I've been adding some final features and tweaks to Atonal Dreams' battle system, with the intention of having something playable that I can show off to get some opinions about before proceeding. I'm not actually sure where to release that, though; I've seen a few conflicting things!
Let's run through the things I've done this week!
Island Decoration
I've filled the smallish starting island with decorations and encounters, and now it feels much more alive and fun to run around on! My full playthrough took almost an hour, so there's quite a bit to explore as a demo.
Battle UI revisions
Previously, characters' status 'statue' UI things were at the top and bottom, since that's what I've always done in my games. While selecting a target, though, the navigation directions corresponded to the 3D world rather than the statue order. Also, the statues showed these damage predictors, which I talked about last time, but:
That's cluttered and confusing! You can't even see half the enemies you're trying to aim at.
So I revised it. At first I was wondering whether to do something like this, where you'd select from these circles during targetting mode, and the colour of the circles would be 'hotter' the more effective the skill would be:
But why add new, unnecessary elements? It's always better to find a more elegant, streamlined solution. This made much more sense:
It feels far less cluttered than I expected, and the turn order bar feels better centred. This was a new issue, though:
The info panels I'd added previously now overlapped with the statues. Not good!
Here's what I have now:
(These videos are microscopic since filesize is a concern and uploading every one to youtube is a pain, so there are some elements - like percentage predictors on the statues of valid targets in targetting mode - which can't be made out, but hopefully it gets the point across. The waggling heads - which are faster the higher the effectiveness - are fairly clear, at least!)
I removed the lists of skill properties from the skill displays, since the info panels are no longer there to explain them. Now that space is devoted to the level/XP bar, as I've also done something significant with that.
I realised that buffs - which previously showed as petal icons above the statue's mind halo - now overlap with or get hidden by the other statues; whoops. I'll need to rethink where they go.
Skill Levels
Previously, I was missing any kind of easy growth system. You could technically improve your stats etc by equipping essences and accessories, but while I'd implemented the mechanics, I'd not added many items, so there wasn't much to play with in the current demo. It also meant that you didn't really earn anything for individual battles.
I found myself wishing a lot for a simple, straightforward, tried-and-true XP/levelling system like in Pokemon or Final Fantasy (the earlier ones, at least), or MARDEK. I seriously considered drastically revising what I had to include such a thing. Otherwise I worried that players would feel too bored by the lack of obvious progression. While playtesting, I was getting quite tired of using the exact same skills for the same effects every time!
Skills could already technically level up, but each new level added some extra effect to the skill, which was a pain to plan (so most skills didn't even have their level up effects added), and it meant they capped out at level 6. This meant the XP required to get to that level was too boringly slow, or so fast that you maxed out your skills in this first area.
Now, each skill has a level and XP cost similar to Pokemon levels. I reached around level 12 with some skills by the end of this hour-ish-long demo, which felt right. Since skills only had a maximum of 6 levels before, the XP requirements were written out in a table, based on my judgement, but now they're determined by formulae (some have lower costs than others). That took longer than I thought it would to get right! And it'll probably still need some tweaking as development progresses. As before, they gain XP equal to the damage/healing they inflict, meaning you can level skills up faster by using them well.
I'd thought about adding this for a while, but I was never sure what levels should do exactly. Boost damage, or something? 10% per level? More? Would that even be apparent with these low numbers? What about non-damaging skills?
I like the solution I've got currently though! Skills now have three 'growth types', corresponding to three recurring motifs:
LIFE skills add their level - 1 to max Body (HP) while equipped.
DEATH skills add their level - 1 to the base damage inflicted or healed.
SPIRIT skills add a value based on their level to the user's 'time' stat after use, meaning their next turn arrives more quickly.
I might need to revise the names, since I can see "death" skills boosting healing being something people would take issue with, but I literally just added this yesterday! Could be something like Health, Power, and Speed, though I'd find it a shame to lose the narrative connection in favour of something much blander.
I played around with it a bit, and it made the demo section WAY more fun to play. Surprisingly so! Every point of damage and health matters, so just gaining a handful of skill levels could allow Collie to one-shot Pawnites or survive an extra hit. Plus some trickier battles felt more like they'd be doable with some training while they felt impossible before.
Having little gains to aim for like that definitely helps with engagement and makes every battle feel more worth doing. It also encourages the use of all skills rather than just focusing on one, or it means that if you do focus on, say, Collie's physical attack exclusively, then her taming skill will lag behind. It makes a lot more sense that someone doing a particular thing over and over would get better at that specific thing, rather than hitting things with a sword a hundred times and then also somehow being better at magic as well at the end of it!
Zone Completion
I finally got around to adding a feature which has been on my To Do List for literally months! Following battles, you see a screen like this:
You can also summon it up whenever you like outside of battle.
It shows all the monsters (individual ones, so a single battle would usually be worth several) that you've cleared in the current 'zone' (a collection of grouped rooms; this zone is called 'Eyeland' even though it's not actually an island shaped like an eye now that I think about it so I should probably do something about that). It also marks whether you killed or tamed each one, and shows you the balance between them and gives you an appropriate title.
I haven't implemented this yet, but when you clear out a full species, this screen awards you an Essence item of that species, which characters can equip up to six of each. That'd be one of the main ways of building up your characters, but since it requires you to go out of your way looking for battles, I'd be careful to balance things around having no essences (or I'd have difficulties or something).
Releasing a Demo... Somehow
It's taken much longer than I expected, but the battle system's really coming together now, and I'm at the point where I'm struggling to decide what else to do with it because everything's mostly in place. Just little tweaks left, which I can likely finish next week (I hope). But I need to know whether it's fun for other people, since we all think differently and prefer different things, and it's tough for me to gauge the fun-ness of something I've spent months working on every day.
So the sensible thing to do next would be to show this off to some people, but I'm not yet sure of the best way to do that because there are several options.
One is to just release a free public demo, on Steam, or maybe itch.io. I've been looking at indie devs a lot on Twitter recently (seeing a bunch of new ones every day), and a lot of them are mid-project like I am, but have demos available on one of those platforms.
But releasing a demo too casually might also mean I'd miss out on an important promotional opportunity, and some people have said that if I release one too soon, it might kill interest since it's still months before the actual release. I'm not sure about that personally, since the point of a demo is to get someone to wishlist, meaning they'd be informed on release (plus Steam's algorithm uses wishlist totals to decide how much to push a new game in people's faces).
Another option might just be to release a small private demo for some of you who volunteer to alpha test it, as I always have done in the past. I'm not sure where to do that, though. I could upload to Steam ASAP so then I can begin accumulating wishlists, but itch.io is apparently way easier to upload to, so HMM. I'll need to think about it.
If you know anything about any of this stuff, from seeing what other indie devs do or what's worked for them, I'd love to hear what you think! I'll look into it myself either next week, or the week after, depending on how long adding some finishing touches/bug fixes takes.
I've also been wondering recently - not for the first time - whether I should be doing these updates as youtube videos, in which I maybe just read out these blog posts over relevant imagery so you can choose your preferred format (plus videos get attention much more easily)... Something I'll keep thinking about! I'm unsure how much work it'd be. I'll probably experiment at some point... though I wish decent microphones weren't such an investment!
(There's no way I'd record my ugly mug, but doing the voice might not be so bad. Even then though I worry that I'd end up oversharing or otherwise talking in a way that's not the detached, impersonal, just-focused-on-the-content way I see most youtubers speaking in! Like interjecting descriptions of the mechanics with comments about depression or my various insecurities or something. I don't know how human the maybe dozen or so viewers I might get would be comfortable with me being!)
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