Devlog 2020 - Quarantine edition

It's been more than a year and I did plan to release a demo in this year, but now I'm not sure. There was almost a year of hiatus mainly because I can't think of a better story.  But now, I'm working on it again. Chance is, the story is going to have a major revamp (again) which renders the one that I released irrelevant in terms of the plot, but I'm not going to take them down.

Anyway, I'll talk about the general update of what was happening to this game (mainly the mechanics). You can also follow live update if you follow my twitter account here https://twitter.com/theolized (as I often post something I do).

The wide screen

The game went to a major overhaul on the screen resolution. The main reason of being able to full screen without black border (which apparently some people had a problem with it). Another reason is for more space for me to write even more information which I struggled to write information in such a cramped space. By the way, the resolution is going to be 740 x 416. It's a weird choice I know and probably will look blurry in full screen as it isn't a perfect ratio, but I don't care.

The hardest part was the actor HUD. I don't have an artistic skill to think of this differently, so I just slapped actor stats on their HUD. Which, personally I think it's a good indicator on how much their attack stat increased when they get a buff instead of just plain "increase attack stat by 20%" but you don't know how much that increase. Besides, while doing this, I realized some of the perks and states weren't behave as it should be since the stats weren't changing.

Action Log

Since my game is focused on combat, having an action log would be nice. So you can try different combination and see how does it work.  But I also add this for my own development tool to track the damage.

Stats are no longer increase on level up

Having my game played by several people and I gained feedback, I realized that having one level difference could made a boss battle easy and impossible to beat. The stat increase was to blame. Now, I like power fantasy, but I want to make my game has smooth experience as possible, as in, they don't require grinding to complete, but for those who do, they will still rewarded. As for now, I decided to drop stat increase on level up. Now, you're going to have the same base stat from start to finish. The other thing will be the game changer.

Perks equip

Bad choice,  bad combination, you gotta live with it. Yeah no, living with your bad choice because you're not well informed with it, is something I hate from literally every game. Level up now grants a slot for you to equip one more perk. You may unequip the perk at any time. You're free to try any combination based on your limited perk slot. The game has total 25 equipable perks but I don't plan for you to get level 25 until the final boss.

Boss HP Bar is now shown

The more I think of it, the more I realized that I have no reason to hid the boss HP bar. My first reason was just "to add tension" which admittedly not a good reason at all. Besides, that will lock me from making an interesting boss pattern like HP triggers or phase change based on the HP because I hid the HP bar and my players will be unable to anticipate. When I try to display HP bar, it doesn't make any difference, besides now that I think about it, hiding the HP bar just make it worse.

The video footage

This isn't complete without an actual video footage. Here, enjoy the footage of consecutive boss battles.