Greetings, adventurers!

Of all the updates we've shared so far, this is probably the one you've probably been the most interested to see. I've been promising to show off combat for months and months. Even back as far as when I visited David in Japan, my plan was to get onto combat on my return. Game dev is nothing if not unpredictable of course, and I realised I had to get all the other systems up to scratch before starting on such a complicated new part of the game.

In an old school RPG, combat is at the heart of everything and one of those things you really have to get right. So many hours of a game are made up in combat, whether its clearing trash mobs in a dungeon or the climactic battle against the final boss, and if combat doesn't feel right, the whole game can be a chore.

I've been working on combat for the last 6-7 (six seven) weeks or so , but of course other systems that are tied into to combat like pathfinding, equipping inventory and so on, I started much earlier. Like everything in game dev, combat is an iterative process and I've already done a number of different versions of early combat before locking in the direction I wanted to go with.

Here's a good example of something I tried and threw out pretty early.

Abandoned prototype - An early 'non grid' iteration



Early combat used the same gridless system the rest of the dungeon uses. Monsters and players could move anywhere and if they were within a distance radius of each other, they could perform melee attacks and so on. What we found was combat quickly got bunched up , with everyone right in each others faces like a scrum. It got confusing pretty quickly, and was starting to feel a little closer to Baldur's Gate 1+2's combat ( which worked in realtime, but in turn based would probably suffer from these issues)

I realised we were starting to get a little bit away from the "Gold Box" era we've been promising, and this just wasn't feeling like it captured that spirit at all. What was needed was that classic grid based combat that makes things so easy to understand from a tactical standpoint. Where this gets tricky is there's actually a hidden grid that is running across the whole map for pathfinding purposes, but each tile is only 8x8 in size (necessary to navigate paths in crowded taverns and so on)

8x8 is far too small for tile based combat, so I had to do some tricky maths to create sort of 'macro groups' of tiles that would represent 48x48 squares around the combatants. 48 pixels is wide enough to feel like it creates a bit of spacing around combatants. When battle begins, the grid fades in and these 'macro tiles' take over for pathfinding purposes. Here's how the transition to battle looks ( with a nice "Battle Begins" animation from David!). You can see the

Gold Box style - the switch to a 48x 48 grid.

You can see here how at first the party is moving at a pixel-to-pixel space wherever they want. When combat begins (the blue icons represent initiative rolls), everyone leaps to the nearest free 48x48 'macro tile'. The rat rolled the highest initiative number so runs to attack Raistlin the mage. (placeholder name, shoutout to a Dragonlance legend!)

The reason the rat targeted Raistlin is interesting - I've created basic monster intelligence. Like D&D, Pathfinder etc, monsters will be assigned tactics such as skirmisher, tank, berserker and so on. Depending on the tactic assigned, they will behave differently. Healers will try to heal their own allies before attacking enemies. Casters might look to use offensive spells and so on.

The rat's basic tactic right now is "skirmisher" where it looks for the weakest (lowest HP) enemy it can see, and runs straight for them. All the rats attack Raistlin because of this.

Hero pathfinding and a melee attack example.

In the above GIF, we can see our fighter Caramon look through targets to do a simple melee attack. The game supports both mouse and keyboard , roll over an enemy and it shows you a path to attack. Keyboard allows you to walk right up to and 'bump' an enemy to do a simple melee attack. The GIF loses a bit of the subtlety of it but when you're in range, a very quick tween plays while the hero swings their weapon to get some 'oomph' to the attacks.

Movement is 'per tile' , with characters with higher dexterity being able to walk further. I will most probably add armour penalties for full plate mail and so on too.

Ranged combat and opportunity attacks!

Here we see Laurana attempt to move to a new position on the battlefield to snipe some rats. The game implements line of sight. If other combatants or obstacles obscure the path to your target, you'll see a red line, if the path is clear it's yellow. Arrow keys or mouse allow you to cycle through targets. The timing on the bow animation is a little off, (make a note to fix today!) but we have projectile attacks now. Slings and bolts will fly low and straight, throwing axes and spears will have of an arc on them and so on.

Notice also how Laurana makes a disastrous tactical error on her path - by walking away from the nine tiles that surround the rat near her at the start of her move, she triggers an opportunity attack for the nasty vermin to bite her. Again on her path, the second rat is able to do so too. She barely survives, enough to do some damage to the third rat.

Right now everyone is doing a standard '10' damage in these examples but I actually have damage values taken from the actual weapons they are using ( just turned off for some tests I was doing today.)

I have a simple death screen working now if the party is wiped out, and if you get far enough away from your enemies ( right now I think it's 16 tiles ), it triggers a 'party has fled' message and you can continue along with your adventure. Of course some battles will be un-fleeable, can't have everyone bailing out on the battle against the Leviathan itself !!!

XP and Levelling Up

Next post I'll be talking about the level up process ( as well as show off some of the cool maps / interiors and sprite work David has been working on! ). We already have an XP system in place, but my next task is to add in some basic level up , more HP per level, gain some basic powers and so on. For that I have to actually create some new powers! Right now there's no area of effect spells, no cool powers or anything outside the basic melee and ranged attacks, but that'll come soon enough!

Anyway, this was a long post so thanks for staying with me. I'll put a video together at some point once the systems get more detailed, but I hope this was a good teaser for what we have in store for the combat phase of the game.

Cheers all, let me know what you think of things in the comments!

Oliver Joyce + David Aron
Whiskeybarrel Studios / Nostalgic Realms