Hey everyone!
I've made the last changes I had planned before starting on "Chapter 1" of the game, a whole new level! These were updates to the flow/length of the tutorials so I didn't throw so much reading at the player all at once. It also made the tutorials show up when the actual UI was present.
Here is a gif illustrating what I'm talking about. The quality isn't great, but I think it gets the picture across for the 5 MB limit I have on uploads.
The last two weeks have been interesting for me. I took some time off my normal development schedule to try out other another interesting game in the tactical RPG genre, Expeditions Rome. It has given me a couple of ideas for some design issues I have run into in Those Who Rule. Things like how should shields reduce damage. A random chance to block X damage, or a "shield hp" that regens every turn?
Something else I'm looking at is the turn order. Right now a unit with high Endurance can act twice before a unit with a low endurance acts once. I'm thinking of potentially changing this so each "turn", every unit gets to act once, but the first actions will be taken by the highest endurance, and unit's with the lowest endurance act last. This is much easier to understand and instead of having powerful abilities take more "stamina" I could get rid of stamina all together and they will reduce the using unit's endurance stat for a turn, causing them to have a more powerful turn, at the expense of acting later in the next turn.
I'd love to know everyone's thoughts on those two implementations. However I won't be implementing them yet, as I want to get chapter 1 created and added to launch a "second beta" of sorts. I want chapter 1 to have some meatier combat than the prologue so that I can get a real sense of how player's feel about the combat system, and how easy it is to understand. This will help me make the above decisions. There will be more varied terrain, and less of an open field than the prologue, as well as the introduction/encouragement of using abilities. You will also be controlling 4 characters instead of 2, so it will give much more variation in how you can play.
I may also look into hiring out the writing so I can focus on development and level design. Still mulling this over though, so no concrete plans yet. Luckily all the art is already done! Here are some of the characters introduced in the chapter:
Playable characters:
NPC:
Enemy (recolors just for a bit of variation):
Hope you all have a great week, and thanks for giving this a read!
Best,
Eldin T.