Battles and Dilemmas

I reported last week, I believe, that I had made some changes to the encounter in the Crystal Moon. In the week just past, then, I continued to do so: the crystal creatures now have collision shapes that should be more efficient, if less precise; the crystal creatures now all turn at a uniform rotation rate; and the patterns of the encounter's waves were revised.

You may recall too from last week's blog post that the crystal creatures now wield continuous-beam attacks. At the time of that blog post's writing, such attacks yet prompted damage effects in the same manner as did non-continuous attacks. Which was a problem: continuous attacks have their effect on every frame on which they apply, which could result in the spawning of a huge number of damage-effect objects.

So, in the week just past I addressed that: Now game-objects can optionally have special "continuous" effects that are applied for such attacks. At the moment only the player has such, as current only the crystal creatures have continuous-beam attacks.

But the player's damage effect is a particle effect--and as of last week's blog post my little custom particle system only supported instant, "burst" emission of particles. Thus, in order to have a "continuous" damage effect for the player, the particle system was extended, modified to now optionally provide continuous emission!

Here below, then, you should see the results of this work on damage-effects:



And, as shown in the first screenshot above, the encounter in the Crystal Moon wasn't the only one that saw work in the week just past: the boss-fight against the liche, too, saw changes!

Perhaps most saliently, the liche now has a new attack: they can summon grasping skeletal hands to briefly hold the player in place, giving their minions an opening in which to attack. But, while immobile, the player can still turn in their grip and fight, allowing a chance to fend off said minions!



Now, the liche's minions include a type that fires a ranged, homing attack--which would be quite unfair to have launched against the player while the latter is immobilised! I've thus made changes to the flow of the battle, giving the player space in which to defeat those ranged minions before the liche starts using the "grasping hands" attack.

I'm not yet quite happy with the encounter, but I think that it's making progress...

And on a more minor note, in the week just past I reworked the animation and behaviour shown by the Stone Guardian enemy on death:



Moving to matters of interface, in the week just past I enacted a few quality-of-life changes related to the selection of combat-spells:

First, I've added quick-keys by which the player can select from their combat-spells, rather than scrolling; by default, these are bound to the number-keys 1 through 4.

Concomitantly, I've adjusted the tutorial to reflect these new keys, and--as this made one of the tutorials messages rather long--split that information off into a new tutorial message.

And second, when the player does scroll through their combat-spells, this scrolling now skips over empty slots--no more accidentally scrolling to an empty slot in the middle of a fight!

On the design side, I've found myself facing two quandaries:

First, in gameplay, I'm considering the removal of the Rune of Power item.

On the one hand, I see a few arguments for keeping this item: It can be an aid to the player in battle; it's a small, repeatable item for the player to find and collect; its effect provides an additional point of uniqueness to the game; and it's an implementation of a feature that I would like to include in a project.

On the other hand, I see a few arguments for removing the Rune of Power: it complicates the balancing of combat--it can change a difficult encounter into an easy one; it complicates artefact design, as each has to have two associated combat-spells; removing it might enable me to introduce more artefacts, as some of the currently-intended "empowered" combat-spells are freed up for such use; and in a game that already includes exploration of curious moons, reached by flying through their suns, and the acquisition of various magical artefacts, all to stop a solar-system-devouring threat, perhaps its further small point of uniqueness is superfluous.

But if I do remove it, with what do I replace it as a reward for exploration? I'm considering adding minor upgrades--increases to maximum mana, for example--but that might be a little cliche for the genre. (Although noting that I do already have upgrades to the player's maximum health.)

As you may gather, I'm still thinking on this...

And second, in art, I'm finding that I'm not happy with the look of a number of objects in the game-world (such as the tutorial NPC). Some I'm fine with--the player-character and Stone Guardian in particular I still rather like. But in others the small scale combined with my current textures results in detail becoming a blurry mess.

I'm thus rethinking and investigating potential changes here...

And, once again, there were various changes, fixes, and tweaks enacted in the week just past that don't seem worth detailing here!

That, then, is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^