Hey everyone!
Exciting progress made this week, the entire draft script for chapter is complete! Me and a writer are still doing small back and forth on scenes to make sure the characters feel right, but it will give me plenty of breathing room to put it all into the demo before the Tiny Teams July 17th deadline for submission. Working with a couple writers has really helped solidify the direction the story is going, and I'm super grateful for all of them that reached out for collaboration.
The art at this point is WAY ahead of the story/gameplay, but I still want to show you the cool new characters we've drawn up. Here is the recently finished King of Valjord.
On the coding side a large chunk of my time is being spent on making the save transfer over safely to the next chapter of the game. Some of you may not know this because the prologue was so short, but the game actually has auto-saving during battle. So if you exit the game in the middle of the battle, you can hit "continue" to load right back up at where you left off. This is a feature I wanted to support early on as I know sometimes you just can't commit to finishing a whole level in one sitting, especially for late-game chapters, or something comes up where you need to close the game.
That said, it makes the save system considerably more complex, so I'm making careful changes to make a clean transition to the next chapter. I may introduce backups in the future as well, as it's pretty easy to copy the save file and make sure you always have a save you can reload if your current one gets corrupted for some reason.
After finishing saves, I am making a (hopefully) quick change to how shields work. Instead of blocking x damage, they will act as a smaller regenerative health-bar of sorts. The idea for the shield to regenerate came from a player called ScubaLuigi. A quick example of the system: A shield has 10 "block", and has 5 regen. So the first 10 damage your unit takes will not hurt their HP. Then at the start of a unit's turn, if the shield was damaged, it will regen 5 "block" up to a total of 10. Different shields will have different values, some may not regen at all, some will block lower and regen fully. I'm excited to play around with the balancing and see what you all think of the system!
After that I will go heads down in creating the dialogue scenes I talked about earlier in the game. There is choreography of the scenes that needs to be completed, and that's what I'll be heads down doing towards the end. There are some really cool scenes in there that bring some characters to life that I'm really excited for you all to experience.
That's all I have for now, cheers and have a fantastic start to your week!
Best,
Eldin T.
