Devlog Aug 8 - Party management and viewing effects on characters

 Welcome to the first August devlog!

Once again we are making the last preparations for the play test, which we plan to start next week. Therefore we have focused on making several improvements to improve the clarity and fun of the game. 

Second party member and party management

To make the tactical combat feel more interesting, we need more than one character for the player to control. We need multiple characters with different abilities and strengths and weaknesses.

These characters together are traditionally called the adventuring party or just party in role playing games, so that's also what I'll call it here.

Let's introduce the first character who will join Marius on his quest: The archer Julia

Julias stats and abilities are still a work in progress and is likely to be adjusted after the playtest

When opening the inventory, we can now cycle between the party members using some new buttons near the character portrait

Clicking the small portrait to the right of the big one will go to the next character. If you have 3 or characters in the party, there will be two buttons visible, allowing you to cycle to both the next character and the previous character.

Using this interface, each character can be equipped with items. This will be remembers when the player saves the game.

Combat text

A new addition to the game is floating text in combat. This can be things like damage numbers or when a combatant is afflicted with certain status effect.

It's going to look something like this

Here Marius attacked the wolf, dealing 5 damage and also giving it the Fleeing effect.

Negative effects are shown in red and positive effects will be shown in green.

The Fleeing effect is also a new effect, so let's talk about effects

New combat effect UI

We have added a new couple of effects and also made effects visible in the combatant popup. So there's now a new line of icons above the equipment:

Here we can see that the wolf currently has one effect on it.

Clicking the icon will show more information about the effect

As always, we can always adjust the description to ensure that the effect is clear.

Clicking the blue link will show information about the Fleeing effect

The exact effect might change, especially after we test the game next week.

Getting the fleeing effect to work did require some additional work, because we had ensure that the game knows to skip the normal logic that determines the characters actions and instead run towards the edge of the battlefield.

The idea with these improvements is to make it easier for the player to understand whats happening in the game and learn what different effects and abilities do.

Non-repeatable events

Finally let's talk about the last thing we did this period. We can now set any events to be non-repeatable. This will be saved in the save system. This will prevent the player from triggering the same conversations or combats multiple times. Other things we do want to be repeatable, and now the game supports that.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading!
The next update will be on August 22nd where we will reveal the result of our very first test and show which adjustments we've made based on tester feedback. Talk to you then!