Devlog #12- Rina's Power

This week I haven't done a lot of interesting stuff, but I have finally finished the tutorial!
There's still some minor adjustments on the list, and after play-testing there'll likely be a tonne more, but the major parts of the tutorial are done and I've also iterated a lot on the dialogue and I'm a lot happier with it now. One of the final parts of the tutorial was Rina's POW move, and it's the most interesting thing I've worked on this week so I'm gonna talk about it for this devlog.

Power moves (POW) are an ultimate move unique to each character that require charging up over multiple turns before use. They all feature a 20-30 second minigame, with minimal controls, where the score you rack up is translated to damage. I wrote about it in more detail in a previous devlog.

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Rina's Power Move

Rina's POW is the first character's power you'll unlock regardless of which sibling you choose as your player character, as it's part of the tutorial. Rina's weapon of choice is a water-filled gourd, so her POW is a washing mini-game with her stuck in a soap bubble that you can blow around with the arrow keys washing away a dirt-covered object. The object itself is drawn very basic so that I can easily add a bunch of objects to randomly select from, adding an element of surprise. I think it gives it a Warioware feel too, which is exactly the type of short-burst hectic fun I'm going for.

It's one of the last parts of the tutorial, and I purposely just throw the player in with very little instruction. (I will add a sign with "arrow keys to move" in the future) The bubble moves on it's own in the direction of the dirt, and pressing the arrow keys will cause a reaction, so I think the player will figure it out on their own. Also the final score doesn't matter at all in the tutorial as any number of damage will finish the opponent off.

I got my brother to try it and he liked it but got somewhat frustrated when he couldn't get to 100%, and in a way that's what I was trying to design to.  These power moves aren't meant to be something you can clear every time, I want your result to be inconsistent but still reward skill.  It is possible to get 100% (I've done it a couple of times) but it's not easy, and I hope the itch to get a higher score will keep players engaged over a longer period of time. This move is an ultimate one after all, so you'll likely only use it once per battle if even that, making your chance to improve intermittent.

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Happy Halloween!

Also a special Halloween bonus, Ayumu and Rina dressed up as Jotaro and Jolyne from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. I got into the manga over the past year and it's become a huge inspiration for storytelling and characters. Took me a couple hours to draw this and about 3/4 the way through I thought, hmmm a time-lapse of this would have been really cool... These skins of existing characters are a great way to improve my pixel art, so I plan to do more like these for future holidays and I'll try and give a time-lapse a go.

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If you've been following my Twitter updates, you'll have seen some WIP shots of the town and I've drawn some more houses. Go check it out there if you're interested, because I think I'm gonna save that for next week.  I've got some more related stuff in the works so I'll make it all about buildings in general!

Thanks for reading! See you next week.