We haven’t updated in a little while as we’ve been quite busy, especially with the recent holidays. But we’ve got some great updates we’d love to share with you! And tons more to look forward to in the near future!
Demo Updates
Battling Upgrade
We’ve recently redesigned a portion of the battling. Instead of having just Attack/Heal and then a Difficulty setting to choose (Easy/Medium/Hard), we’ve completely pitched that. We are now utilizing a sort of category based system where you choose which attack you want to do. Each attack has its own time limit and damage. This means attacks like Gatling Gun do way more damage than Swipe, but has a way shorter time limit. Not only that but we’ve also added a new strength/weakness system to the monsters and to player attacks. This means that you’ll do bonus damage (or less damage) based on if the attack you use is good (or bad) against the monster you’re fighting. Right now, the strength/weakness system is a bit basic because we don’t have a ton of attacks yet. But as we get more attacks and more monsters, this feature will really start to shine I believe. It’s just another layer of giving the player more choice when it comes to the battling. To see a very simple example of the new battling menu (and the bonus explosive damage), watch a bit of the trailer that we updated below.
Keyboard Functionality
The keyboard functionality that was in the previous builds were a bit half-ass’d. By that I simply mean that they didn’t work for all menu’s (such as the Option menu) and were rather untested. I’ve recently gone back and updated the menu’s as well as the new battle system to be 100% functional with keyboard alone. This means you don’t have to use a mouse. In fact, you could bind a game controller to keyboard buttons and play with a controller if you wanted.
SRS Countdown Multiplier
Most people won’t care about this right now, but it is a deck option. The deck setting allows you to shorten or lengthen all countdown times by a multiplier. This will become really useful in the future for decks that use either extremely short answers (letters perhaps) or extremely long answers (multiple sentences), because it will allow them to shorten or lengthen all countdown timers to better suite the deck. You never want to give the player too long to answer or too short.
Warp into Battle
Nothing crazy, but now we have a little warp animation (as I call it) and sound. Now that the code is in place, we can always upgrade to a better animation or sound. Watch the previous trailer up above and you’ll see it.
Silhouette Default Face
The dialog images you see of the persons face who is speaking now has a default image with “Coming Soon” over it. Basically, Vax is the only one who has a dialog image at this point, but eventually we’ll make the others.
Item Interaction
Item’s such as the Healing Well, which spans across multiple tiles, have been updated so that when you hover over them, it highlights the entire item. Clicking anywhere on the item will walk you to the interact tile (such as the front of the Healing Well) before the interaction begins.
Map Names
Map names now show up whenever a map loads. So if you’re in the main village and walk into a home, the name of that home will appear and slowly fade out. Keep in mind, a lot of the houses are currently just titled House 1, House 2, etc because we haven’t gotten too far in terms of labeling. However, the Mill, Townhall, your Home, etc are all labeled nicely, this way we can easily talk about them both in and out of the game and know which we are talking about.
In The Works
There are two major things in the work right now. The first is that I’ll be working on adding a sort of combo system to the battling. The upgrade we’re releasing today was released separate because these two components are rather large. I’m not sure how long it’ll take me to get the combo system integrated. The second thing is that we’ll be opening up a second map to run around in sometime soon. As well as creating a better main story line. The townspeople will still talk about features of the game, but the story line will actually run you through a series of small quests. We’re hoping somewhere around 30 minutes of main story demo game play. We feel this will actually give the player an aim in the demo, rather than random wandering.