Devlog mar 28 - Popup information

 Welcome to the second march devlog!

This is our last period focusing on the core combat framework. Since the player needs some information to make tactical decisions, much of this period has been focused on delivering useful information to the player.

First, we have added a damage indicator on the turn order.

The example human has taken some damage from standing on the Burning Ground, indicated by the red shading on his portrait in the Turn Order

If you want to know exactly how much health he has, we have created a new system of popup menus. right clicking the human will give some information about his stats and abilities.

The example human currently has 7 health out of a maximum of 10

We have deliberately left quite a lot of room in this popup because we probably want to add additional stats and information later on. For example, we might want to show equipment here as well.

Each stat (Health, Attack etc) is a button and clicking it will bring up a new popup with additional information, explaining the stat.

This is the popup shown if you click "Defense" on the previous popup. 

The areas of text that are blue are links and clicking them will show the corresponding popup. The intention is that the player can quickly and easily navigate through this information. The arrow buttons in the top right will also help the player navigate, by letting them go back and forward among the latest displayed popups.

There are also popups for abilities. For example, this is the example Goblins Stab ability

This ability hits 1 combatant in an adjactent tile. The ability gives +1 to the Attack roll(so a small increase in chance to hit) and +2 damage.

For comparison, let's look at the example Elephants Trumpet ability

This ability hits all allies within 2 tiles of the Elephant and gives them an Encourage buff. What's an Encourage buff? Glad you asked... 

Character stats can be modified in various ways. In the final game, we will probably have equipment, wounds, magic effects and more all contributing to the characters stats. These modifiers should be visible to the player. For example, here is the popup the player will see if they click on the attack stat of a character with the Encourage buff:

The Encourage buff gives a +2 bonus to attack, bringing this character from 10 attack up to 12.

We have tried to explain everything as best we can, but this is of course one area where player feedback is going to be very valuable.

The last thing we managed to squeeze into this period is that some abilities can now have a Cooldown and/or a Warmup.
If an ability has a Cooldown, that means that after using the ability, it takes a number of rounds before the ability can be used again.
If an ability has a warmup, it means that it takes a number of rounds after the start of combat before the ability can be used.

Both Cooldown and Warmup are displayed in the Ability popup, if the ability has them. 

This wraps up this devlog and marks the end of the work on the core combat framework. 

The specific combatants and abilities shown here are all just examples to show what the framework is capable of.

Thank you for reading if you got this far! I hope you liked this devlog.

Next up, we'll start working on what the core exploration framework: We want to create maps and have the player walk around and interact with things and people.

The first April update will be on april 11th. Talk to you then!