Status effects play a crucial role in combat and appropriate use of status effects can be the deciding factor between easily emerging victorious from an encounter or barely scraping by with a sliver of your health left. For the past few days I've been working on adding visual indicators to when a status effect is impacting your character.
Status Effect Indicators
Fatigue is a very impactful status effect that reduces your damage output. This can debilitate your offensive and in turn let the enemies get the upper hand on you, so it's best to watch out for it. As of the current version of Rapture when a character uses an ability while they are Fatigued there will be a clear visual indicator in the sweat drops animation being played while the character is acting.
Taunt is a status effect that lets you redirect enemy single target attacks to yourself, making it extremely useful for characters that are naturally defensive and providing a certain amount of safety to your more fragile characters. Whenever Taunt successfully redirects an attack, the new status indicator will notify the player by playing the Taunt animation. This will provide clarity as to which attacks were successfully redirected away from your party members.
Let's take a look at Charm, which causes enemies to fight for you. Whenever an enemy acts against their own party members while Charmed, a new visual indicator will clearly convey that information to the player.
Almost all status effects had visual indicators added to them, but you'll have to see the rest for yourself!
Side Note - Battle Victory Animations
Finally, as a little side project this week I added walking animations to all characters, and they will now walk off stage (whenever possible) when successfully beating the encounter.
I'd like to thank you for taking the time to read through this dev log, I hope you found it interesting and there will be plenty more coming soon!
I'd like to remind you that you can contact me via Twitter or through Discord, you can find the links below:
Discord - https://discord.gg/UB54wAv
Twitter - https://twitter.com/GameRapture