Arbiter - Monthly Recap - October 2022 (Patreon)

Happy (belated) Spoopers everyone! 

Hope you all had a great weekend and only cosplayed the finest of husbandos and waifus. My partner and I went as a Pikmin and Korok respectively, so naturally our slim spandex suits invoked nothing but the pure, unfiltered yearning of all who gazed upon us. Yahaha!

Animation

I spent the first bit of this month wrapping up on the last form's animations. I've had to polish them up a bit throughout the integration process, but otherwise we're pretty much all done animation-wise—art block be damned!

Implementation

There've been a few tech problems the form presented that I've had to address, but overall implementation has gone pretty smoothly. While most of my time was spent creating attacks, there were a few systems the form requires that took up a decent chunk of time too. These included the <spoiler> system, some animation <spoilers>, and a way for <spoilers> to <spoiler>. That stuff's all pretty much solved though, so we're in full-on iteration mode now.

The only things left to do are some contextual attacks, sealing animations, and the ability variants. I'm not entirely sure how long everything will take, but I'm almost certain I should be done by the end of November. We're almost there!

Raising the Bar

So this wasn't something I fully appreciated until I started getting it in-game, but in terms of the sheer amount of available combat tools, this last form is absolutely insane. In retrospect it kinda validates those moments of art block I had because I've really put everything I could into this moveset. To the point where, for better or worse, it's kind of completely eclipsed the other forms.

It's a hard thing to measure, but in terms of pure combat variety I think Omen's form is probably the only one that comes even remotely close. Between the versatility of Omen's whip-sword and all the different charge move variants, there's enough there to compete with the last form in terms of content. For Scarlet and Wolf, however, there is not.

This puts me in an interesting position because while I do still genuinely consider Scarlet and Wolf fun to play, I can't deny that they're lacking. I'd already planned to go back after I was done with the forms and give Base Ashe a little more to play with, but he's also supposed to be somewhat intentionally underpowered to give the forms more value. One could argue that the other forms being weaker than the last form does the same thing, but it was always my vision to allow players to switch between forms at will based on their given needs—I never wanted them to be straight upgrades.

The other thing worth keeping in mind is that Wolf and Scarlet both have very powerful passive traits, which are basically that Wolf chains lightning between enemies with every hit, and Scarlet can attack from a range for free. Because of this, I think keeping their movesets simpler overall is a good thing, but even with that in mind I still do want to give them a bit more. I'm not really looking to get caught up in feature creep or anything (he says five years into the project), but I think there's an obvious enough discrepancy between the forms that I don't really have an excuse to not go back and balance the scales.

With that, I think when I go back to fix Ashe I'm going to give Wolf and Scarlet a little more to play with. This likely won't be anything more than an additional tool for their special attack, but it should be enough to round them out with the other forms. 

It was a predictable problem honestly, I just kind of chose to ignore it for the sake of finishing the forms faster. But since each form has gotten gradually more and more complex, it makes sense that Wolf feels a bit empty compared to the most recent one. That said, I already know what additions I'll be giving the older forms so it'll just come down to sitting down for a week or two, cranking out a few animations, and getting it all in-game. It's a marginal amount of worked compared to making an entirely new form, so I'm pretty confident I can get it done quickly.

Conclusion

That wraps things up for this recap! Suffice it to say work on the last form is going well and I'm excited to be done with everything by the end of November. Aside from the updates to Ashe, Wolf, and Scarlet, the only thing to do after the last form will be the actual transformation mechanic, in which Ashe *actually* transforms. I've saved it for last since it'll have some tech problems to solve in regards to switching characters, but all in all I don't see it taking too long to figure out (knock on wood).

Anyways, thanks for reading and thanks for your continued support everybody! 

Cheers,
Jordy