We're Gonna Need a Bigger Pole (Patreon)

Fishing pole, that is.

Greetings!

I'm sorry about the delay in posting - I wanted to have something cool to show you, and I didn't get really finished with it until today. I've spent most of my time working on the Ned Danger quest, and as part of this quest I created a mini-dungeon. It's pretty small - it doesn't have any minigames, and it's nothing like the Dark Pits in either size or complexity - but it does have a boss fight.

Why I Don't Like (Most) RPG Maker Combat

As I mentioned before, I'll be adding a bit more combat to the game in the future, and thinking about how to do that got me thinking about why I mostly excluded it in the first place. It basically came down to the fact that I didn't really like RPG Maker combat, and it seemed like a lot of other folks didn't, either. But why didn't I like it? After a bit of thought, I identified two main reasons:

• It gets repetitive (because a lot of RPG Maker games require grinding), and
• The battles themselves are boring.

This game is not at all grindy, so the first one doesn't really apply. The second one kind of does, though. So why are the battles boring? Once again, I came up with two reasons: boring mechanics and boring visuals.

Making Combat Less Boring

I wasn't really thinking about it in these terms, but in The Dark Pits I tried to address the 'boring mechanics' part by essentially adding minigames to the boss fight. And I think it turned out okay, but it was a ton of work and only applied to that specific battle. I'll continue to do this for certain pivotal boss battles, but it won't be common. In order to make combat in general more interesting, I'll have to make combat mechanics more interesting - giving you more resources to manage, different ways for abilities to interact, threat mechanics, smarter enemies, etc. Now, I won't be addressing that in this release, but it's coming. It's a problem that will require a bit of thought, and I don't want to come out with something half-baked.

The other thing I can do to make combat more interesting, though, is to make it more visually interesting. The video shows combat under both the old system and with the new enhancements. As you can see, the game's current combat, to be frank, doesn't look all that exciting. The new one, however, looks more fun and interesting (hopefully!)

The new combat shown above is from the boss fight in 0.9. The first thing you'll probably notice is that the characters move around a lot more. I think this makes it more alive and fun; some of the moves look kinda badass, and the movement makes it look like the characters are actually doing something. The other difference is that I changed and added a lot of animations. I like the ones I'm using here much better. I purchased a ton of animation spritesheets while I was doing this part, and it feels like they really give me a much larger palette to work with.

Now, in 0.9, only the main party members - Alex, Ana and the mystery girl - will have their abilities reworked in this manner, but in future releases - probably 0.10 - I'll extend this to the Bunnies, and I'll probably go back and make some of the boss fights more visually interesting (like the flame spirit and Stone King.)

Coming in (Probably) 0.10: UI Revamp

I really don't want The Proteus Effect to be Just Another RPG Maker Game. You can do a lot of interesting stuff with RMMV, but one unfortunate consequence of using a beginner-friendly engine is that a lot of people will have produced a lot of mediocre games with it, and players will carry those associations into your game - especially if it looks and feels like one of those mediocre games. So, a part of avoiding this is giving your game a distinctive look and feel - or at least making it look and feel different than those other ones.

That's part of what drove me to rework the animations - a lot of folks have probably seen the stock animations a billion times by now. While shopping around for those animation assets, I also came across a lot of UI assets. That got me thinking that UI is another really good opportunity to give TPE a distinctive feel, so I got inspired and bought a bunch of UI assets, too! (lol.) I haven't decided for sure - I'll have to see how this sort of thing looks next to my 3D art - but here's a couple of examples of where I'm thinking of going with the UI:

Cute and fun. That's what I get from this aesthetic, and that's the feel I'm trying to create with the game itself. I did some looking into how I might actually perform a major overhaul of the UI into something so decidedly not-RPG-Maker-looking, and the problem looks manageable. It's likely to be involved, so I won't be working on it in earnest until 0.9 is out, but it's something I definitely want to do. I'll also be switching all characters (especially IRL Alex) over to the more stylized 3D look in 0.10, and it would be nice to do both of these at the same time.

That's all I have for this time. I'm going to finish up this dungeon and keep grinding away. Please let me know what you think of the UI aesthetic, as well as the new combat movement/animation. Does it look like it would be more fun to play? (That's the goal, after all!) 

Thank you for your support, and stay safe out there!