Have you tried out the prototypes and wanted more battles? Well, all sorts of nifty gameplay bits are coming soon! Since the last update, I've been mainly offline to work on battle sprites, skill animations, and the Melody action sequences that go with them. The advantage of doing all this offline is that I can finish quickly without the distractions of the ~internet~

I love those little battle sprites in YEM sideview/angleview games where your party members look like they're jumping around, casting spells, doing anything that's not marching in place. This game has quite a large cast of playable characters who weave in and out of the story...and guess who went mad enough to try to frankensprite her own?


Lorenz's poses are finished. This one was difficult for me, since I'm so used to simple recoloring with a palette. And vibrato didn't make poses for the RTP pirate captain. >_> Now I have about ten more characters remaining (oh god), but they shouldn't be as complex as this one was. Today, I started on another character's sheet, and his UDLR sprites are already done. These poses are tedious as hell to edit, but hopefully it'll be worth it in the end. At least they'll make cutscene coreography more realistic, haha. However, non-human characters and Remi's fusion forms won't be getting special sprites like this--I can't do full-scratch with no base and they don't appear that often anyway.

Until recently, I've never really worked much with Melody action sequences outside of simple attack animations for weapons. Then it suddenly clicked! Similar to the water skills that the enemies possess in the RSD prototypes, I've added sequences to the other first-tier elemental skills that allow them to show a series of damage numbers as their animations play, instead of showing one lonely number at the end of it. (Like a Shadow Hearts game <3)



The number of hits varies among all skills. There's an inverse relationship between the number of hits and total damage dealt. For example:
"Pyri" (Fire) - 1 hit
"Torrentei" (Water) - 2 hits
"Galei" (Wind) - 6 hits
Ignoring weaknesses, the wind attack does crappy low damage, while the fire one deals more damage. However, skills with higher hit counts will level up your chain bar faster if you want more free heals and buffs. But cheesing those high-hitters will piss off your enemies and quickly raise their "Tension". Party members and most enemies need tension to cast their limit breaks Purge skills. Here's a sample of a new one later in the game:


Writing skill descriptions for the purges seems like lunatic mode Twitter. Fit as much useful info as you can in one line! No fugly scrunched up text! Brackets and abbreviations! (I know VX Ace gives you two lines, but I'm not tossing out years of work + revisions for a shiny new engine.)
Also, the Pierce Shot up there is an example of an actor-exclusive skill. You can get more of those by finding items and completing certain sidequests. Their effects are all over the place and are relevant to the character in some way. For example, Moshi can repair simple technological objects and use them in battle, and Leiko can find special bullets effective against enemy types (not elements) to offset her being the worst caster in the game.

So yeah, that's what I've got planned so far for the battles. This is all an early draft, so things may change later. Once I work on the first dungeon, I need to test all this later so it doesn't crash and burn in a pile of bugs and bad balance!
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Misc. updates
- Fixed a bug where the chain bar disappears while targeting an enemy
- Revised Agora Hotel cutscene dialogue
- Removed action icon in battles. There was a true/false setting I overlooked the entire time, derp