Devlog Sep 25th - Items and abilities for Thecla and Septimus

Welcome to the second devlog of September!

Last time we made items and abilities for Marius and Julia. We're continuing with items and abilities for Thecla and Septimus

Thecla starts with several items:

Thecla is a warrior-priest from the Legion, so we want to give her some quite good quality items to reflect her past. Her armour is so good, the player could even consider giving it to Alexia, one of the other characters capable of wearing heavy armour.

Note that in the bottom of the screenshot, the armour says that it can be used by Thecla or "??". That's because in this example, Alexia is not in the party yet.

This is another new thing we added. Previously the item would only say "Item can be used by Thecla" and only if the player inspected the item again after Alexia have joined, will they be able to notice that the description has updated.
That felt a little unintuitive, so now, we use the question marks to let the player know that there are other characters who could potentially use this item in the future.

We have also created a new Ability for Thecla to receive when she levels up. This one is called Charged attack.

This is an improved version of Theclas existing ability Stab, in that this also created a Charged Ground Effect, which deals Shock damage to a random character in the tile. We even created a simple animation for the effect.

The ability has a cooldown, which hopefully means the Stab ability will still be situationally useful. We don't want any character to have an ability that is never used.

This is also the first time we have seen Ground Effects with a duration. We had to expand the way Ground Effects are handled a little bit to get this working, but we did it the same way as we have done other effects with durations, so it luckily wasn't too difficult.

Let's continue with Septimus. Septimus is an apprentice mage, and only starts with one item: A set of Robes.

Not the most impressive of items, but since he has ranged abilities, hopefully Septimus will be able to stay out of the worst fighting.

We also give him a passive ability when he levels up:

Septimus will sometimes deal fire and frost damage to himself by accident (we have showcased his starting abilities before), so the idea is that this effect will diminish the downside of his other abilities, in addition to giving him an edge against certain opponents. 

The stats and on these items and abilities will probably be adjusted as we test the game. 

We also went through all the abilities of these two characters and ensured that they all have appropriate sound effects.

We had a bit of extra time so we made an update to one of the first dialogues in the game. The first time the player encounters a wolf, there's a bit of dialogue and we had a background placeholder image. 

Here's how it looked before:

In this example, we changed the window size to be very wide, and as you can see, that caused the background image to be quite stretched.

Here's how it looks now

We have drawn a new image with Marius and the wolf. Both the sprites and background are based on existing graphics so it didn't take too long to set up.

We have also improved it so the image no longer stretches along with the window. Instead we add black bars in the sides (or above and below).

That's all for now! Next time we'll continue with the final two playable characters. Talk to you then!