And then battles can be finished on TNR project.

Well'p, look's like I wont be able to do a progress report every 2 weeks, so better I say that I'll do the update reports at around 2 weeks, but that may change if something cool happens on the way.

And yes, the changes are related to battle system, but first, I'm going to talk about the part of the battle system that involves the game dialogues.

So, I've partially adapted the dialogues system of the game to the new battle system, so the game not only calls battle from npcs when asked for, but also will wait until the battle ends before continuing the script, it also allows the game to tell who has won the battle, but currently, the system only checks if either the caller of the script(the npc) or the one the script is being executed to (the player) has monsters capable of fighting in the party before beggining the fight, later I'll have to change that, because partially of what is to come.

I've also tried to place a secondary npc to join the battle I start, and it worked, the npc and my character, both had a Level 1 Kangaroo Mob, we were able to take down together a Level 2 Kangaroo Mob, that's some teamwork, right? And the best part, is that I've added a temporary script to make so the battle actually can end, so the player doesn't get stuck in battle, neither the monsters.

Beside those news are quite cool, I also noticed that I'll need to do some extra work, I'll have to make so the Healer Npc I've added for testing check if I have npcs following me, so the healing also affect them, but for that, I'll need to make them be recognized somewhat as being members of the same team, which means a Party system will have to be added in the future. Another thing I've noticed, is that the health, special and stamina regeneration are not working, I believe that may have been broken while I were adapting the scripts, I just will need to do It's linking again.

Now onto the battle system, beside being able to finish battles, I've also added a script to give the wining team the exp and loot rewards upon the battle end, and also while debugging that, I've been able to fix a bug that were causing the game to add to the monsters loot table non existing items, which I found out that was caused because of the map bound loot table, which adds map specific loots to the monsters that spawns on the map.

Even though those are really great changes, there are also a sum of bugs that are still on the game, most specifically on the battle system, one of them makes so the enemy monster ocasionally selects a null monster as target, I still need to investigate that, and there are several other bugs I'll have to fix aswell, but one thing that is not a bug, but I'll have to check anyway, is how I'll make the monsters drop bits (game currency), what tax they give and how much more related to level, or that or just leave the loot give you the bits currency by selling to a npc.

Now for the changes ideas, soon enough I'll try to implement something I've planned for quite some time, add a system where the monster gets increased loot rates on items based on the level, so let's say, If a monster has 51% chance of dropping a certain item at level 1, It will have 100% chance of dropping something at level 50, but there is a downside, If the monster is actually level 51, the loot rate will drop to 1%, If is level 55, goes to 5% and etc, that makes so rarer loots are more frequent to appear depending on the higher the level of the monster is, but also lowers the drop rate of common loot. I believe I'll have to test those percentage values when making the system to see if it's not too insane for balance, so the idea might change in the end, at least you wont need to pass day and night to grind for an item whose drop rate is really low.

Another idea, is that I thought about adding some minor physics system to the game, so when a monster gets knocked back or gets tossed in the air, It will reach the floor and then return to it's formation place, this is quite hardcore, so I'll have to work sometime in the future.

And to finish, I'm having real troubles to do the player sprites, most likelly because I get not much idea of how to do it, you may notice by the photos posted latelly, that comparing the monster sprites and the player sprites, the monster sprites are quite of better done, while the player sprites are quite poor, I guess I'll have to look at some character sprites on the web to have ideas on how to make the character sprites on the game, and then rework the outfits, beside I'll have to rework aswell all tiles in the game, and possibly make the game have a 2x zoom on the image.

Also I still have to make more monster sprites on the game, but I didn't got any good time to work on them latelly, but I guess I'll eventually have a good moment for me and the spriting to work.

Well, that's all for today's news, and I'll finish this news by leaving a photo of my character and a npc facing a wild monster, good luck trying to guess which of the monsters is the one I'm controlling. And yes, that's also something else I'll have to do in the game, beside also making the battle be less confusing.

Edit:. I've also added a scaling to the battle system based on the window size, the only cheat is that on the world map you can see more than other players on lower resolutions can, but I'll fix that in the future.

And also added the arrows telling the teams, so now you have an idea of what monster I'm currently controlling in the game. Right click the image and click View Image to see it in full screen, if you want to have a better dimension of the changes.
Ps:. Their coloring is bad, and the eye colors is a mistake right now, I'm going to remove in the future.

Wall of text and changes on TNR

Heh, I took less long to post those news, eh? Beside I remember I have promissed that would showcase the Dog Head monster sprites and tell more about it, but not going to do that right now.

Well, I guess you guys are tired of so much battle news, but I'm nearly finishing the core of it, the rest I can see while working on something else. One of the things I wanna show off today is the spell casting, beside based on the last news I launched, the game haven't got any hud news either, so better I tell you what changed since the last screenshots spoiled, but for that, better I show you the image of the game current progress in battle so I can talk better about it.

