I noticed it’s been a while since I last posted an update on the project. So here is an update on the state of it so far.
Behind the scenes, the cart library has been taking up a fair bit of my time recently, as I wanted to get it in a usable state for a Carter Games project, which needed a few bits the library didn’t currently have. Mainly a debug console at runtime. The update is now in pre-release, so I can get back to focusing on this project alongside that prototype soon. An update of what’s new since my last post:
Enemy attacks
The biggest move has been with the enemies. They finally attack back! Currently, it’s very basic with them all just selecting their first attack move to attack with. There has been some progress on getting them to actually select a move based on the game state. But for now I just want to get the battle loop working with all combatants fighting. This all took a while to get working as I found out I had coded a lot of the logic for combatants specifically to party members only and not in a generic sense for either side. Doh! So about 2-3 weeks was spent getting that all in order. In this time I also added more visual effects and get rid of the fallback for no effect so all moves would go off a visual animation/particles of some kind.
Animations & death states
With enemies fighting back, and quite hard actually. Hitting 145 per hit with cleave. I might need to double check my maths there. But the party could now die. So I added death animations as well as animations for getting knocked down from a weakness and getting up from both. I also added a getting hit jerk in to flow. With this I also re-did the party status UI to show a dead party member as well as support for status ailment variants which I know I’ll have to do soon. I also stopped a dead member from being selected for moves. For now it is a blanket disable, though I will need to allow selection for revival abilities in the future.
Character outlines
While it took a while, I was able to get a working character outline effect to appear. In persona 5 you’d have a red outline following the character along with the rest of the UI. The effect isn’t perfect as you’ll see by the feet in the screenshot below, but it does the job and doesn’t get in the way of the existing anime/cel shading that is already present on the characters.
Next bits
The main focus going forward will be to get the general moves working on both party members and enemies. I currently have some un-reliable code with the effect spawning that will stop the game randomly which I need to work out as well as a load of smaller issues that I’m bound to find. So there is a goal there as well to make the gameplay that I’ve written more stable and fix a few bugs. I’ll hopefully have more to update on in the near future.
~ J,
