock that has been tasked by his patron to assist the hero in his mission. He uses a combination of dark magic and dual wields daggers to deliver critical attacks to enemies. Ash will also be the first romance option for the hero and will be involved in a series of events in the future.

UI Improvements

Based on feedback and ongoing UI tweak and improvements the targeting of enemies should be a lot more obvious. They will begin flashing after the player selects a command, and a targeting reticle will appear when they are selected.

The equipment screen has been improved slightly and names and icons have been added to the equipment slots.

Some dialogue bubbles are now skip-able by pressing the confirm button/key or by left-clicking.

A proper dialogue box has been added for extended conversations and will continue to be improved in the future.

The Slime King

I've begun work on the boss battle that will cap off the dungeon prototype mission. Since this is a boss monster I want to have it to have a bit more complexity than the regular enemies. He will have patterns where he will grab characters to use them as shields or throw them back at other party members. 

I was really hoping that I would be able to finish him for the end of the month but I'm only about half way and will probably take another week or so to program his AI and work on a "Game Over" animation in the case where the player loses.

I think in this case I can make a build of my current progress and release it tomorrow and then continue working on the boss and possibly do a release mid March. The overall experience hasn't changed much since the last release so people who already played through it once may want to wait until the boss is finished to give it another go but let me know what you guys think.

March and Beyond

After finishing the boss battle I would like to round out March by doing another pass on the battle system, adding things like character turn order, status effect resistances and possibly special moves like limit breaks or team attacks. I'd also like to work on the dungeon layout a bit to make it more interesting and take advantage of the new character controller and add some more interactable objects and details.

This will tie up the dungeon prototype phase of development and I will turn my attention towards the town part of the game, where the hero starts his day and where he will return to after each mission. There will be new characters to interact with and areas to explore around town that should make it as exciting and fleshed out as the dungeons will be.

At some point I will take some time to put together a proper roadmap and I can further expand on my plans and goals for the game.

But I have to thank you all again for your continued support and enthusiasm for the game, you guys are making it happen! I'm honestly so excited for the future of the game and I hope you will be too!