Devlog June 26th - Kara and Alexia abilities

Welcome to the second devlog of June!

In the last update, we were planning to work on Karas and Alexias abilities. We have quite a few abilities to go through, so let's get started!

First off, we have Kara's Confuse ability:

We have added the duration to the description of all effects. If we need to add more details in the future, we can expand the popup with more fields.

This confuse effect will cause the enemy to have fewer action points. By default it's just 1 fewer action points but if the enemy fails their Magic Resistance by a lot, more action points will be lost. They could lose even all their 4 action points.

We have added these stats (Magic Resistance and Magic Power) to the combatant popup, along with an explanation for the player.

The explanation text is the same whether the player clicks the Magic Resistance or the Magic Power buttons.

The final ability for Kara is Faerie Shot:

 This is a fairly weak ranged attack but if it deals damage, it will give the opponent a version of the confuse effect. This one has no Magic Resistance check, but will always reduce the action points by only 1.

Moving on to Alexias abilities.

The first of Alexia's 4 abilities, Sweep, is a simple attack. The most special part about Sweep is that it hits a full tile, making it possible to hit multiple enemies.

Next, we have Defensive Chop, an attack that hits a single opponent, but also has a change to lower their attack. The intention is that the player can use this ability against particularly dangerous enemies to lower their damage.

Neither Sweep not Defensive Chop required us to write much new code. It was possible to create these abilities using the existing systems we have created for previous abilities.

The next abilities are a bit more unique and required some more work.

The third ability is called Protect the Little Ones.

This ability will cause Alexia to take a portion of the damage that character would otherwise have suffered.

This should have a nice synergy with the final ability, Shield Up.

The hope is that these two abilities together can help us solve the following problem:

We want Alexia to be a defensive character, but if we give her more defense, health and protection, then the enemies will simple choose not to attack her and attack someone else instead.

We could of course change the enemies to make them want to attack her anyway, but we decided we didn't want to make the enemies stupider intentionally.

Instead we want to find a way to make Alexia useful despite the above constrains. These two abilities are our attempt to do so.

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that both Alexia and Kara start with a few items. Most of these items are newly created. We also introduced a new system that makes certain items equippable by certain characters. Previously, everyone could equip everything.

Every item will now have a bit of text at the bottom explaining who can equip it.

We also made various improvements to the popups of abilities.

Before we had a different file for the popup and the ability itself. That meant if something changed in the ability, we had to also remember to update the popup so the information there is still correct. Now there is only one file with all the data, so we only have to change it in one place when we need to make adjustments.

This kind of improvement is not immediately obvious to the player, but in decreases the risk of errors in the game, so it is a change we're happy to have done.

We're done with abilities and items for now. Next update we will probably return to writing dialogue for the Northern Hills, but we might also start on making menus for the game. This is another milestone that we must complete before it will feel like a real game, and potentially could be a lot of work. So it's good to get started on it.

Next update will be on July 10th. Talk to you then!