Devlog #17 - Big UI upgrade & the Anatomy of a Skill + buff timers
Finally got together a new devlog, and I actually think it's pretty meaty this time! A ton of my focus was on untangling the anatomy of what a Skill actually is in my game, and that also went hand-in-hand with UI upgrades, which are very much WIP
Character portraits are now visible in the Pause menu Summary screens - I needed the character sprites associated with the UI for party members for the next step, so I made them visible here as well. Other than that I have not polished the Pause menu at all, but now you can see the character in their stat screen.
In-battle character wheel & plans for UI regarding targeting - So I had this idea of having the party member who is targetted by a single-target attack (or the entire party in case of a party-wide attack) appear at the bottom of the screen, but because of all the information that can be on screen already, I don't want them to always be visible. My solution is a wheel that displays the selected party member, which can be used both when you are selecting them on your turn AND when the enemy selects one of them for a target. This wheel is not finished, but I have a rudimentary version of it in there to see how I like it.
The anatomy of a Skill - I really had to think this through to untangle a lot of the ideas about how to present information clearly while having a lot of interacting and flexible choices for Skill design. I had come up with a lot of passive abilities that sell the feeling of each character/class, but for example, a Poison boosting passive is only as good as your range of active Poison skills, so I needed many active Skills in each category. I also want things like Fire and Ice mages, while having Fire and Ice feel more interesting than different kinds of elemental damage.
What I have so far - Any active attacking Skill (meaning not Passives, Healing, Status, or Buffs/Debuffs) can be, independantly, either Single-Target or Multi-Target, Single-Hit or Multi-Hit, Magic (costs MP and can be silenced, but has more variety and power) or not Magic, Ranged (bypasses time cost of attacking into many summons but loses accuracy) or Melee (the opposite), have an elemental Type (Fire, Ice, Elec, Poison, etc whatever I need) and a melee damage type (Cut, Pierce, Bash, with their own advantages).
Elemental types aren't rock-paper-scissors, they have more bespoke effects. Instead, Fire spells feel like Fire because they inflict the Burning status. Ice spells can slow or freeze enemies, etc. Skills with those tags though, are made more effective by certain passives. As for Melee types, Pierce skills should bypass Defense buffs, Bash attacks scatter summons, and Cut attacks may deal extra damage on crits (maybe, unsure). A Fire Sword attack, for example can be a Single-target Single-hit, Magic Melee Fire Cut attack, and I can balance it all with MP and Time costs.
That's a lot, I know, and the goal is to make it as simple as possible in the battle UI to strategize, but also make the game very flexible and interesting.
Skill tags & properties - Skills in battle display tags that represent the above properties, so we are always clear what we are working with.
Skill and Item description boxes - Now we can read what our Skills and Items actually do in battle! This will also greatly help me to write down the actual current implementation of skills and balance them while playtesting.
Stat buff turn timers - Stat buffs are now applied on individual 3-turn timers (for now this is by default 3 and maxes out at 3, but that could change). Reapplying a buff resets the timer to 3, but while buffs and debuffs counteract each other, buff don't reset the timer unless they are on the positive side, and vice versa for debuffs (ie you can only extend debuffs with debuffs). An alternative approach would be to have a queue of effects with their own timers, where a bunch of buffs and debuffs can be active at once, meaning if the buffs expire, you could be left with a set of active debuffs, but I think using one side to cancel the other works well in concept, I have to think on it some more.
Such a long post, but I've been thinking about this all for like 40 days since the last one!
