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.