DEVLOG: Combat Update: Encounter and Field Design
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to design dungeons, fields, and other areas, as well as how to lay out combat encounters in those areas.
The original combat system was very, very limited (and buggy!) and I’m still not an expert in design and balancing good, interesting combat as a result of that.
I decided to start with a semi-fresh slate, in this case, I built a small area that resets your character’s stats and skills upon entry, and restores them upon leaving, so that I could test across any save file.
To simulate the game’s basic difficulty curve, I’m adding in a leveling system separate from the regular game, a shop at the end of each level.
The rewards from each level give a gradual growth in stats and skills that makes a rough estimation of the player’s growth between semesters, at a faster pace that allows me to test things much more rapidly without having 14 save files going all at once.
So with this little area set up, I began to work on two main goals.
The first is creating hinderances, traps, and puzzles. The first I came upon was a replacement for the darkness system originally implemented in the underground waterway.
Brighten, once I get it implemented, will increase your view radius as you walk around, making it pretty useful!
The second goal with this was to create a few more enemy types besides the standard slimes for the start of the game. Above are the shadow crawlers, designed to blend in with the darkness-infested levels and attack you from the shadows.
They don't do much right now (because I haven't finished them, even their walk animations are glitchy!) but they should be an interesting challenge later!
I have an interesting idea for uses for those tendrils later as well!
Aside from the darkness, I created 2 basic traps, one with 2 variants.
The first trap is a corrupt statue, which strikes you with sonic damage to your MP and slows you as well if you are in-line with it.
I’ll also probably give them a few longer-last bad status effects such as weakness to give the player a proper reason to avoid them probably.
The second is a poison swam, here a pile of red bubbles. It slows you upon touching it until you’re out, and also deals damage to your hp to boot. There’s a second variant, a blue swamp, as well, which only slows you down.
Also shown, the first of many new items that will be implemented. It's a ring that reduces the stat penalties you will have for being pregnant! (probably movement speed mostly)
I’ve also begun learning to properly implement UI gauges! It’s hard to see but the slimes now build a pleasure gauge below! (It's the empty black bar, because Anya's the one getting pleasured so nothing's happening to Olivia's bar)
This just tracks the same pleasure build-up that was shown in the last update, with the new resistance mechanics, but now it's got a visual indicator besides the status effects!
Finally, I’ve begun playing with party members and combat. It’s very basic at the moment, but I got slimes to properly detect who is being hit with their pleasure and impregnation-building attacks!
Anya getting frisky with a slime... and then exploading for some reason
Still no proper solo scene for Anya against the slimes yet, or any way to really help her out besides just killing the slime that’s attacking her, and she doesn’t do much except randomly choose an enemy to punch, but it’s a start!
And unrelated to the combat part of the update but just kind of cool in general, I’ve done some more standard artwork for the game!
Here’s Olivia’s new cowgirl scene!
And here’s a fully-implemented impregnation animation that’s now set to play upon any impregnation event happening (except fertilizing tentacle pods, because that needs a bit more unique work)
Looking back at some of this artwork… I feel I could do a lot better. I might spend the extra time to replace a lot of the artwork and animations while I’m doing the combat update, since it’s going to take quite a while anyway.
The original goal was just to replace the waterway, field areas, 2nd floor dungeon, and the start of the dark tower and then call it a day, but I kind of want to go a bit more in-depth now and really dig into some of the systems like the COMM and messaging/prostitution call systems, expand the tutorial at the start to include a sort of “pre-game” combat and systems tutorial, and add a dungeon or two to the beginning of the game (perhaps a forest and mining/village one for gathering and crafting?)
But I don’t want to delay releasing something forever, so perhaps I’ll tear out a small piece of the testing area once it’s got a good baseline for the combat system and throw that into a little demo or something so I can have something for everyone to test out in a few months while I slowly work on everything else.
Either way, thanks for reading and please look forward to more updates in the future!
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