Below is a screenshot of the concept of how the battle animations will look.

I’m taking alot of time to get this part exactly as I want it because I want the appearance of these battle animations to be a strong part of the games identity. Animation is also the part that I enjoy doing the most.

Just from generating the above concept I realized a number of additional factors and things that need to be done to get this where I want it. The most important point of the battle animation is to create a  sense of anticipation. Battle animations can be turned off of course because it is a cinematic experience that is fairly separate from gameplay. To create that sense of anticipation I realized I should not have characters start off in a bland neutral idle pose, but have a sort of weapon garnishing type animation to create a feeling of intent.

I’m hoping to demonstrate the appearance of that in the coming weeks but I’ll just talk about the idea now. Before a unit actually hits another visually there will be a slight frame freeze to create the feeling of anticipation, because 3 different things could happen, hit, miss or block, and the blocking sequence in terms of a time is a much longer occurrence which would be jarring to happen with out any pauses.

The camera needs to be specially programmed for zoom ins of  these freeze frame moments so I will have to keep in mind the size of the backgrounds I create to accomodate a large range of zooms.

Also I have to create dynamic shadows for the 2D sprites, which in theory shouldn’t be that hard of a programming task. I’ll attempt to just create a mirrored clone with a black transparent shader applied to it.

Here’s a repost of some of the art for the character Jill to demonstrate how the original concept art turned into the map sprite, dialogue portraite and battle sprite.

Thanks for reading.

There’s nothing new to show this week as I’ve just been producing concept art and sketching/redoing animations. I could show the drafts but I still don’t think its representative of what it will look like after it’s done. I decided to redo the idle animation I had posted previously after coming to the realization of how exactly I want the battle animations to be choreographed on the the parallax backgrounds.

Below is a re-post of an example background, I took down last week’s because I had used a background from Marvel vs Capcom as a placeholder.

It’s going to take quite some time to nail down the animations, which will be the primary focus now.

Alot of random stuff got started but not finished this week, so some of the stuff below is unfortunately not representative of how things will probably look months from now. I had to redo alot of animations and start some more concept art which is mostly just scribbled notes on a page.

One thing that did get done was adding the path arrow that gets drawn while moving a unit:

Its a small but important quality of life addition. I had forgotten it wasn’t there yet.

Colored the running animation and made a rough draft of the basic attack animation.

I started programming the Battle scene Camera and parallax effect, didn’t have time for this post so I hacked together a really ugly looking background but it demonstrates the parallax effect. Edit: I removed the image that was here before just in case, because I was using a background image I didn’t make myself.

Thanks for reading.

This week was polishing up the stat screen a bit with some custom icons. Still a bit unhappy with it but its cleaner than just text.

Some sketches for the running and attack animation:

Didn’t manage to finish the attack animation but that’ll probably be tomorrow. The next week will most likely be cleanup and coloring of the Regan animations, and then starting on some enemy animations. After having 2 working sets of attack animations, the programming for the actual Battle scenes will be done. After that point there are only 4 major programming pieces left to do which is personall exciting to think about; Towns and the Reknown system, The dueling system, Robust save states and Special objectives. Then its just thousands and thousands of hours and animation and drawing XD.

Thanks for reading.

Been going back and optimizing and redesigning old UI elements. Here’s a rough draft of the what the stat screen looks like. The layout right now is just a data dump and I’ll be organizing as well as creating better visuals to represent the data like status bars and item icons. Didn’t manage to finish that stuff in time, and hopefully through some iteration I find a clean layout that is space and information efficient. Also need to fix the placement of the tooltip that appears when you mouse hover over things on the stat screen.

I decided to include a radar graph of the growth rates of units to give a visual general idea to the player what that character will mostly like turn out like in the later levels. I want to eventually create a character screen that lays over the stat graphs of different units to create obvious comparisons to allow for better late game character planning. I could go really far with that predictive informational stuff, but it’s probably redundant. It would cater to a very small subset of people that play character RPGs with tons of planning.

Thanks for reading.

I spent most of this week just figuring out animation tools to find and create a process that I like and is reasonable. I’ve settled on sketching out the keyframes in photoshop, and then using OpenToonz to do the animating. It was pretty annoying figuring some nuances of the tool out, but I found a good balance of what I think looks good and is also time efficient. The end result of last weeks line animation is below.

This is the idle animation for one of the characters, but it will definitely be changed in the future. I find it pretty lazy and lifeless. The plan for this week is to get the run and basic attack animation done, so that I can then program the battle animation screens as well as the character stat screens.

Thanks for reading.

This week was mostly playing around with animation software, and a lot of trial and error with 2D animation. It isn’t much, but it’s a start, an idle character animation for the battle animations:

The next week will probably be some minor programming, some concept art, but mostly still fin-nicking around with animation techniques.

In last weeks post I talked about struggling to figure out how to do a non-laggy search algorithm for the enemy units. After a bit of grinding, the issue was fortunately resolved. Below is a wordy explanation for those who are actually interested; otherwise the update is that the enemy AI programming is mostly done, enemies can attack and kill player units during their turn, decision making as to which unit they should attack has been implemented, (closest < lowest hp < has some sort of tactical weakness)  What’s left is mostly a lot of polish on how the camera moves during enemy turns.

What was causing the frame lag was searching the entire grid in a single frame during each enemies turn. The solution was to break down the search into much smaller searches, and only do a full-grid search at the very beginning of the scene load, when the enemy unit instances are loaded. When the scene begins the full grid is searched to create an initial path so the enemy knows what general direction it needs to be heading. Every time that unit has its turn, it does a smaller grid search for any player units it should be attacking or moving towards, and if it finds available player units it will update it’s initial path.  If it finds nothing, it continues on its original path, towards the location that player units were. The next little bit of programming revolving around enemy units is how destructible bridges work. The only time that enemy units need to reinitialize their full-grid path search is when the possible paths on the map have changed, which could occur if a bridge has been destroyed.The gif below doesn’t demonstrate all behaviours, but just shows enemy units attacking player units.

Some character art that got done:

The next month the hope is to showcase some of the 2d animations during combat engagements. I decided to postpone the character stats screen (which in theory is very simple to do) because I had an idea to mesh it with some animations.

Thanks for reading.

This week has been battling with the enemy movement script. It’s the algorithm that makes enemy units decide what Player Unit they’re going to move towards. A simple A* path-finding algorithm looks at all the tiles on the map that is possible for the Enemy Unit to move to and then finds the closest Player Unit and starts moving in that direction.

There have been quite a few hiccups. The intended result occurs except there’s a major issue of the game pausing during the frame that the path-finding calculation happens. Placing the calculation in a coroutine and waiting until its done takes way too long so I’ll probably have to find another way of calculating how the Enemy units find the closest Player unit to attack. Other than this enemy script, some more character designs were sketched out which will be rendered out this week.

Thanks for reading.

This post was intended for Sunday but I ran into a few random bugs and it took an extra day than expected.

Here’s a look at how the basic dialogue works with scrolling through text and selecting choices via buttons:

What made the post a bit late was the fade effect, it turned out be very simple in the end, there are 2 images, one fades out at the same time the other fades in as each line is read so that the emotive face matches the line. I wanted to fit in the basic unit statistics page along with this post but I came up with a few visual ideas involving 2D animations which will have to make the stats screen wait. The next weekly dev post will probably just be some art, followed by destructible bridges.

Thanks for Reading!