Devlog #25- Practice Battles

I’ve added a lot of new systems to the game recently (training, hardmode, swapping leaders, team layout, quiz, exp stock) but haven’t integrated them perfectly into the existing systems and tutorial yet so I’ve started going back and doing that. Because of this, I’ve decided to wait until that’s done before getting my brother to playtest, and releasing a demo update with the new stuff.

Last week's goals-

-Final touches of  Quiz: DONE! (Still need the tutorial and more questions added though)

-Add training area: DONE!

-EXP stock menu: MOSTLY DONE!

-Wesley’s area polished and playtested by my brother: ...NOT YET

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Ayumu’s HIT

Thanks to some great feedback on the demo, I’ve been going back and making existing stuff better. During this process, I ended up thinking about Ayumu’s HIT minigame which has gone through many iterations and I’ve never been truly happy with it- and I decided to rework it again!

The basic intention of his minigame is a simple timing-based one. I always wanted to make it so that each timed attack would add to the damage done, but when I tried it would either be too long for a basic attack or too complex. I think I’ve now found a good solution- 

(Ignore the red square in the top-left, I'm still working on getting the timing right)

First, I split ayumu’s ATK damage into 5 amounts. Ayumu’s first hit (1/5th of atk damage) is guaranteed and then the next 4 hits add another fifth, but they require proper timing and missing will end the attack early. I've added the current damage total as you attack, so that if an enemy has 1 HP left you don’t have to do the entire minigame too.

Timing is based on when the ring of white silhouette sickles reaches the center. I’m finding that designing the timing for this is incredibly hard to get right, but visually I like how it turned out. It needs some nice sound effects and maybe a bit more visual reaction for each hit still, and I plan to keep iterating on it until it's perfect.

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Training Area

Mac will now hang out at base-camp, and you can talk to him just like any other party member with his own selection of chat topics. The main reason he’s there though is to run you through training battles-

The list of practice battle options will get longer as you encounter new mechanics and characters. The basics are simple setups to allow for practicing a character’s attacks in a battle where I remove the other team members so you can repeat attacks quickly. And this is also where I’ll tutorialise any new recruit’s abilities.

When you recruit a new character, I don’t want to bog down the excitement with a tedious tutorial. I’d rather have players just try out the new attacks and figure it out on their own. But now if they are stuck or just want to make sure they are doing it right, they can return to Mac and get a more detailed rundown of each character.

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Next week goals:

-Fully polished version of the game content so far, ready for playtesting!

-That’s it.

I think it's important to get all the new systems working, playtested and polished before moving forward, so no distractions I'm gonna get it done by next week!

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Thanks for reading! I’ll show off the exp stock system and menus I'm working on next week when they’re fully done