Dev Diary #4
Added 2016-07-23 18:48:19 +0000 UTCHey guys,
The battle system is now working in its most basic form. We can spawn an enemy, go to the battle screen, have a fight (consisting right now of punching eachother until the enemy dies), then returning to the map screen.
This has involved a lot of back-and-forth between Crimson and I about the minutia of the battle system. I had had in mind a system similar to Pokemon - both parties choose their action, then both actions are played out in order of current highest speed stat. Then it goes back to choosing your action.
However, without the benefit of animations to play out, we discovered this can be very jarring. If the enemy is faster than you, you will end up choosing an attack and then immediately getting hit. After a few rounds of this it's possible to make sense of what's happening, but at first it feels very off-putting.
So, we've decided instead to go a more traditional turn-based route. Player and enemy actions take place one after the other. So in this instance, if the enemy is faster, the first thing you'll see in a battle is getting hit for damage, and *then* your choice of actions.
I'm not really a fan of unavoidable damage, though. If you're in a dangerous place, in this system, a fast enemy could spawn and hit you before you can react, so we're providing an option to attempt to flee before the battle starts. It could well be that this might need changing later, perhaps special items that provide other options before a battle starts (Hah! Pocket sand!), but we're happy with it for the time being.
Anyway, now that the groundwork for the battle system is in place, we can put some basic moves into our moves database, and hook those into the enemies and player to start fleshing out the stat interactions like damage, armour, resistance, etc. a bit more.
Lastly, thank you all so much again for backing us on Indiegogo and/or supporting us here on Patreon. It means the absolute world to both of us.
Until next time!
