The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

I haven't made quite as much progress this month as I did last month, but it's been decent. Mostly I've been working on revamping the combat system to make use of "selector skills" that have no immediate effect, simply allowing me to get targeting input from the player and feed it into my battle plugin. I'm conceptually at the point where a simple single-target skill at least should work, but of course things almost never work out right on the first try in programming. ;)

I've also done a little bit of work on creating "component" sprites to take advantage of DynWardrobe. I noticed something unfortunate while working on Link's charging-for-Spin-Slash sprites: with the Hylian short sword equipped, Link was already stretched out to the right edge of the sprite area.



There are longer swords in the game which Link can use, so I needed a way to get a little more room. I settled on changing the direction in which Link holds the sword:



I'm a little worried it could look like it should be poking into an ally, especially if Link happens to be standing next to one of the girthier characters, but I can only think of one other solution, and it's not pretty. I'd have to move Link's physical appearance within the sprite a bit off-center to the left, and to keep that from looking wonky I'd have to adjust ALL the hero sprites to match, and then I'd have to tweak most of the battle animations used against heroes so that they hit the visible location of the heroes instead of the actual center of their sprites. X) There could be other repercussions to it that I haven't thought of too.