Pwogwess

I've got a lot of stuff done today.

I now have 6 passive abilities (Oaths) that I like pretty well - although I'm sure they'll all change as I iterate and balance later. I also have 3 active abilities that work pretty well. I implemented pushing and opportunity attacks. Quite a bit of stuff!

I have decided to focus on just implementing rough features and just pushing forward without caring about how it looks visually. I think I iterated a little too much on the presentation of it all without iterating on the core gameplay concepts enough. So it meant I created a lot of UI and reworked many things that I didn't really have to. So I'm just playing with it, saying fuck how it looks, it's gonna look rough for now, so that I can make real progress.

It's been lots of fun! The basic gameplay is getting a lot of neat new features. I haven't really gotten to test them out more thoroughly yet, but I probably will play it a bit tomorrow.

I also posted devlogs on itch and steam, and posted on instagram today. Of course probably nobody will read these first ones. But it's worth building some kind of habit. I think tomorrow I'll work on uploading a build so I can post about it on reddit. I need to make some marketing pushes. But I am - I'm trying!

Making progress. It's gon happen baby. 

Playing the Game

 Today I just played the game a few times and took note of a few bugs. It's really quite buggy. However, it feels significantly better since I increased general movement speed and I reduced the AP to 2. I also really like the passives instead of just general stat boosts. I think I am headed in the right direction. I just need to keep playing with it.

I think I made a mistake getting too specific into the UI representation of things, and writing instructions, etc. because most of that doesn't work the way I had originally intended, or in fact anything like it. It has changed so much (naturally and for the best). I think that in the future it would be better to just keep playing with it and iterating and not bothering to display things properly until I get it to feel right for me.

I guess I just wanted to get it into player's hands ASAP, which was worth it. But you get what I'm saying.

Anyway I'm kinda having fun playing the game itself right now. I mean not more than a battle or two but I'm starting to feel a little bit of emotion when playing a battle, like "Oh no, Bulgred is surrounded!" or crossing my fingers to hope that an enemy can be killed this turn. So that's a good sign.

I need to start working harder on advertising. This Sunday I will be sure to post something about the game somewhere and perhaps write a devlog to showcase that the game is being worked on.

Peace!  

More Interesting Passives

Been taking time in the mornings again to work on the game. It's just been falling behind and I have been okay at work so just have to juggle which one comes first depending on how I'm doing at each. Very grateful to work from home because it allows me to prioritize and shift the order of things. Flexibility.

Anyway today I spent time implementing more interesting passives. Previously I just had stat changes based on the passives they take, but I thought it would be more interesting to restrict things and add whole new behaviors. Right now, these are the things I came up with (and implemented pretty quickly I must say)

• Oath of Courage
• Free attack per enemy adjacent
• Cannot disengage while adjacent to living enemy
• Oath of Perfection
• -4 to crit roll (way better odds)
• 1 damage to self upon missing attack, to a minimum of 50% HP
• Oath of Endurance
• Downgrade all critical hits and reduce incoming damage by 1
• One attack per turn

I feel pretty good about these. These seem at least on paper to be quite a bit more impactful than my original ideas. And it's kinda neat, I'm using some of the older ideas I had too.

Anyway I'm just keeping up the work. I feel inspired again to finish this thing and I'm starting to get better at putting in the work. I need to start posting dev logs and advertising more now that I have the Steam page up. But one thing at a time; I really need to get these abilities nice and solidified. I think a lot of the game is becoming more and more clear and I'm glad I've cut features that I have. I feel like if I can just get this system ironed out, next up would be probably tuning the combat to make sure everything is good, then the complete UI reworking. Idk, maybe I should wait on the UI rework until I have ironed out all major features (like strategy layer progression)... we'll see.

Anyway it's off to work. Later. 

 

Work on Text Notifications and Passive Perks

Finally implementing passive perks. It's pretty neat and an important part of turn-based strategy I'd say. I also am working on the text popups for notifying how much damage an attack does or to notify effects as well, because it will help me understand as I debug and work on this feature. And also it's obviously useful for the player as well.

It's going alright. I'm glad I've been able to get focused and put work in today and recently. Once I get some real work on the progression done (at least have a few levels of progression implemented for characters) I would like to work on some UX stuff. I probably will force people to play the game (lol) and see what they think - and I'd bet a fair few would be irritated about how the controls feel.

I mean, nobody is going to be impressed as it is now, and that's fine. I just need to see what bugs people.

What bugs me, is that the bars on top of the characters aren't as descriptive as they could be, the tooltips over characters are useless. I also am considering changing the game to a hex format, but I need to think more before doing so. I would like that because it would allow me to do a more left-to-right battle where the player first of all could always see their character's faces (who wants to look at the back of their dude's head?), but also more importantly it would allow me to cut future art and animations in half by only representing left and right versions of characters. In fact, it would completely eliminate the work, because I could just flip the sprite or animation 180. So I would be cutting the work to make new content by 75%. 

Seems like a great idea for that alone.

Well, now that I think about it, I don't really need to implement hex grid to just cut those things. I can do that now.

Hmm.

Anyway yeah I just need to keep chugging. I need to stop reversing and changing course and get moving in a direction. I feel like I've had like 3 or 4 iterations of this oaths thing at this point and I just need to pick one and roll with it until it works. I would really like to stop building things and throwing them away.

What a learning experience this has all been.

I should mention that I just decided to put my steam page up a few days ago. Right now just sitting at 11 wishlists. I'm fine with it. I was waiting to do all this stuff and get it right but frankly I'm just not at the level where I should be thinking that way. I just need to get the thing done and do it well. I need to focus on making a good game and it would be great if people noticed. I am going to try to market harder than I did last time, but I can't get in my own way. I just have to work with what I've got from where I am.

I look forward to release.

Brain Tired.

Welp. Can't really get it done today. I've been sitting here for about 45 minutes trying to focus but it's just not happening. Time to relax I guess. Maybe I'll give it another shot later on.