Thrall

Oops.

I missed blog day. It was supposed to be yesterday and I just forgot. Matter of fact, I completely forgot to come up with a subject for the mid-month blog, so I'm doing another progress report!

That's okay, though. I was on vacation for a week in the first half of November, so I was able to get a lot done, and there's actually quite a bit to report on. So, let's get into it, shall we? First of all, I managed to create a unique consumable item that'll be used in the late game. I think I can share this without any spoilers, but essentially I found a way to create an item that replaces the elemental damage type of your currently equipped weapons! This was super cool, and gave me some really good ideas for how to wrap up some story points. What's really neat about this is that it not only overwrites whatever element the weapon had, but it also replaces the attack animation for the weapon while keeping its weapon type (blunt, sword, axe etc.). So that was cool.

What else? Well, I found a way to animate the Overdrive gauges! Now, when the gauge is completely filled, it won't just turn into a static rainbow colored gauge, but will instead be a color changing, flowing rainbow gauge! I know, so exciting. I'm sure it doesn't sound like much, but I'm really happy with the result.

Yeah, this progress report is mostly going to be me geeking out over a bunch of very small and seemingly insignificant but kind of cool coding things I figured out.

On a more useful note, I did find a way to improve on the Colorblind mode, and actually test it out. I changed some of the gauge colors for better contrast and adjusted some other system colors while that mode is active, then tested the mode by going into my computers graphic settings and turning saturation to zero. I then played through the demo to see how effective the method was, and while not perfect it certainly was an improvement over the previous iteration. Accessibility settings are important! They deserve as much attention as anything else.

Now, one major thing I did was rewrite the battle system. Mostly. I essentially completely re-wrote how the Game_Battler script calculates damage for both physical attacks and skills. This solved two problems. One, the code is much more readable and easier to edit if I need to change or add anything. And two, now you can gain all the benefits of passive abilities from skill trees or unique weapons while using techniques, instead of getting those buffs exclusively from normal attacks. This was very important for a number of things such as Overdrive skills not stacking Overkill damage, or certain skills being less powerful than the base attack simply because they didn't get the same buffs across the board. With this change, combat will be much more consistent and predictable.

Also, apparently I screwed up somewhere and the RES stat did literally nothing. That's fixed now. Oops.

What else, what else - OH! I changed Weak status. Before, Weak status would reduce enemy DEF by 80%, increasing the amount of damage physical attacks would do if the enemy had naturally high DEF. But that's kind of boring and unpredictable. So now, Weak status works kind of the same way as Slag in the Borderlands games. Enemies (or allies) afflicted with Weak status will take 2x damage from all sources. In addition, I've added custom animations for Weak weapons and attacks to look more like poison attacks, and even changed Damien's attack animations when using daggers if he has Poison Blade unlocked. It feels much more like a viable weapon element now, and is also something to be more wary of when fighting enemies.

Let's see, I also changed the tutorials. Instead of a massive info dump all at once that explains EVERYTHING, tutorials are now more reactive. So for example, instead of explaining Overdrive at the beginning of the first battle, Overdrive will be explained only once you've filled your Overdrive gauge for the first time. Also, I've added small tutorials for when you find elemental weapons, explaining what each element and the associated status does.

And finally, since I know this was brought up in the initial testing phase, I changed the Locker. Normally, you could stash one weapon and one armor that could then be accessed from any save file. Now, you can stash up to 3 weapons and 3 armors. This way, you can transfer at least one item per party member, essentially. This didn't seem to increase load times at all, but it does increase the game's overall file size. By a whole whopping 2KB. Scary. At any rate, the Locker should be much more functional now.

And that's about it! I did work on a ton of maps and cutscenes as well, but that's kind of par for the course. Sorry for the late blog, and sorry it's not very well structured or formatted, this was kind of rushed. Hopefully I'll be a little more prepared for the blog at the end of November. Until then!