Devlog Aug 22 - Playtest and feedback

Welcome to the second August devlog!

This period we had our first playtests, and we received a lot of valuable feedback. It was also a lot of fun to finally see other players try out the game!

This is going to be a collection of many smaller improvements but together they should hopefully make the game feel much better.

One common thread in the feedback we received is to make the game more responsive in combat. If the game has animations or sound effects when something happens, then it becomes more clear to the player whats happening and what the consequences of clicking different things are. 

Different cursors

We have now drawn custom cursors for the game. This allows us to change the cursor depending on what's happening. Currently we have 4 cursors:

It's important for a game to communicate what's going on and these different cursors should help with that

There is already an option in the game for scaling UI, so we wanted that to also scale the size of the cursor. We therefore created a small script that creates scaled versions of each cursor. Currently there are 4 different size levels. Eventually we'll add this setting to the options menu, once we prioritize making menus.

New Battle Map

Eagle eyes viewers might notice in the above screenshots that we've drawn a new battle map. We also slightly adjusted the way we draw the tiles. Previously, all tiles had a green border, but now we can customise it. It can even be multicoloured as in the above screenshot.

Animations and sound effects in combat

Another way to make combat feel more responsive and making it more clear what's going on is to add animation. So now every character have a few (very simple) animations, each consisting of a single sprite.

Here's the different sprites for the Goblin

Every character has a default sprite, an evade sprite and a take damage sprite. The evade sprite is used both when characters dodge or parry an attack.

In addition to these three sprites, then every ability is associated with a sprite. For example, the Goblin has two abilities and therefore has two extra sprites.

We also added a few very basic sound effects. We now play a "whoosh" effect when an attack misses and a "punch" effect when someone takes damage. It's quite basic for now, but even small improvements like these can have an outsized effect on the game as a whole. 

Updated animations

We also made a fairly small, but impactful change to the walking animations: 

We simply changed the order of the sprites, but it does make a significant difference

By starting the animation with a more active sprite instead of a more passive one, it feels like the character starts walking faster.
When the player presses a button, they expect something to happen immediately. Therefore it's a good rule of thumb to have the most impactful part of the animation right away, otherwise it can feel like there's a slight delay. 

Improvement to the AI controlled characters

Previously, if a character couldn't hit any valid targets with any abilities, they would simply pass their turn.

This is of course not the best implementation, because if a character for example is too far away to hit anyone, they will just stand still until the player chooses to approach them. We always intended to fix this problem and now we have.

Every type of enemy now has a preferred distance to the closest enemy. If they can't use any abilities, they will try to approach the until they are within their preferred distance.

Now the second combat (already very hard) is completely impossible, so next week we'll have to make some adjustments to make it easier. Once the game is finished, it's not great if the second combat in the game is so hard. But for a demo, it's probably ok that the last combat is a challenge, so players and testers are encouraged to use their abilities well.

Bug improvements

Finally, we also found a number of bugs during the testing.

- We fixed some bugs relating to saving/loading, although there are still some things that are unfinished. - Also fixed a bug where we could not roll 10 on the ten-sided dice we use in combat. This meant that combat wasn't quite as random as we wanted.
- We redrew the wolf leg in the wolf portrait (it looked weird and was probably bending the wrong way).

That's all for now. Thanks for reading!

The next update will be on September 12th, were we will show something a little bit different. We want to apply for a grant so we'll spend the first September sprint looking into that and then writing an application. Talk to you then!