Devlog feb 13th - Farmer in trouble

Welcome to the first devlog of February

This week we worked on a new area, which contains several cutscenes, dialogues and battles.

This is a zoomed out image of the entire area. Only the background is shown here, i.e. all characters are removed

Immediately upon arrival, the player will get ambushed and thrown into a fight. There will be two more fights in the area. We have drawn two new battle maps for the battles in this area.

This area was originally intended as a side area but has now been promoted to part of the main quest of the game. 

This allows us to add features to this area that we want to ensure that the player doesn't miss. For example we will have Marius learn a new ability that allows him to put mud on the ground, giving enemies a debuff.

Over the course of the game, characters will gain more abilities and become more interesting to play

Since this area is now mandatory for the player, we can balance later parts of the game knowing that all players will have this new ability at that point.

We can also let the player learn new information about the game world. For example, the player will overhear some of the goblins using the rune tablet to communicate with some unknown person.

In addition to the talking Rune, we have also added dialogue for the goblins and for the young, farmer in the red clothes.

Readers with sharp eyes will notice a new enemy in the above screenshot. The Goblin slinger is an enemy with a ranged attack, which will hopefully challenge the player in a different way compared to previous melee-focused enemies.

We have also added another new ability. Marius will now quite early in the game learn First Aid, a passive ability that will heal all characters a little after each combat. That should hopefully make it feel less punishing to lose a bit of health in combat. It will also revive characters that have been reduced to 0 health.

Like all abilities, this ability can quite easily be upgraded during the game.

Finally we made an adjustment to the pathfinding so it should now take Ground Effects into account. That means characters will now tend to avoid walking in bad effects and prefer walking in good effects.

Notice Julia's movement prefers tiles that are not on fire. Seems sensible

This system is quite simple. Every type of effect has a single number that indicates how bad/good it is (we use the same number when the enemies determine what abilities are most effective) and characters will just choose the path with the highest number.
We could improve it in the future. For example some effects might be fine to move through but not end the turn on. But for now, this simple system is probably good enough.

Thanks for reading!

Next update is on February 27th where we will try to link up this farm area with the forest village. The Forest village is an area we have already shown, but we still have a lot of dialogue to write there, so that will be fun. Talk to you then!