Good day everyone and happy September hope this burning summer ends soon.
To celebrate I’m finally manage to have the core features of LION ready for the Update 0.4, there is a Buch of adjustments and bug fixes I must make to the game as is not completely cheeked, but I decided it was time you get to see what I have been cooking for the game for half a year.
However, lots of what you are going to see at plain sight won’t be so different, and there are several reasons for it, I have not made more models, or animations that I wanted to because I spent several months rewriting the core code of the game. This was necessary to ensure I could continue on expanding the gameplay and options latter down the line, as it was quite badly written.
This allowed me to implement key mechanics that you will get to test inside the game, which are.
- The New Radial menu
- The Special Abilities
- The Attack Plans
- The Physical Systems
- The Roles and Stances
- New Controls System
- Leveling Up and materials
- RPG attributes
- Rewritten Grab Objects system.
Before explaining this new feature to those how haven’t read the previous logs, I’m letting you know that I will be making several updates during the Month, this for several reasons, the game will be feature for the Latinx Games Fest this September 15, I which you got the time to see the events and support the projects and games that will be talked about in it including mine.
Also, I’m realizing this update a bit early that I was preparing some bugs will appear and some things might be mistranslated or unfinished. I will be making like crazy lots of bug fixes and 3D Models and Animations, to include new attacks for enemies and Bosses, and have several mechanism-like objects being carried y children with proper final 3D models as well as other interactable, and including new graphics for example the loading screen which will look pixelated for now. After that the next months I will be working in a tutorial level for the demo and early access and new sections on the early access world to extent the gameplay and conclude the early access world to focus mainly in the main world of the game in which I spent some time but I cannot afford to show anything at the moment.
So let me explain each new mechanic.
- The New Radial menu
The Radial Menu received a massive overhaul, the items or children that appear on the menu show more data than before and allows to change certain stances and roles witch I will explain ahead in the menu itself. Also now includes other 3 sub menus to select and execute attack plans, Special Abilities and also to select Objects being carried.
For the children a main capsule colored behind them represents their role, DPS, Tank, healer, and another under which resents their stance, that determinates their Target seeker behavior.
Also appears above them Target they are attacking and the amount attacking the child with red dots around their portrait.
Inside the menu the player can select and command children while the time slows downs to allow a tactical and pause view of the action allowing to make complex decisions in the heat of battle.
- The Special Abilities
The special abilities are massive attacks and special attacks or actions that can be equipped to each child, but only 1 per each of them, these abilities can cast powerful attacks at the cost of some of the charge of the child executing it, and also will require a cooldown equivalent to the power of the ability.
These abilities can be called by the children themselves outside of formation at any given moment when they seem necessary.
- The Attack Plans
The attack plans are a big system I made to allow the players to fast and efficiently command children in the heat of battle, this by obtaining and creating a set of premade commands of movement followed by a stance and role assigned to them.
These plans can for example set all blue and green children as healers and set them on the back relative to Rosamunde orientation to heal all children and Rosamunde that will stand right in front of them, or another to send tanks forward and cast their abilities upon reaching their location of movement to draw full ago and cause massive damage.
These Plans can be obtained on the world and also can be completely custom made in a menu inside of the Inventory menu at the right bottom section
- The Roles and Stances
This is an extremely important system for the RTS combat and control, the roles and stances.
The Roles are the class trinity seen in many RPGs and MMORPGs, Tank, Healer and DPS, each child of each color has access to each of the 3 roles or Jobs, allowing to Focus on protection, Damage or Healing, this can be changed at run time ither using attack plans or the radial menu by pressing RT. Also, their stance is a Stance or position regarding enemies, it focuses on how the child will seek targets or if to seek them at all, there are 4 stances, Aggressive, Sentinel, Passive and Supporter.
Aggressive will seek any target closes by or that matches some criteria based on the role.
Sentinel will spawn a Circle area that will set the child guard area and the child will not heal nor attack anyone that is outside of this circle, this circle range varies according to the child type or color.
Passive will do its command and upon completing it will remain in wait or idle and will do nothing not matter what until commanded otherwise
Supporter will seek all lied children and Rosamunde and check if require aid form the current class the child has, for instance a tank in support mode will check if Rosamunde is being attacked and will seek to Aggro the enemies away to the tank, healers will check her health and heal her if necessary and DPS will attack any targets that Rosamunde or any other child might be attacking.
- New Controls System
The Controls have received some drastic changes, the main one is that commanding and selecting are done with the Left Triggers now, more specifically Commanding is done with LT and The Special Commands like Shoot and launch are done Holding LT like before, Selecting is done by taping LB and Aiming with Holding LB, the Tools like the Climbing Claws and Grapple Hook, boosters and levitation are done with RB, also the call back have been changed to a constant call area with
- The Physical Systems
The Physical system are a set of 3 system that combines Weight, Temperature and Electrical charge on certain objects and witch the children and certain elemental objects can influence, for example the Impact Children can obtain in the Final Game the Thunder medal that allows to cast electrical powers and can charge temporally certain mechanical objects, however the charge can be altered by temperature and increase the weight of an object requiring more children to lift, being magic children able to cool down an object using ice magic.
At the moment I’m creating an extension on the early access in the red void area that will implement a puzzle using this system.
- Leveling Up and materials
Now you can level up the each of the children and increasing their 5 core attributes based on their armor parts being, their weapons Raw Power, Their Agility Scarf, their Book of Intellect, their Armor Constitution and Body Vectors Endurance, which increases their Base damage, Defenses, Awareness and Critical Hit, total Max Life Units and Total Charge.
These children can be leveled up by the Atlantios NPCs that are in most heavens save stations, this is done using 5 materials types collected from enemies. Each child must be increase individually and can be customized to fit your play stile.
Rewritten Grab Objects system and Massive Bug Hunt down
The grab object system used to Carry objects has been rewritten and remade and working better than before, also a massive Bug hut was made to being able to further extent the game with having bugs in the inner code protentional causing massive issues down the line. The amount was so big that I cannot enumerate them all, but many more will be fixed like one you will encounter with the ability Thunder ball that does not collide properly, I’m currently checking that ability to fix it. That and many other things will be fixed in the several patches I will be making in this month of September, stain tuned to check the new features of the game and new content coming.
