Devlog August 28th - animations and xp planning

 Welcome to the second devlog of August!

We started off this period working on the dialogue in the Northern Hills, specifically dialogue with two minor characters that the player meets at a farmstead. One of them can transform into a sheep, and we wanted to extend our framework so we can trigger sound effects and animations during cutscenes. Here's the resulting animation.

This is a zoomed in (and muted) view, but hopefully it gives a good idea of the animation

Luckily it was surprisingly easy to make animations work using our existing cutscene code.

Next up we started on some combat improvements that were suggested a while back when we last tested the game. One was that if a character moves multiple tiles, we want to visually show them moving one tile at a time, rather then immediately move to the destination tile.

This was a little tricky, because we must add a little delay to allow the player to understand what is happening. However, we must ensure nothing is happening in the game while we are waiting for the character to move. For example, the computer controlled enemies should not start to calculate their turns until the moving character has finished moving.
Thankfully, we arrived at a solution that I think works well and doesn't change the existing code much.

Other minor combat improvements include a sound when a character moves and custom sound effects for different abilities. So we can now have different sound effects for e.g. swinging a sword and casting a spell.

The big thing we want to do next is go through all characters and ensure they have all the relevant equipment, abilities and that we have something planned for all their level ups in the game.

We talked about XP (Experience Points) and levels in a previous devlog, but it's long enough ago that it's worth it to summarise: Basically, we will award XP to the player controlled characters for various actions. Once enough xp has been accumulated, the character will level up. The plan is for each level up to make the character slightly better, either by giving them an increase in stats or new or upgraded abilities.

We need to go through each character and ensure that these level ups are properly planned and that the character will feel interesting to play at all stages of the game.

Before we can start this project, we needed to decide how much xp and how many levels the characters will gain over the cause of the game. Long story short, we typed some numbers into a spreadsheet and decided that the player will start at level 1 and reach level 3 or 4 at the end of the game, depending on how much optional content they decide to do.

To avoid spoilers, we had to redact parts of the spreadsheet 

This spreadsheet is for internal use, so we don't expect it to fully make sense. We just want to give a sense of how we're thinking about and working with these things.

For next time, we will start going through all the characters one at a time. We already started with Marius, but we don't have enough to show anything yet.

Lastly, I'd like to unveil a little side project I've been having fun with: I created a Youtube channel. It is not related to our game (or even game development in general), but it is more of a gaming/storytelling channel.

The art featured on the logo and banner is done by the amazing AnnikathArt. There's a link to her work in the description of the channel. The thumbnail art is done by me.

So far I've uploaded ten videos, all related to a game called Europa Universalis IV, and playing with a mod called Anbennar. This is one of the most popular mods for that game, but it's still very niche content. The target audience for these videos are people who are already familiar with this game and this mod, so if that sounds like you, go have a look.  

https://www.youtube.com/@MasterBrightdragon

It might just be something for you!

We want to keep this space focused on game development, so we'll likely not mention Youtube again for a while. Perhaps eventually, once our game is finished, it will be covered on the Youtube channel as well. Until then, we'll keep the two things separate.

Next devlog will be on 11th of September. Talk to you then!