Devlog april 10th - Cutscenes and Septimus fight mechanics

 Welcome to the first devlog of April!

We continued right where we left off last time, with the cutscene where Septimus meets his fellow students from the magic academy.

We drew a new map, allthough we re-use many of the trees and stones from a previous map. The new grass texture should hopefully make it feel sufficiently different from the original map.

Septimus is the person on the left of the boulder. The two others are his fellow students

We wrote the dialogue and added added a few new poses and expressions to them. Since we already showcased the characters in the last update, we'll not showcase them again now.

We created two versions of this map. One is the above, the other version is a battle map. This is necessary because during the conversation, the students are attacked.

More goblins!

Every character in combat needs animations for taking damage, evading damage and at least one animation for attacking. We also need to create their abilities. In this case, each student has two abilities. The bald student has a damaging ability called Snowflake and a defensive ability called Ice Block. The student with a small head has two offensive abilities.

 Snowflake is a weak attack, but only costs 1 action point to cast.
Ice block is currently unfinished, but will likely be a buff that, for a limited duration, reduces damage taken.

Burning Hands targets all enemies in an adjacent tile. Gust of Wind has longer range, but only targets a single opponent. 

The most complicated character is Septimus himself. He has trouble controlling his magic powers, which means he starts with two passive effects: Frost Overload and Fire Overload.

Both passive effects have a number attached to them, so we had to update our effect icon so it can display a number.

The effects on Septimus causes ice or fire to appear in a random adjacent tile every time he casts a spell associated with water/fire magic.

In addition, casting a spell increases the overload value matching the spell and decreases the other. For example, if Septimus casts a fire spell, Fire Overload increases by 1 and Frost overload decreases by 1. If an overload value becomes too high, casting spells will deal damage directly to Septimus.

We created these effects to signify that Septimus is powerful, but doesn't have a lot of control over his magic. Hopefully he will be a fun character to control.

As always, we added descriptions to all of these abilities and effects. In addition we updated our Ability popup to also show the type of ability. For example, the Snowflake Ability is a Water spell, so it has the tags Water and Magic.

The ability types are shown on the bottom right.

Usually the ability type and the damage types match (a Fireball spell is fire magic and it deals fire damage) but there are some exceptions. For example Thecla's Zap ability and the student's Gust of Wind ability are both Air magic, but one deals shock damage and the other deals blunt damage.

Last thing we added was a new ground effect: Icy Ground.

This can be spread randomly by Septimus' Frost Overload. Any character standing on Icy ground at the end of the turn will have one fewer action point the following turn.

The effect only lasts a single turn, but currently the duration is not shown here. That's something we could perhaps improve in the future.

That's all for this update.

Next update is on april 24th. We will write the dialogue at the end of the Septimus fight and we still have to write some extra dialogue for the town. Then we will start to work on the area called Northern Hills, which is probably going to be the largest area in the game, with several fights and new characters. It is likely that creating this area will take several updates, so it will be nice if we can get started next time.

Talk to you next time!