This time I've been working in several new features and a new scenario.

Posted by Autarca on Aug 20th, 2016

Hi

For this new progress report I worked in several new things like:

New Cavern scenario:

I've always liked cavern dungeons, they're gloomy and full of atmosphere if they are done right. I'm trying to do that with this scenario. In this game you can explore a dungeon in real-time but fight in a turn-based grid so I needed a good looking arena to show the combat and its new features, for example in this video I'm testing some changes to the transition between one mode and the other:

I think I nailed the lighting but I'm always open to feedback.

Player Spells:

I also used the cavern arena to test this new feature. Basically some monsters can cast a few spells and they are only limited by a cooldown, players can cast a single spell from their "Spellbook" every turn as long as they have mana (they are also limited by a cooldown though). In this video you can see the player casting a Lightning Spell, I still need to add an animation to the player model, substract mana from the player's bar and maybe "juice up" the effects:

New UI elements:

As always working in the UI is a long and tedious work but I keep progressing. This time I'm working in a "Bestiary", basically your inventory of monsters where you can assign monsters to your battle formation (the number that you can field is limited but you can increase it after levelling your character), to your reserve (in case you lose a monster or want to make it retreat you can call one of your reserve to fill the slot) or just store them in your inventory.

I also decided that big monsters will use 2 slots of your battle formation while small monsters use only one.

Dialogue

I also started coding the dialogue mechanics (with the help of a plug in of the asset store to save time). I'm also writing a script which is turning to be a very entertaining task, of course english is not my native language so I'll probably make a lot of mistakes but I intend to hire edition services later to fix them.

Stats

There's no screenshot for this one but I recently added a small database to the game in order to keep the stats. Basically a monster has several base stats like attack and defense but those are increased every time they level up, these values are saved in a small table and I can read them with a simple SQL instruction. I like the system (after all I worked for years with SQL in my previous jobs) but I'm still not sure if the system is compatible with Linux so I need to check that once I have a playable prototype.

Polishing

Of course I also keep polishing the game by adding small features like footsteps sounds, effect when clicking, UI effects, etc. The problem with these details is that they take time, you won't get praised for them but if you skip them people will notice (or at least think that something is missing) so they may be small but they are still a critical feature:

That's it for this report. I keep working hard so please consider following the project or leaving me any feedback.

Regards,

Jorge