This week was just a bunch of animation roughs, most of them I ended up having to redesign, which is expected, but I managed to end up learning the basic idea behind horse-riding frames, although what is shown below isn’t representative of what will turn into a finished animation, (no character and the horse itself isn’t dressed) the motion and proportions I’m looking for is there, which makes pipelining all the horseback animations pretty straight forward. The characters are pretty easy because the motion doesn’t create complicated movements for any hanging pieces off the character, just the hair/cloth bob up and down. Also did some post-line work for some animations such as the lance attack below. I always learn a new time-saving trick whenever I do the line work which is always nice. Thanks for reading.

The Battle UI has been taking a long and for good reason. I’m glad I didn’t hash out a quick design, because in retrospect there’s a lot of unique gameplay features that have I have to accommodate for like the “willpower” system, the ability to manipulate character hit rates using a limited resource called “willpower”. Over the course of about 2 weeks this UI has gone through about 5 revisions, each revealing to me some element of gameplay I hadn’t considered before. I’ve gone back to look at what older FE games have done with the UI for triangle attack, and it would seem there’s never been a straightforward description of UI of the maneuver and for good reason, it’s a fairly complex thing to tackle, and I’m not surprised Pair up in FE games doesn’t seem to be staying. Still continuing to slide in animation drafts with whatever time I can, but the UI and gameplay designs, are in dire need of refinement and completion, so that I can focus on almost purely creating assets starting September. Thanks for reading.

Nothing visually got finished this week to show mostly, just a massive amount of sketches and more planning. The “planning” is making a draft schedule that is based off the gameplay specs drafts, so that I know what the short term goals are to make the programming of the gameplay mesh with all the assets that I need to make and the order I should do them. Here’s a dump of some of the sketches though.

Still organizing and planning the big year end schedule. Alot of extrapolating is at hand, I was able to knock some of that off by learning how to make some 2d effects. Below is a fire explosion that’s a part of a future magic-type attack. I’m working on a number of elemental effects for magic but they’re still cooking in the oven. The heavy sword knight attack, has been put on hold like a million other things, I think its better to sit on my designs a bit before post-animating them in case I change my mind and have to redo everything, which usually tends to be the case.

Thanks for reading.

Still organizing and planning the big year end schedule. Alot of extrapolating is at hand, I was able to knock some of that off by learning how to make some 2d effects. Below is a fire explosion that’s a part of a future magic-type attack. I’m working on a number of elemental effects for magic but they’re still cooking in the oven. The heavy sword knight attack, has been put on hold like a million other things, I think its better to sit on my designs a bit before post-animating them in case I change my mind and have to redo everything, which usually tends to be the case.

Thanks for reading.

Finally designated a block of time to spend alot more time on working on the game, so this week has been alot of planning with some animating mixed in. Goal currently is to get something out by the end of this year that is playable and visually representative of what I first envisioned for the game, which was hand-drawn 2D animation.
The speed of the animating workflow definitely still isn’t up to what I want it to be, but alot of the weapon specific animations have been drafted out which should make things alot easier, instead of having to reinvent the wheel everytime I’m trying to figure out how to get a character to swing something. Fingers crossed the scheduling works out this time, or at least way better than every other time I’ve tried to set time-mapped goals. Thanks for reading.

Worked mostly on some animation roughs, for the basic lance attack and great sword attacks.

Still have been stuck on the final look of the UI for the battle stats screen. It still feels like something is missing for that screen to be as informative as it needs to be with regards to informing the player whether or not an attack is advantageous to carry out. =/

Thanks for reading.

This week I started working on the idle animation of a greatsword enemy type, and continued to sketch out some character designs. Last weeks notes on the Battle screen UI design went through a lot of iterations and I’m getting a bit closer to nailing down some of the details. So far most of the considerations with regards to UI have been with melee range situations, due to the complexity of having multiple characters being able to attack an enemy at once. I’ve had to go back and make some balance adjustments for ranged considerations, creates another stall in getting the UI right. In the meantime, until I figure it out, it’ll just be more drawing.

Thanks for reading.

No update this week, still tinkering with a lot of non visual things. Almost done with a version of the BattleSetup UI that I’m happy with. It’s the screen that provide information for an attack, like HIT and CRIT%. I’ve always been unsatisfied with the screens that exist, particularly the ones that come in a table/excel sheet type format. Last week I had nailed down somewhat of a full first pass of the game mechanics, and it’s been alot of iterative design with the layout of the UI as a result. Things got very complicated and screen real estate got taken up because multiple units (up to 5) can participate, and all the scenarios have to be displayed to have an obvious outcome.

Given the obvious data that needs to be displayed, to avoid using the usual table format I’m using a double health bar system as seen below:

There’s alot more animation and visual tweaking as well as other parts of the UI related to Surround attack, weapon masteries and dueling but all still in flux. Thanks for reading.

No new visual stuff this week, because a lot game mechanic/rules stuff was hammered out. I finally came up with a draft that has many of the obvious holes plugged up, and by that I mean how Player turns work, damage scaling, and nuances with the Unit classes I’ve decided to go with. There have been about 15 iterations of the core game mechanics that I’ve sanity checked over and over, I 259ded to do th200to avoid having to reprogra200verything. As of this draft there will not be much deviation, until playtesting.

So far, the unit interaction system has somewhat of a dummy placeholder. I was using a modified version of the pair up system seen in FE: fates, but I finally put together a new system of game mechanic tactics that moves away from weapons being the primary form of tactics in FE200mes. The reasoning behind doing that because I simply didn’t enjoy the weapon swapping (weapon triangle) and hard-countering through unit type stuff(armored, flying) that is sort of forced knowledge. Whether or not that will lead to actual engaging experience, will become more clear in the next few months. Now that these decisions have been made, a lot UI stuff has to be redone, like the pre-battle info screen above, all the screens were pretty hacked together before, simply because I was loose with the programming until the game mechanics were fleshed out. This next week will probably just be a lot of UI design and programming. Thanks for reading.