I’ve been fine-tuning the combat, since I am trying to avoid a mindless hack and slash. The kittris, though test monsters, are still using fundamental attacks that other monsters later can borrow, and I found them incredibly hard to predict… part of that is because I haven’t drawn the animation frames that signal what they are about to do. But they did move a bit too fast, especially when I implemented the next ability in Arashi’s arsenal: defense.
Arashi has the ability to either simply just block attacks and take reduced damage (she is allowed to move at a reduced rate while defending), or the player can try to time pressing the initial defense button the moment an enemy lands an attack. If within the “parry” window, if the enemy’s attack connects, it will do no damage at all as long as it is a physical attack. Furthermore, parrying an attack will not only stun the enemy in place for a good block of time, it will enable Arashi a counter attack window that does even more damage than a running slash. One of the early bosses is weak to this particular strategy, since I want to teach the player how to use it effectively to handle the harder levels later.
I guess I want the combat to be more about options, since I want to reward the main possible playstyles, cautious and strategic, or aggressive and swift.
Also notice in this screenshot, I added a fog layer as the first “weather” effect. And I am working on a good time of day routine… this is important since the first stage occurs at night. Fog is a very useful effect for ambience, but I want to add rain, and possibly cloud shadows for higher level weather (I think the camera is too low to have a believable cloud layer overhead).
I’m getting to the point where I’m running out of things to program without going forward with the level design, once I copy over the “usecode” source, the next thing I need to do is make a handler for multiple sound effects playing at once (right now, the only sound effect I have is the BGM and a sword swing). After that I see no reason I can’t design the first level… minus cutscenes and npcs. I’ll get to that.
Artwork takes a lot longer to produce than programming code 🙁 Will update as soon as possible when some of the Stage 1 elements are complete (not to mention, I still have to work on Arashi’s animation frames).
Also, I figured out how to get the sword slash animation to be smooth and still look flashy, which won’t take much effort to do compared to other artwork.
Took a few days off to play Dragon Age. It’s a good game, typical BioWare with excellent writing and crappy NPC AI during combat. Feels sorta like Knights of the Old Republic with less lasers. LASERS?! lol
Hmm, do you plan on doing some kind of randomized root system for the bases of tree’s? The tree art look srally good, until you see them just popping up out of the ground.
Also, do you plan on any type of nature paralax style elements, kinda like Saturn Albert Odyssey Gaiden? I remember that game looking freakin’ awesome, though probably less much so today with the Saturns composite cable limitations. Stupid lack of HD forsight!
That is an interesting idea, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen any game randomize the roots to trees. But keep in mind that the trees are placeholder art still, and I didn’t intend for the roots to just be missing lol. Honestly unless this game has a random dungeon generator, I think the root layouts of the trees should remain static as they are just as much landmarks as any terrain for the map. But I will do my best in the final map designs to keep the roots as natural looking as possible ;p
I’d have to check Albert Odyssey Gaiden, I never got to play it, so don’t know what you are referring to. Parallax scrolling isn’t hard to do though, I’m already doing that with the fog you see in this screenshot 😉 But getting ideas what I can do with it would be nice for later level designs.
I noticed the tree animation is the same for all of them, maybe later you can try to add slight changes to some of the trees. Also about your “Test” monster why not leave it in as maybe a starter monster for the player to learn on in say a Learning type mode of the battle functions. Oh and about the camera angle that is to low for cloud cover shadows check out the games named GrowLancer, the games looked good but it had about the same angle you have I hope that helps.
Don’t worry too much about the trees being too similar at this point, I do plan to mix them up a bit so it’s not so repetitive. At least within my means lol, the Xbox 360 version is going to have a strict limit for game size including graphics to get published on their network, but I am planning on a “Complete” version on the PC release which should allow for a bit better graphics and more involved maps.
The “Test” monster, the low-level kittri, is definitely staying in, the only reason I call it a test is because I spent all of 5 minutes to make its graphic lol, its artificial intelligence and abilties are the basics for the future monsters in the list. 🙂 I still need to check out Growlancer though.