Greetings Investigators! Started working on the search system today, not much was done by me on Friday except for raging at the boss-HP bar breaking, hence the lack of a post then. Friday's UnProgress: - Broke the HP bar while trying to fix it. Today's Progress: - Started work on the search system. Thanks for reading, see ya tomorrow!
On the topic of Boss battles and HP bars: will the bosses have any sort of visual cue to the damage they receive (skeletons becoming increasingly broken, humans getting ragged and wounded, etc) or is the HP bar our only indicator of progress during the fight? Will the bosses HP bars be toggleable on/off in the options or they will be always on? I feel like not knowing how much your enemy will be able to endure (or if he is even killable) is pretty interesting as a "soft" increase in difficulty and so an interesting option. Not saying that I think it *should* be that way, just that it is interesting. I've been away for a while, but now I'm back to the usual game development stalking. Looking forward to future updates. And keep up the good work
Thanks for the question, Tsuruda! Currently the HP bar is always on, but you've touched on a feature of many cRPGs that I find interesting. At the moment the game's Lore skill acts as a requirement check on items, but I've often thought about there being 'Lore checks' on enemies to reveal their HP/weaknesses (including bosses). If there's time before release we might get a chance to look into this further, but no promises. If the bar does remain fixed, we may provide an option to toggle it on/off. Oh, and, unfortunately given our small team size (It's just Joe creating the enemies/bosses), I don't think injured sprites would be possible for this release. Edit: This is much easier to do in 3D games, as you can drop in 'injured' textures over old models, like they did in Wizardry 8. We would have to hand-edit every frame! Hope that answers your question!
That would be very cool indeed, but don't worry about implementing this if it wasn't already planned. Feature creep can stagger game development, specially on small indie teams. It could however be a cool post-release update if you find the time (and energy) to do so. This on the other hand seems relatively simple (I could be way wrong, so I know I am kind of assuming here) and would be very welcome As a person that worked with (shoddy) animation in the past and as an amateur pixel artist, I know that it is super hard work. As I said before, it would be cool, but don't trip yourselves over this if it wasn't already planned. Keep up the good work!
