Devlog #17- Grab Bag

There's no focused design topic this week so I’ve opted to using Sakurai’s terminology and this week will be a grab bag of random new stuff I want to show off.

As for the demo, things are going well! All of the main content is done, and now I’m playing through it and making sure that it’s all working and touching up anything that needs it. (Mostly things I knew needed fixing at the time but was too lazy to fix)

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Onto the new stuff:

First off, introducing a new character- Aburaoka, otherwise known as Abu!

Abu is one of the  recruitable party members in the prologue, met later in the story. He’s a take on the pompadour yankee cliché, with some influence from my recent binge of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. He’s blunt, standoffish and emotionally unintelligent, but hopefully he'll grow on the player over time. 

He's not featured in the demo, I just felt like adding him the other day when I got bored during endless bug fixes.

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Revamped HYPE

I added Mac’s HYPE ability to battles a few devlogs back now. You can read more about it here, but to summarise- You have a team bonus and a percentage success rate to apply it for one round. Using Mac’s turn to hype the crowd will raise this percentage and then attempt to trigger the team bonus.

Test playing the first iteration, I realised it needed some more player input so I’ve added a simple minigame to it. Now when you select HYPE, Mac will slide across the front of the stage and do finger guns as you mash Z and X (or your chosen 2 buttons) with each finger gun adding a percent to the hype bonus success.

(He just says "heyoo" as placeholder for now, but I'm considering allowing the player to enter their own phrase here for a bit of personalisation)

Up until now I’ve avoided mashing button minigames like this for accessibility reasons, not everyone can mash buttons and I’m sure it turns some people off. So I plan to add an accessibility function that swaps it to a guaranteed 15%~ regardless of how many finger guns you do.

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Boss Battle

This mysterious hooded man is a part of Momo’s dream; the man who has stolen her younger brother and appears in her nightmares to reenact his crime.

He’s the first real boss I’ve added (one of many planned), and what defines bosses in my game are that they have multiple possible attacks, unlike standard enemies which always use the same attack.

Here’s the two attacks that he does. The first hits the front row hard, and the second hits all characters a little less hard but it’s much harder to read his timing. There’s no warning for which attack is coming so you just have to pay close attention to the starting frames of his attacks.

I can all but guarantee that these will be changed during playtesting, so I've stuck with very rough animations for now.
I’m not confident when to comes to making these attacks feel good to deflect, but hopefully I'll get better at it over time.

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Cinematics

Now with the cutscene, dialogue and quest systems in place I can finally start putting in more involved cutscenes without worrying about having to redo them entirely in the future when systems change.  Here’s a sneak peak at a scene with the hooded man-

I keep seeing tutorials on how to add cool lighting and effects to pixel art games, and it makes me worried that a game in my style comes off as tacky or juvenile, but then I remember that's kind of the point. I like being able to make a stupid little cutscene like this in a half hour and move onto the next thing. I hope people will still enjoy it regardless of it's basic graphics.

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At this rate I’ll have the demo ready in the next few days and get my brother to playtest it first. After that I’ll send it to some friends to play, then if all goes smoothly I’ll have it ready for a public demo early/mid January.

If you’re interested in playing it early then let me know and I’ll send you a link when it’s done! Thanks for reading!