Cast Aside

Started work on some new faces:



I have a hard time simplifying things. Sticking with ver 3 for all facesets.

Facing near annihilation (ie. cancellation) at the mercy of my wife's new job and subsequent end of all things game-development, Cast Aside narrowly pulls through with a now job-less wife - with the holiday seasons over they've reduced her to so few hours it wasn't really worth all the headache anymore.

So with her having lots of spare time and doing art commissions instead of working all weekend and into the night miles from home, we are make progress again! (For real this time.)

Here's several of Rayne's new faces and one of Kael's - redoing those awful faces was near the top of our art list, since there are already quite a few outstanding for other characters too and we really hated the old:





There are some new sprites and world edits, and the sketches for your other two characters are done; for some of the old 'default' faces replacements are in progress as well (bye bye old Captain face.)

On the production side I just deleted several maps and puzzles - why? Because they were bad. They were good, but they were wrong. I was taking a whole dungeon in the entirely wrong way and backed myself into a stupid corner because I didn't want to lose the work.

Instead I've started mapping out all the story in much more detail before working any further, and I'm trying to do it the right way!

For the next dungeon I'm focusing away from the puzzles a bit, and going more into the exploration side and adding some mechanics for manipulating the world and using your party in small groups to help each other out.

Sorry for the delay in release of the full Chapter 3; it's actually a big chapter and Cast Aside got temporarily put on hold until mid-September as we're working on an RTS for a competition.

We've got a new mechanic done for the Terrandraal area, and part of the main storyline will be introduced at the end of Chapter 3, so we're very excited to continue with this as well!

Well, it appears my video abilities are gone so the demo video has disappeared from my game page!

I guess I'll blog the video in, which isn't too bad since I can also do a little explaining since these look more confusing than they really are. :)

You can find the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-O73F9VinI

First, the fight start. Combat happens with everything exactly as it is on-map when the fight starts. For stories your characters would be placed in certain areas, etc.

Combat is real-time and based on a "tick" system; every X frames (think Frames Per Second) makes a single system "tick." You can increase or decrease the time it takes for each tick to happen anytime during combat.

Everything you do costs "Stamina"; you can think of this like your normal AT bar except instead of getting your single turn when it fills up, you can keep acting as long as you have enough in it to do what you want.

Notice when you move you get to "face" your characters in directions; this is extremely important since there are 3 sides considered when attacked/attacking:

1. Facing - Hardest to hit, very low crit chance, highest resist rate
2. Side - Much easier to hit, higher crit chance, medium resist rate
3. Back - Almost guaranteed hit, highest crit chance, lowest resist rate

The next confusing bit is all the blue circles; there are some in the Skill window, and some when you're targeting a character/location.

In the Skill window you can increase the effectiveness of the skill, and how much "Aura" it adds to the square by increasing/decreasing those blue dots. (Cost 1 SP extra for each level)

When targeting you can make the action repeat that number of times (if you have enough Stamina), you do this a lot and some characters are based on it; the red-head PC is a "Striker" type class that hits many times and uses a dagger with "Backstab" (super crit when behind) abilites to deal a lot of fast damage.

Next are 2 questions in one; why does the blue-haired girl have a skill called Flare with such a crazy-huge effect size?

The answer is what Andrea (red-head) did just before with the "Intense" skill.

There are 6 (and one secret) color effects; each character has one as their primary and each adds an effect to the map when used. How many of those blue dots in the skill window (plus the skills base amount) affect how many are layered on the map (up to 5 levels possible).

Those "aura" tiles give different effects:
Red - Grants + of effect radius of skills (higher the red more squares added)
Yellow - Grants faster stamina regen
Orange - Increase power of damage/healing effects
Green - Increases passive HP regen rate
Blue - Increases passive SP regen rate
Purple - Increases range of skills and lowers casting time

No effects are negative and they work for you AND the enemies; enemies also cause these with their attacks.

The red-head used Intense to make the square under the blue-haired girl red so her magic would have a +2 radius. I used this to hit both the rock I wanted to destroy, and put a big HP down effect and damage on the two zombies the green-haired boy just "rooted" with his leg-sweep skill.

Notice how after the skill is used the previously green squares are gone and other squares turned red? Skills 'overwrite' squares based on number:

3 Green square hit by a +4 red skill = 1 red on that square after

The final fun thing to watch is how I used a "Vibrant" (orange) to put a + damage right where I knew would be behind the zombie (since I figured he was going for the red-haired girl or the kobold). Then I zipped my striker behind him and did major damage + backstab, even though her stamina only allowed for 3 strikes.

This is a later battle in the game, I introduce them in an easier fashion and order, so you're not thrown too many things all at once. I also leave a lot up to the player to learn by adding it over the course of the game and hinting about how it works.

Overall it's a fast-paced system that you can take at your own pace (I didn't use the time freeze to prepare or take a breather, but I could have if I started to get overwhelmed.) It was used for me during the small cut-scene so you weren't getting smacked around while everyone is talking (notice the zombies were on top of the wall below them? That's because in a freeze enemies are displayed on top of everything and the tileset turned grey so you can see everything clearly.)


This system has seen MANY revisions, so I hope everyone enjoys it.



For fun, here's a video of when I had it as a normal turn-based system!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdE2dMaYu_I&feature=related