Devlog June 12th - New abilities and popups

  Welcome to the first devlog of June!

We have been continuing work on the Northern hills, and have now completed the intro cutscene. This cutscene serves to introduce many characters and so it required quite a bit of work.

When the player enters the area, there's some dialogue, then a fight and then some more dialogue before the player can explore freely.

Next up, we started to create the combat abilities for the new characters. We also made some general improvements to the way combat abilities work and are displayed.

We already had abilities that could summon combatants into the battlefield. However, there were no way to see what the summoned combatants would be like. The player would have to use the ability and only then would they be able to see the result.

In a turn-based game like this is, it is nice to be able to plan out your actions ahead of time. Therefore we prioritised improving the popups so now the player can click and see all the stats and abilities of the summoned combatant.

On the left is the popup for the ability, and clicking the summon button opens a new popup with information about the combatant 

Similarly, for abilities that create ground effects (such as burning ground, icy ground, muddy ground ect.), there were previously no way to see what those ground effects do.

Here's a popup of the Muddy ability that Marius gets on the left. It creates a tile of Mud. Clicking the button will open a new popup explaining what Mud does. 

Now the player can click a button in the popup for the ability and open a new popup explaining what the ground effect does. This is actually a completely new type of popup, since we didn't have popups for ground effects before.

We also made sure that we can have links in the text, so in the above example, if the player clicks the blue text, another new popup will be displayed with more explanation.

Eagle eyed readers will notice that the Mud popup has a little sign that says "Does not affect Flying".

This is another new thing we have added to all ground effects and combatant effects (including damage):

We can now set up these effects to only affect certain opponents or to exclude certain opponents. In this example, the Mud on the ground is set to not affect Flying combatants. 

We have given the flying ability to Kara

This is a fairly flexible system that we can hopefully use for many interesting abilities in the future.

Currently only has one ability (the one that summons a mouse illusion). We want to give her a few more and then we'll move on to Alexia's abilities. That will be the focus of the next period.

Talk to you on June 26th!