Happy Post-April Fools and welcome to the start of Spring! Here’s what we were up to during the month of March!
New Enemies New Skills
Last month we showed off some of the new enemies that we’ve been working on and this month we started on that long process to add new animations and work on rebalancing the battle system!
When we initially started on Gataela, the thought was that the enemies would be somewhat like Pokemon in that we would have certain types, and as the game progressed their levels would go up and they would get some new skills, but it would still be the same type of enemy.
As we added the overworld and added biomes to it, it became apparent that not all enemy types will belong in the same biomes. (Not to mention that would be kinda boring.) So we expanded our initial list going from 9 different common types to 23. That’s a whole lot more!
But with more enemies means the need for more skills.
Each enemy before had a maximum of 5 different skills that it could use. With only four skill slots, there would be quite a bit of repetition in enemy encounters. We’ve been working on expanding that so that each enemy has 10 different skills, with different levels associated to those skills. For example, if you run into a level 2 snake they probably shouldn’t have skills that could cause an instant kill. As your enemies level up, so do the skills it has available going from more basic skills, to intermediate, to expert.
God-level skills are saved for bosses :)
So we doubled the enemies and doubled their skills, does that mean 4x more skills? Nope. This is the “fun” part of breaking down who has what skill and looking for overlaps. For example, both snakes and wolves can bite. Does that mean two different Bite skills? Maybe in terms of stats since a snake would have a poisonous bite, but the animations can probably be the same. But then is the only difference in stats the poison aspect, or do we need to consider the skill level as well?
Lots of excel sheets have been made and continue to be made.
Over the next few months this will be something being done in the background and we’ll probably bring this up every once in a while to introduce some of the cooler skills.
Interior Time
Now that the overworld is complete we’re beginning to focus on interiors. In particular this past month we worked on the interiors for the Palace. I wonder what happens there? :3c
We’ll be continuing on various areas over the next few months, including adding backer houses. Look forward to more in the future!
What’s Next?
Next month we’ll be focusing on these areas:
- TTBattle Skills and Balancing
- Adding Cutscenes
- Adding Overworld Interiors
- Improving Map/Level Load Times