This week, I've made good progress on revising how skills and essences work!
This is the end of the second week of making adjustments based on tester feedback! I've been very productive about making the changes, though it's taking time, as all things game dev typically do.
I was also trying to get around to all the various comments I was getting, and I tried to make a point of at least popping in the Discord every day, but over the past few days my energy ran low, and I got ill (one of my eyelids is swollen up, general malaise; seems to be yet another flare-up of the chronic ∞ blepharitis ∞ I have on top of everything else, how lovely), so I retreated back into my bubble. I can do creative work while like this, thankfully, but the social stuff is more taxing, so I couldn't manage it. There are a few messages on places like Twitter, Patreon, and Discord that I've neglected because of this, and I feel bad about that, but I should hopefully get around to stuff soon. Sorry about that!
I talked last week about some major changes I had in mind for the general gameplay mechanics, which I wanted to implement before addressing more minor concerns, or generally continuing development. I've made good progress on that!
I started by revising the layout of the skills and equipment menus. Here's what you saw before when you checked a character:
And if you pressed a button, you got here:
The equipment screen was fairly cluttered, while the skills one was relatively spartan.
The main thing I was working towards was the ability to equip monster essences as skills. I knew I'd have to redesign the look of the skill buttons/capsules (again), so I experimented:
I felt that the influence of runes was significant in determining a skill's effectiveness, but previously the only indication of the rune was a small white icon among a few other icons, while the element got top billing by determining the skill's prominent colour. I wondered whether giving runes colours would help them feel more distinct and memorable, and if I did that, whether I could blend between the element and rune colour for a skill on its capsule.
After quite a bit more refining, here's what I ended up with:
(Mostly; I just noticed the old pages thing is still there in the upper right; it shouldn't be.)
I really like how the gradients turned out; way more than I expected to! So that was a nice surprise. I love the size of all the elements on these capsules and consider them a big step up from the previous ones, but maybe that's just me. I'm proud of them, anyway!
Previously, the Equipment menu was the first to show when you viewed a character, with the Skills menu requiring a button press and therefore being more 'off to the side'. Now, it's the reverse; skills are given priority, while equipment is more of an afterthought.
A button press just shifts the appearance of these buttons now rather than shifting to an entirely different screen, which I like and feel makes more sense.
Pieces of equipment don't alter stats directly, unlike in most RPGs. Instead, each has a 'passive' skill, some of which would have effects that would activate in response to certain events - for example, the 'Guilt' one here would damage Savitr by 25% of his max health at the start of his turn if Collie is KO'd - while others are more, well, passive, boosting the effectiveness of certain types of attack by a percentage.
I've not done much with that yet though (none of those passives work, and their names aren't final), as my main concern this week was the essence stuff.
Now, the first time you tame a certain species of monster, you see a Pokedex-entry-like screen like this at the end of battle:
It's very spartan and work-in-progress at the moment; I'll need to give some thought about how it should look . I also experimented with something like this (earlier version):
But I haven't really devoted time to it just yet. I was just worrying about getting it to work at all first; polishing comes later! (I'll probably add a bunch of particle effects.)
I feel this gives both the taming feature and individual monster species more appeal!
After that, anyone can equip that monster in a skill slot - like this - to use a skill associated with it. The monster's model is also shown to the right there when selecting the skill, since the aesthetic appeal of things like this are so important to me. Some RPGs have battles where you can't even really see your own characters (Earthbound, for example), which I find annoyingly disconnected!
Extending from this, when you use that skill, you actually summon the monster briefly to execute it:
I only just got to that point right at the end of Friday, so it still needs work, but I'm really pleased with the direction I'm heading!
Here's (a slightly outdated mockup of) the menu that appears while you're equipping a skill, which hides the skill slots:
Essence skills level up like any other skills, by adding the damage they inflict as XP. Unlike before, where essences contributed directly to all the primary stats, here they instead just grant two permanent 'boons', each of which increases a single stat by a set amount.
Skills have a level cap of 10 when acquired, and when level 10 is reached, the first boon is unlocked. Then, when you clear (either kill or tame) all monsters of that species from its area, you increase its essence's level cap to 20. When it reaches level 20, the second boon unlocks.
I feel this should address a few concerns that testers raised. It discourages just focusing on a single skill and neglecting all others, as you need to master many to boost your stats. It's very similar to MARDEK's system, except here all boons you unlock apply (rather than having a limited number of points to equip them), and they all apply to stats rather than being skills you might never even use.
I've retained the glitter currency, which I'm thinking you could spend on skills to give them XP without needing to directly use them. This seems like it'd alleviate the frustration of having to grind skills you don't even want to use, but it also means that you could just stick with a favoured skill while levelling up others by spending glitter on them. Hmm.
Skills also still add their level onto the damage they inflict or heal, and 'innate' skills - those that aren't added from essences - such as Collie's Tame or Savitr's Awe - currently have no level cap. I'm not sure whether to give them one or not; maybe plot events could increase it? They don't grant boons either.
This ate up the entire week, mostly because I had to reprogram a lot of menu and stat-management stuff behind the scenes. I've been using this code since the beginning of Divine Dreams, and I've revised the mechanics a bunch of times since then, so it's bloated with no-longer-necessary/relevant functions and stuff that I'd really like to devote some time to cleaning up. Seems this is common for large programming projects - or at least I see indie game devs joking about it - but it's sort of annoying!
So I'm actually looking forward to spending next week doing a bit of ∞ refactoring ∞ so it's more elegant and less cobbled-together, and I hope to get these changes to a point where I could upload an update.
Oh! I also made this mock-up:
It's a revision of the 'predictor' thing which hopefully clarifies a lot of things. It's not functional in-game yet though; I'll do that next week.
I've also been thinking about tutorial pacing - something like forcing taming in the first battle, then using the tamed monster to hit elemental (and maybe even rune) weaknesses so those concepts can be touched on right away - but that'll come after I've finished this! Lots to do!
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