Devlog #22- Party Swapping

Another quick update devlog this week, real life stuff has got in the way a bit (thus late devlog). I’ve mostly been finishing the cut-scenes and enemies for Wesley’s area, but I got a bunch of random stuff done too.

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Last weeks goals

Next area Boss battle- Almost finished. I’ve done the sprites and design but haven’t fully implemented it yet. I’ll likely have it done today.

All major cut-scenes up until boss battle -All done! 

Other areas furnished (at the very least with functional placeholder art) -I got more done (mostly non-placeholder!) ...but there’s still a couple of empty areas.

Ability to change party members at base camp -Done!

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Bonus stuff I got done

Updated the demo: Fixed some bugs I found and adjusted some stats and cut-scenes

Refactored my battle system: This was a big diversion but something I’ve been putting off because of how daunting it seemed. I went back and restructured the whole battle system so it’ll be quicker for me to add stuff to it from now.

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Changing Party Members-

My game now has 5 party members so this week I added the ability to swap them around. Here’s what I’ve got-

I reused the character menu screen because it already shows just about everything you’d need to know when swapping members. 

You can only swap teams while at base camp, and you need to have at least one of the siblings in your party at all times, but other than that you can swap around however you like. The current state of each party member stays consistent even if you swap characters in and out so you'll still have to visit Mila to end the day to restore HP.

Changing Leaders!

This is a feature I had planned for the next game, but it turns out that with the way I have done things it was easy enough to implement for the prologue too- swapping freely between Ayumu and Rina!

You can see it in the gif above in the top-left, simply pressing A here will swap your main controllable character between Rina and Ayumu while at base camp. This will give the player a bit more freedom when choosing a party layout, now getting a choice in all 4 party members.

I'm already writing all the cut-scenes to work with either sibling so it's no extra work, but there might be a few continuity errors in dialogue depending on who you take where. Hopefully they can all be explained away by in game lore- they're very close siblings and whenever they are at base camp they update each other on what happened.

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Goals for this week:

-Finish the boss (continued from last week)

-Polish Wesley’s area to a playable state

-Make the next area (small northern hub connecting 4 of the dreams)

-Finish part 1 of Yusuke’s extended dream

I’m going to try and focus on the content connected to the ‘main story’ of the game, and push towards getting the final area and boss done sooner rather than saving it for last. The finish line still feels out of sight for me so I'd like to get the structure of the full game finalised and then fill in the gaps with the other planned areas, cutting corners there if necessary.

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I’m still going at a good pace but I'm always just a bit behind where I want to be, so I might have to start thinking about cutting back in places. Watching the latest Nintendo direct really put into perspective what my game has to be- A short and polished game. My game will never beat out the hundreds of incredible games that come out every year, so I just need to make sure it’s a good time for whoever does give it a chance and maybe it can lead me on to one day being able to make one that does stand amongst the best.

Thanks for reading!