It's been a little while, what have I been working on?
My latest work went into making some pretty significant tweaks to the battle results screen. Really starting to tie things together now, but it's not quite finished yet! That's not all, though.
Back in May I was experimenting with RPG Maker's "weather" system. I had implemented a map-specific "overhang" layer that framed the edges of rooms with black space. That prevented weather effects - like snow particles - from displaying beyond the boundaries of the room.
The frogs are just my debug objects for turning the snow on and off.
But it's not like I wanted it to snow indoors - after I had the overhangs figured out, I rewrote the behaviour and graphics code for the "snow" particles to create these dust particles that float around aimlessly.
This ought to make the catacomb interiors feel appropriately dusty - and make the environments feel less still and lifeless in general.
They even display on the battle screen... though sometimes they tend to crowd around the left side of the screen because of the panning and sliding during the battle intro animation. I'll have to fix that at some point.
During May and June, Vito got a complete set of battle sprites and an attack animation.
And so did Yolei. Oh, and the dog enemy is also new.
The dog enemy is very evasive, but also cowardly and not very tough.
It is capable of the "flee" action, something that slimes and skeletons will not do.
At the end of June I added a MAJOR quality of life feature. When Ashley is facing something on the map that can be interacted with or talked to with the action button, a quotation bubble with an exclamation mark will pop up above their head. No ambiguity! No more pixel hunting or mashing the action button in front of every random tile!
I didn't save any screenshots in July, it was a busy month I guess. But in August I got back to work.
Remember this old sprite? From February of 2023?
Well, I'm revisiting this enemy type with more practice under my belt. Here are some gifs I recorded as I was figuring them out and implementing their assets and abilities.
As armored enemies, they are very hardy - the weaker party members will have a hard time damaging them with basic attacks.
In addition to their basic attacks, all undead enemies can perform a skill that inflicts "fear" status on one party member, which depletes their morale over time...
Here's the same battle running with the mood lighting and dust effects turned on. While I was fiddling with the code, I was also able to configure the target animation to not play if the skill misses. It looked sloppy otherwise.
At some point I put a big, animated door on the front entrance of the debug dungeon. I used this door as a testing model for other interactive doors to use later.
I also spent the last few days of the month filling out Nana's spellbook with some more spell animations. "Dazzle" inflicts dizzy on the entire enemy party. Dizzy enemies have a chance of hitting the wrong target with their basic attacks - including their own allies. Hitting a dizzy target with a basic attack will also knock them down and stun them for one turn.
"Fume" poisons one enemy with a cloud of noxious gas, dealing damage over time.
I should of course note that since skeletons don't breathe, they can't be poisoned in the final game - I was only using this one to demonstrate the animation here.
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