 Beside It look's quite ugly, the image above depicts both teams, not only you know which team the monster belongs to by their name colors, but there is also a ring under the monster that carries the monster team color, being that the monster names above their head wont stay on the final game, since I were using it to debug the battle status, there is also the old hud area on the top left that shows the time until the next turn in a yellow bar (not visible in the image), aswell as a few monster infos, like name and health. The bar also gained an extra functionality, when a monster is casting or preparing a skill, It will load a green bar, which when filled and is possible for the monster to attack, the monster will make use of it's ability. Let's say for example...

The Kangaroo Monster uses the Punch skill, It will be on the preparing to attack animation while the Green bar loads over the Yellow bar, when the bar is loaded and the action scheduled is for the monster, the monster will then use the ability It has been preparing, of course that also happens for the spell casting.

Talking about spell casting, the spell casting skills are also in, aswell as spell casting animation, you can see that the Dog Monster and the Cait Sith are casting a magic spell, aswell as have a circle with some moons on their feet (had no better idea for cast circle), they got animation for casting, which they are seen casting it, even looking like they are saying something, and when the spell is ready, it is casted, the only downside of casting right now, is that the spell damage is low compared to the melee damage, but that depends on the monster, since the INT status is quite low for some of them, that lead me into thinking that I should kind of shrink the status of the monsters, to make so they have less disadvantage when casting spells, even more due to the idea I had to it.

Spells are supposed to be powerful, but shouldn't be spammable, instead of what happens to the skills, they wont use Stamina to attack, but instead will use SP, the SP has solid numbers compared to the Stamina (which is a percentage), beside they increase with the level and status, the number is still limited, but that will allow you to cast x number of a spell before running out of mana, right? Then I thought about something, what if the mana cost of the spell rises by 25% each time you use spells consecutivelly? Spells will still be dangerous and skill usage wont be devalued, but only testing to find out how it will work, possibly that might be another thing I should look for in the future.

Returning to the news, I've also added menus to the battle, so one no longer need to watch the character auto attack because there were no way of selecting action, as you can see on the image bellow, the menu is like the one from the old version of the game.

That also brings a difference though, the way the hud script works changed, aswell a few things, like being able to see an arrow above the head of the one currently taking an action, aswell as an arrow above the head of the one being targetted (beside you'll have a hard time finding it because of the monster names...).

Also, the following photo isn't actually in the game right now, because due to an accident with ctrl+z overflow, I ended up breaking the battle script and losing 3 hours of work, but no worry, I reimplemented most of the hud work back, beside I didn't liked the result of the hud, I have added a victory hud before the grief, It looked like this:

On the original planning, there would be a frame for the tamer information aswell, but what kind of tamer information would need that one huge box?

Anyway, so many ideas, so much to work on, so much to implement, but whatever, the results are surprising, I even added a battle zooming system, which may be useful in the future.

Now on the monster side, I've got to say that making up monsters isn't that easy, I've been playing some games latelly to give me some light on how to make unique, cool and fearsome monsters, and part of it lead me into thinking about adding monster outfits feature to the game, the outfits could be used for a monster variant, or to add an extra customization to it, so each monster look less like one another, or help in the matter of regional monsters, that'll add a bit more of work, but is something I may look for in the future.

Another ideas related to monsters, was of making portraits, beside I believe that will be very painful for me, at least that will make their face images more cool looking. And the last idea related to monster, is adding quotes, when they do or suffer an action, the monsters say something during the combat, or maybe even out of combat aswell, that idea look cool, I got to see how it will look when I add it.

Well, that's all for today's news, sorry for not bringing here the informations about the Dog Monster, but maybe in a future update I'll talk about it, beside I have aswell some status rebalancing to do, and aswell finish the core parts of the battle system, since skills like Defend and Wait aren't implemented, can't make the battle tactical if the players and npcs can keep spamming their strong attacks, anyway, until the next news.

Diving in bugs and glitches on TNR project.

Well, not sure how to begin this news, there wont be any spoiler photo right now, because I prefer to show it at works when It's actually somewhat working.

I've been working on the skill system of the game, trying to implement skill casting, aswell as trying to implement animations to the project, right now, both are heavily bugged, for some reason the monsters decides to say "s**** spell casting" and launches the skill right away, on other side, the skill animation positioning is a bit glitchy, because of the way the positioning works when drawing on the map, and to finish the sum, the animations right now have a frame of delay before playing it entirelly, because If I change the way It plays the animation, bugs will happen, even more if the drawing frames per second is higher than the updating frames per second.

Anyway, the Kangaroo Monster and the Cait Sith has gained already their Casting and Launching animations, the Dog head monster will recieve it in the future.

On other news, I'm thinking about beggining to work on a new monster to the project, but I'm still trying to get ideas about it, maybe I should check out the old text only monsters the project used to have for ideas. I know I could try to make the monster sprites using as base the images the old spriter has made for the project, but I don't think that it's really ethical to do something like that without his permission, even more since he hardworked to make the sprites, I know that.

I also am thinking about animations I could do for the existing monsters, so the number of different attacks exists somewhat, I've made an animation of a double punch for the Kangaroo Monster, some animations I plan on doing are a Upper Cut and a Tail Smash attack, maybe even a Body Slam attack animation aswell, even more since the Body Slam attack surelly would need only 1 frame.

Anyway, this was all for today's news. Let's hope the bugs will be squished on the next news, hehe.

Until next time.