Devlog Sep 11th - Items and abilities for Julia and Marius

Welcome to the first devlog of September!

This sprint started with additional dialogue work, specifically the dialogue that the player can encounter if they return to the Forest Village after having visited the Northern Hills. There's a couple of different variants of the dialogue depending on what the player has done in the Hills, but I think we have covered everything. So hopefully there should be a meaningful dialogue no matter what.

Next, we started working on all the characters. Last time we decided that the player characters will start at level 1 and reach level 3 or 4 at the end of the game. We need to ensure that every character will receive something when they level up. We also want to check if they all have the proper equipment and that all their abilities have an appropriate sound effect.

Our plan is to go through each character one by one and check all that. We started with Marius:

Marius will often go into melee fights, but we had no armour in the game for him to equip. So we have introduced two new pieces of armour:

Both will be available to buy from the town shop, and we have also added a Leather Breastplate as a quest reward for one of the quests. This way, all players will have the basic Leather Breastplate available and can choose to buy the better, but also more expensive option.

Similarly, we also added a melee weapon to the shop, the Spiked Club. This is an improvement over Marius' starting weapon, the Club. The player will not have enough silver to buy all the items, so they will have to choose.

That's probably good enough for Marius' equipment. Let's move on to Marius' abilities.

Marius starts with just a single ability, but he receives an additional one during a quest. So we decided that when he reaches level 2 and 3 he doesn't need to gain more abilities, so there he will gain some stat increases instead, making him more durable in combat. For the players who reach level 4, we wanted to give a special reward, so there he will gain a new passive ability: Animal Awe

This is a passive ability, i.e. it is permanently active. In order for this to make sense, we had to also add an "animal" tag to certain enemies.

We found a couple of sound effects for the abilities and with that, Marius is done!

We move on to the second character, Julia. We have already made a few different bows for Julia, but she also needs some armours. We decided to just make the leather armours we made for Marius to also be equippable by Julia. That gives the player some choices. They can choose to give the best armour to Marius, who is more often in melee combat. However, Julia is the more vulnerable of the two characters so perhaps she needs the armour more.

With Julias items done, let's talk about her abilities. She already starts with 3 abilities, so we just give her one more, the Multi Shot:

A simple ability that fires two shots at once, this was actually quite simple to implement and didn't require new code, since our existing systems already enabled multiple targets. We also slightly changed her Aiming buff so it only affects the next shot she makes. Hopefully Aiming and firing a Multi Shot will be a viable strategy in combat.

Julia gains this ability at level 3. At level 2 and 4 she gets some stat bonuses. We did have to make a slight update to our level up system to properly display when a character gets multiple things for a single level.

Again, we found a good bow sound effect and that finishes our work for Julia.

Next time, we will continue going through the characters and add relevant items and abilities. Talk to you then!