Devlog #24- Hardmode

This week has been a bit of a cursed one: Because of non-game dev commitments, generally bad sleep and overall game-dev slump, I got very little done compared to usual- although I did make some progress. It's tempting to prolong this devlog to finish off some more stuff, but I'd rather write it now so I can start the new week fresh! The week after a slump is usually when I get the most done after all!

Last week's goals-

-Revamp Quiz and Hard mode/Weaklings: Done! (for the most part)

-Make interior for Yusuke’s house: NOPE

-Wesley’s area polished and playtested by my brother -Start the final area (leading to final boss): NOPE

-Start the final area (leading to final boss): NOPE

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Moving diagonally

Although this week didn't go great, I did finally get the characters to move at a more accurate speed when moving diagonally without any jittering! Anybody who's been on game dev forums will know that this is a very common problem people have, and I've tried to fix it in the past but gave up as I could never quite find a way to do it properly (especially with the 3 followers also needing to be pixel perfect). I still never found an answer online that worked, and instead figured out a way on my own.

Basically, when a character moves diagonally they should be moving at 0.7x speed. My characters move at 2 pixels per frame, so now when walking diagonally I make the characters walk just 1 frame every second frame (1,2,1,2,1,2) which evens out to 0.75x speed and it's a smooth enough pattern that it's barely noticeable. Such a simple solution but it took me so long to figure it out.

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Hardmode

I had some feedback about how the ghosts respawning every day felt like too much, and while I won't remove that because that's a very intentional part of the game, I decided to add this 'hard mode' to balance it out a bit. (Hard mode is not a typical difficulty mode, and the name itself is purely used on the backend and not in-game).

While in the overworld you can now call on Mac anytime to prop up big flashing arrows pointing at you. If these arrows are up and you get ambushed then you can't deflect their hands and the ghosts in the battle will have significantly higher stats. 

As Mac will explain to you, ghosts come back every day but if you want them to stop ambushing you then you'll need to humiliate them. Losing a match with such a huge advantage is enough for a ghost to realise that there's no point in ambushing you from now on.

So now you can move around the world stealthily avoiding ghosts and remembering their locations, or work towards demolishing every ghost you see permanently. -or, what I would hope as the designer- a mix of both. Holding space (the same button as reacting to ambushes) for a second will add or remove the arrows at any time while in the overworld.

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Quiz, revamped

Removing an enemy encounter from the overworld is the first benefit of hard-mode,  and the other benefit is that winning these battles will reward the player a quiz reward panel!

I wrote about how Mac's quiz will work in a devlog a ways back and it hasn't changed a lot so if you're interested then you can read it here.

But to summarize quickly, you can use Mac's turn in battle to do a quiz minigame for a chance at rewards such as [ATK+X],  [heal X], etc. that apply the for rest of the battle. Get a question correct and your reward is chosen randomly from a consistent board of 16 possible rewards, and the player can upgrade this board with new reward panels as they play.

Previously I had planned to unlock these reward panels somewhat randomly but now they are exclusive to hardmode battles and which reward panel you get is tied to the overworld appearance of the ghost. For example, a car ghost will always give you a SPD+5 panel, and a tree ghost will always give you DEF+1 panel, no matter which area they are in.

Common ghosts will give common reward panels, allowing the player to add multiples of the same for a more guaranteed result. Whereas rare or unique overworld ghosts will have stronger and unique reward panels (and also harder battles), so there is some more incentive to seek them out instead of completely avoiding them.

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Mac's POW

I've also decided to make the quiz require some charging up before use, like the other characters POW bar. It'll work basically the same, a bar that fills up under Mac's turn-order icon. But unlike the party member's POW, I'm thinking that it will charge up whenever a player successfully dodges and whenever a player hits an enemy for 0 damage.

I think this will work well because it'll build up naturally as you play, but will be especially helpful when in a tight spot. There's possibly some strategy around purposely doing low damage to charge the quiz too.

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Goals for the next week-

-Final touches of  Quiz

-Add training area (started working on this, but nothing to show yet)

-EXP stock menu

-Wesley’s area polished and playtested by my brother

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Thanks for reading! :)