INFINITE BATTLES

My original plan for using the art was to make the game infinite. Battle after battle, until your characters are all slain. At this point, the artist was rapidly adding animations and other content. Plans changed to be more of a traditional role playing game with an overhead world, set in a grocery store, but to get to that overworld, I pushed through with the combat to make the game infinite and engaging.

Each foe was given its own experience, gather enough experience and the character levels up, which replenishes their health. Going up a level will also boost the stats of each character as you’d expect, but the enemies stay the same. It’s all super basic stuff. The real challenge here was balancing the experience needed to level up versus a very limited array of foes. That fourth level turned into a sheer grind that was never worked out at this time. Another part of the grind was each character can only attack, and nothing else.

ACTIVE BATTLE SYSTEM

If I haven’t mentioned it the original battle system was very traditional, where the player selects what each character will do. Then the characters and enemies will take their turns in order of agility + a random 20% depending on the turn. In a way, there is more strategy, luck and ease to doing it all at once, then watching the ballet of combat take place.

However, it is mundane and to add some flair, combine with making it look like the original mock up, I designed an active battle system. Each character and enemy has a turn meter that when it’s full, they take their turn. You decide what action a full character will perform and they carry it out. The turn meter is still based on the participants agility + a random 20%, so there is a chance where two participants of the same agility will have a random outcome. The maximum of the meter is ten times the highest agility of a participant. That way there will still always be a few seconds of waiting to start each battle to assess the situation.

The agility of enemies and characters were modified so Mom is always the last character, Rudy at level one will have the same agility as the starting enemy, and Burger will be the fastest, but do the least damage.

BARS INSTEAD OF POINTERS

You may have seen, we also went to glowing bars rather than pointers. We quickly ran out of room with the ABS meter and mana points on screen. I could have added up and down menus for enemies and skills, but there’s more wow factor being able to see it all on screen at once. The height of the GUI was increased to give each bit of text more room to breathe and be less cluttered, even if it’s still a bit unavoidably crammed.

TWO MORE DAYS DONE

That closes the third day of this Coronavirus game jam. It doesn’t seem like nearly as much as the first day, but nothing will seem as grand as constructing the game screen. There are so many more things to implement as you will see, since I am staggering these blogs a week or two late.