Intentionally posting new spooky and gloomy cemeteries images to refer to Halloween! So now, the attack and the magic spells are working fine I’m trying to make it as fluent as possible, but synchronizing animation seems to be the hardest part. For now, the animation handling is a completely separated module which communicates with main hero script. Same goes for camera direction. My idea is to create an input lock, when an attack sequence is performed and at the end unlock input, but now it feels that the input is suspended a bit more than it should be. Do you have any better idea on how the fluent combat could be designed?
The story evolves in parallel. Estel will encounter deadly ghouls and undead warriors resurgent by a mighty necromancer that rules in Southern Empire - Nawia. The necromancer will try to conquer northern places, where many of Estel’s friends live. Of course, he also desires the Philosopher’s Stone and thus, he has kidnapped Estel’s patron, who probably knows how to decrypt the Emerald Tablet. So Estel will reach many different places throughout his journey to find him.
Amazing looking graphics! Looking forward to playing this!
I like the story especially, finely knit, and with a bit of wordplay, this can be kinda lord of the rings type fantasy.
Do you have any better idea on how the fluent combat could be designed?
Daluck be with your game.
For now the combat scheme looks like this: input triggers function in main hero script to set the lock flag and send message to animation script to play sequence. After a specific time the collision object is created in front of the hero that triggers a monster in a range to take damage. Then, the monster sends a message to main hero script and “ask for” a damage. Damage is calculated and sent to the sender - damaged monster. When the animation sequence is done (unfortunately I have to set a proper timer for that in animation script instead of having some callback when the finishing frame is displayed) the lock flag is reset to false, so the input is again registered. Because of that I can feel a small delay between attack sequences. I want to create a system when a player is tapping attack button and the hero animates a sequence instead of starting the same animation every time the user clicks or having those delays between. What could be useful I think is the information what frame of animation is displayed currently.
What could be useful I think is the information what frame of animation is displayed currently.
It’s in our backlog to expose an animation cursor for flipbook animations. With the cursor exposed it will be possible to start an animation from any frame, read the current frame, animate the cursor using go.animate() and so on. It’s not going to get implemented soon though. Most likely end of Q1 if I’m allowed to guess.
Choose first frame of play_animation?
Here’s the surprise for you - A fluent,efficient system to manage combats constantly, and without dealing with input lock and things. A bit wacky still, as I didn’t have much time today, but would give you an idea of how combat can be done. Moreover, I will develop on it and take the concept further after some days, but this should be ok till then.
Wow! It’s great! Thank you very much This is nicely done and animations aren’t interrupted, I will add idle animation at the end and it will be awesome!
I was working on dialogs and meanwhile, I released Defork So hope, it will help you too! I added FSM to handle dialogs input using dynamic gui table with different amount of options to choose. I also decided to use short option text, that is extended when Estel is saying it actually - I hope it is more natural and easy to control conversation without reading a vast amount of text only to choose the best hero’s answer.
Many choices will be relevant and I’m working on a system to manage and save decisions data, that will store relation between each NPC and Estel, NPC’s dialog nodes and decisions. Creating such nonlinear story is very time and brain consuming If you have some suggestions or advices, feel free to share! My brother is helping me with a scenario and he has a lot of ideas, as he’s a writer We are collaborating on writing missions and I’m taking care about logic connections too.
I am glad about the progress and this dev diary and forum helps me with a motivation a lot I hope this year would bring us all great ideas, implemented in Defold and shown to the world!
Happy Defolding in New Year!
So, in the last month I completely refactored the Focus board - a linker type board to collect elements used to craft magic spells. I spent a lot of time on new scripts and graphics and I hope the effect is visible at the glimpse - what do you think?
Next big thing, I’m working on is magic. Yeah, I’m preparing a cool witchcrafting system where elements can be conjured using different carriers and with different modifications. Everything to engage in the process of creating a spell. Defold particle fxs are used here and effects are exciting for me, though it is an initial version only - what is your impression?
So, a gameplay is now like this: hero enters Focus mode which pauses the game and the Focus board appears. You can take your time to accumulate as much energy as it is possible on a linker board in limited turns, taking into consideration conditions like weather, environment and mob’s weaknesses. Then you can select one or two basic elements that will fuse into another element. Then you are able to cast a specified element’s spells by pushing it forward (like flamethrower for example), swirling it in a powerful tornado/flamenado/waternado and so on or many other.
And I’m getting back to creating those powerful effects May Deforce be with you!
Perhaps it’s possible to detect “watch mode”, and display a 4x4 board instead?
I will surely die if I wait for this any longer. Give us something to play, play and play.
Great to see the development, just waiting for the first release.
May the Deforce be with you too.