A Plan to Overhaul Combat (...and new bugfix patch!)

Hey, it’s SnakeF8!

A lot of my time last month was tweaking features to make the demo a lot more polished, so now it’s time to push that out as 0.3.4-b. There’s still some QoL stuff I need to crank out that's not in this patch, but we’re getting there. In some places, Soldiers’ Descent looks better, and the most jankiest of bugs that exist have been stomped out. There’s still a dialogue bug I need to fix, but eventually I’ll have a “eureka” moment with that. Combat should look and feel a LOT SMOOTHER.

A COMBAT OVERHAUL IS IN THE WORKS

Even though the turn-based combat is almost exactly how I planned it in the design doc, there has been this looming concern over my head that its loop may be spammy after a while. I turned to SirDiesALot and the main playtester for suggestions, and they helped me come up with a brand new and potentially unique solution to make the fighting portion of the combat a lot more engaging.

This idea stemmed from how most turn-based RPGs have something in their fighting mechanics that set them apart from others. Pokemon, Persona/SMT have elemental weaknesses while something like Deltarune contains bullet-hell. Even unexpected systems like Yakuza: Like A Dragon combine its staple beat-em-ups with turns. I don’t want to reveal too much out of fear of someone taking the idea, but here’s a mockup sketch I made while on a camping trip:

It looks VATS-y, but there's more to it than locational damage. On other pages, there are additional notes, details, etc. that fully plot out how this new shoot system will work. I don’t know how long this will take, but expanding the system with this seems very VERY promising!

Patch Notes:

• Slightly changed boards texture
• LT Dex can now blink!
• Added a blur feature to certain menus
• Added a dialogue continue sprite for when a dialogue box is done
• Changed some of the select colors on some UI buttons to a brighter green
  • This change was made thanks to user feedback :)
• Added camera lerping in combat so that party members face the enemies they are attacking
  • This means party members look at the average point of all enemies on screen
  • This means on attack, a party member will also face the enemy they are shooting
• Optimized hitDuration method (Turned 12 lines of code into 2 lines)
• Moved muzzle flash particle system to its own script so that it can use animation events
• Rescaled HUD UI resolution to fix the scale of other UI elements
• Added lighting to combat arena
• Removed scene lighting settings in the debug scene (It did nothing)
• Adjusted LT Dex’s camera angle in combat
• Bugfix: Fixed dialogue persisting even when object is destroyed
• Bugfix: Fixed dungeon coordinate data when debug scene enemy is either fled or defeated
• Bugfix: Fixed animations waiting for the next animation during combat
• Bugfix: Fixed inventory bug where info is not properly displayed when using the gamepad
• Bugfix: Fixed multiple muzzle flashes and synced them up the shooting animations