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Dreamons - Transmogrifier, Collections

12 months ago1,744 words

I did a lot of stuff on this Dreamons project this week! Now you can collect summonable allies and alter your own appearance whenever you want from the menu.

∞ Last week ∞, I talked about some Unity bug that'd cause my whole PC to crash, and how I hoped remaking the Unity project might fix it. So I spent some time doing that, and since then I've not had the issue again, so hopefully I've seen the end of it!

Between Tuesday and Thursday, I was more focused on actual game dev work than I have been in ages (months, probably), because I actually knew what I was doing and just had to sit down and do it (rather than being paralysed by uncertainty and doubt). I would have liked that to carry on into Friday, but I had to get a brain scan on that day, which I'll talk about later.

Essentially, I spent my time incorporating new gameplay mechanics. I've already got them mostly sorted out, and the battle system shown in this gameplay video I posted in May is likely to remain mostly unchanged (except for the level up stuff):




The changes I've been making are relatively minor, and as such I was able to breeze through a few of them quite quickly once I put my mind to it.

Menus are something that players don't exactly excitedly speculate about or make fanart of or whatever, but planning those out can be a good way to solidify the core mechanics, as those are what they're meant to be providing access and insight to.



Here's the menu as it looks currently. The player's character is in the centre, surrounded by Dreamon allies. As stated in the previous post, the game would be about a council of six elemental dreamons who you'd try to overthrow by taming them one by one. Once tamed, they'd become permanent allies.


Well, sort of. You'd be able to access their stats from the menu, and change their equipment and skills.


But you'd start every battle alone. The player character would have this button in the middle of their radial skill options, which would allow you to select one of your allies to summon.


You'd be able to have two summoned allies at a time. Since the gameplay revolves around taming between sides, their 'defeat' would mean they'd switch to the other side until tamed back, so no need to wonder about resummoning dead allies because that wouldn't be a thing.

The point would be to summon the most appropriate dreamon(s) for the given situation. Or you could try and tackle everything alone if you wanted more of a challenge.

I've been wondering about character progression. "Should I bring back some easily-understood levelling up system?", and such.

What I've decided on for now is to tie stat changes entirely to equipment. How well that'll work - and how satisfying it'll be for the player - is something I won't know until I've developed more and people have played it, though.

I also wondered a fair bit throughout development about exactly how skills might be learned. I wanted characters to be limited to six available skills at any time, but how might they be acquired? Keeping track of all the skills in the game can also get tricky on the dev side.


I like collecting things, and filling out a limited number of slots in a collection. The Pokedex is probably the best example (though actually filling it in is usually essentially impossible within any given Pokemon game). I've decided to use a similar concept for Dreamons; this is the skill collection (or 'Quiptionary', as it's currently called, as skills are 'Quips').

What this would mean would be that there'd be just 8 skills per element (though most have a secondary element too). This makes it easier for me to design and keep track of them all, and it means it'd be possible for the player to satisfyingly collect them all, too. Currently you can get them from treasure chests, though I might revise the exact acquisition method later.

The player could equip any six skills from this collection, while the dreamon allies could only equip skills of their associated element. The skills shown in the collection in this image are hastily assembled from skills I already had in the game, and definitely not reflective of the final skills I'll include, but from this set, Spryad - the Levitality dreamon - would be able to equip Joke, Pump Up, and Woo! from the Levitality section at the bottom, but also Compliment, Reassure, and Flirt from the other elemental sections.


There's also a Bestiary for the foes you face, again grouped by element. I intend to make only a fixed number (8, maybe) of foe types for each elemental area. Like with the skills, this limitation should make things a lot easier for me as a designer (like the limited number of notes was for Memody), and hopefully it'll give the player some satisfaction if they can collect them all too.


Currently the Bestiary and Quiptionary can be accessed using a single key/button press from this menu, and are shown in the top corners...


...Though I also added one for clothing (with the name 'Garbendium', which reminds me more of 'garbage' than 'garb(s)' and probably needs changing!), which has no corresponding corner button, so I'll need to do some revising of the layout! Stuff you have to consider - and reconsider - while developing a game.



At the top of the main menu, in the middle, there's a flower icon/button thing which shifts between different colours (which obviously can't be seen in a static screenshot). This leads to what I feel could potentially be a selling point for this game: the Transmogrifier. This allows you to alter your appearance at any time (outside of battle).

On the left are lists of body parts - hair, nose, ears, horns, etc - which you can change, and on the right are the faces/skins you can switch between. Every time you tamed a new foe type (which would be archetypes like Nerd, Normie, Babe, etc), you'd acquire their skin. Selecting any of the faces shown there would change your appearance; this is what happens when I select the fourth one, for example:



The body parts, colours, and even overall form changes, so what was once a grey, featureless man is now a pale, red-haired woman.


But, as detailed in other blog posts, you can also then open up a Face Painter, to edit the character's palette and every pixel of their face.


A few clicks changes the character from that to this, for example.


Or you can press one of the body type buttons to instantly become the opposite sex while keeping everything else the same.


And of course you're not restricted to making something that looks like a human! You could change your face to the word "BUM" if you wanted.

I've talked about this a few times over the past few months - since I came up with the initial concept for a previous project (Mentales) - but I never know to what degree anyone reading about it really gets it. I suspect it's only by actually playing around with it that you'll really get a proper understanding of its potential, though hopefully these screenshots at least spark your curiosity!



I was going to say more about the brain scan I went to have on Friday, though I suppose there's not all that much to say! It went okay; I didn't really feel any anxiety through any of the process (other than a bit in the morning), and the scan was shorter this time because the past few times they've scanned my spine as well as my head, and this time it was just my head. Hopefully that's a good indication that they're unconcerned about the cancer coming back. Still, I wouldn't be having them if there was no chance. I've just been trying to put that out of my mind though.

I found it sort of silly how I felt more at ease having injections, lying for half an hour in an MRI machine, and talking with nurses than I have been getting the bus recently!

I had no counselling this week because the scan happened at my usual appointment time (pfft!). I heard from one of my uni friends for the first time in weeks - or maybe months - though and apparently she also started getting counselling around the same time I did. Which is also the same time my other uni friend started her latest round of counselling. Odd that all three of us got it at the same time! Maybe it's just that time of year.

I'm still not sure what I'm doing with my present or what I want to do with my future, but I enjoyed working on Dreamons so much this week that I just want to put all that out of my mind and focus on this again next week. I might even go so far as to say I'm excited about it!!

(I just hope that what I was able to achieve wasn't the result of some fleeting hypomania...)