A short update on the Persona Project. The massive refactor I was working on is done now and I’m finally starting to make some progress on the project again. Its been a tad delayed by me switching over the Linux for my personal setup where I work on the project. That’s been an adjustment, but is going well. So what’s new.
Hold Up!
The main progress has been on the hold up state. This has three main points:
- Trigger
- Detects when a Hold Up should happen and starts the transition.
- Transition
- The visual where the Hold Up text appears, the party runs in and aims at the enemies etc.
- Options
- The menu where the user can select to perform an All-Out-Attack or cancel to skip to the next combatant.
Detection
I already had the logic in place to detect a hold up from before the big refactor, so that has been a breeze. I’ve added in a debug key to allow me to trigger a hold up at any time. This is going to be important for the upcoming All-Out-Attack work, as that is where I’d trigger that from.
Transition
This was new. So transitioning into the hold up has a mix of UI & combatant movements. The UI was fairly straight forward. The hold up text is angled a tad and animates into frame while what I’ve named shards tween out at intervals around the copy centre. The fun part was getting the combatants in the right spots. I added a load of start/end points for each combatant and updated points for each enemy so they are closer together for the hold up options screen. There’s also a new camera angle here which follows the player combatant into the hold up. I had to check it was always the player combatant and it was, I couldn’t remember how that worked xD
Options
The options menu is nice and simple. I did have to enable some elements such as the health & target select UI. Thankfully, with the big refactor, these can just be enabled to work on particular screens without any extra work. I’m not planning on adding in any of the shadow interrogation elements, so I have one less option on this screen as talk is not needed as an option. That leaves All-Out-Attack and cancel. As of writing both are hooked up, though the All-Out-Attck doesn’t do anything yet, its a yet to be implemented method. Cancelling out will just pass to the next combatant.
All-Out-Attack
I’ve mentioned it a lot already in the hold up and this is the next thing to go in. I’ve used the project from Mix & Jam on YouTube as a base. The project files there have saved a lot of time with the visuals. I however need to adjust the implementation to work with a bigger project such as this. The setup in that project was rather temporary by the looks of it.
I’ve got the prefab setup for it with all the stages I need to implement. These are:
- Jumps
- Here all the party members jump off screen with a static camera.
- Mirror
- Here a mirror breaks with the party member portaits appearing of some of the shards from the crack.
- Hits
- Where the hits are shown from the attack hitting the enemies in the fight
- Star Transition
- A star zooms into the screen.
- Here if the attack doesn’t end the fight the user will see the damage dealt to the enemies health bars and the fight continues.
- Otherwise it continues to step 5
- A star zooms into the screen.
- Pose
- The triggering party member has a pose followed by a freeze frame to end the All-Out-Attack and fight.
At the moment I have step 1 prepared, but I’m still working on getting the party into position and jumping with the camera angle switching at the right time. I have the All-Out-Attack setup to be under the fight scene, so its out of frame of the rest of the camera’s while not needing to hop scene or anything.
I’m hoping to have the All-Out-Attack done my end of Autumn, though end of September is ideal so I can sort out baton pass and other battle mechanics out before the big bad of enemy behaviour.
New enemy
Shadow J! Its me, but evil? I’ve not done much other than pick the moves I get, so its a T-posing J until I get to doing something better. Here’s the in-game inspect at the moment:
I may also make some custom skills for my shadow, but thats a long way down the road at the moment.
That’s about it for this update. Lots of progress + Linux! Will post another update once the All-Out-Attack works xD
