I had to be away from game dev again for a while for medical reasons. I am still recovering and I can’t sit at my normal workstation, but I got back into it this weekend and did a bit of itemization and enemy design work. Hopefully I will get to my new normal soon and can get back to work on the game.
In terms of content, there is only one dungeon level left to design and build, including the final boss, plus some bits left to fill in on a few other levels. Once that’s done, I will be in the finishing stage. Sound and music are the biggest things left unfinished, and are also what I have the most trouble with.
I also really need to start thinking about how to actually release this thing. Putting it on Itch is easy, but I’ve never tried to release on Steam before.
I got sidetracked today into experimenting with new status icons. The old ones are on top and the potential new ones are on the bottom. I have gotten feedback, and I tended to agree, that there were too many different status icons and not enough consistency. I wanted to reduce the number of different icons (the ones shown here are not even all of them; I will probably consolidate some similar ones) and use more consistent visual language, so that the player doesn’t have to remember or look up as much.
Effects were already essentially categorized into stat buffs and debuffs, damage or healing, modal control effects, and other special or bundled effects (mostly used by players). I color-coded these more or less by category and by friendly or hostile status, and simplified buffs and debuffs so that effects that change the same stat use the same basic icon. I also darkened the borders to reduce the visual clutter.
I think these look pretty good in isolation here on the help screen, but testing it out in combat raised some additional questions about visual clarity, which I am thinking about how to address and might post about later. In the mean time, feedback on what I have so far is welcome.
oh this is totally on a very smart path. the challenge here is definitely being a bit more distinctive with the yellow icons, for sure.
I’m not sure if this is really a fix or just a bonus thought, but, what about finding more than one spot in the UI to include the icons, where relevant? For example if I have Seal applied to a character, yes you can grey out the actions in the menu, but maybe throw the Seal icon inline with the action names to let players know what exactly is the source of that change. If a SPD buff is affecting the scaling on an ability I could use, throw that inline too so I know it’ll be weaker or stronger than normal.
Or even small adjustments like having specific positioning around the portraits, for example keeping Guts/Defending icons close by the health bar specifically to indicate their relationship with survivability.
Interesting ideas, it does give me some thoughts on how I can communicate the impact of certain effects. The biggest difficulty working at this low resolution is fitting in all of the information that I want to convey and making it readable.
Here is a quick look at the new status readout panel for combat that I am working on right now. I have actually wanted to add this for a pretty long time, but now seemed like a good time, since it is immediately relevant to my concurrent work with status icons. This panel lets you quickly scan through all combatants to see exactly what status effects they currently have, as well as the exact HP/MP for players (I may add a skill at some point to enable seeing this for monsters). Selection uses the standard targeting menu and updates immediately on highlighting a target. I’m not sure if this works exactly how I want it yet, but it’s a big step for better communication to the player.
Also visible on the player portraits is a different way of displaying status duration. When I was testing out the new color-coordinated icons, I felt that the loss of color distinction made them a bit harder to identify when partially obscured by a number. This might have always been a problem that I just didn’t see, since I am very familiar with all of the icons by shape and color, but players won’t be. Anyway, I added an option to display the duration (up to 3 rounds) in little white pips instead of a digit, which I think improves readability at a glance. More than 3 pips starts to get too small to see, but more than 3 rounds is also a pretty long time, so the exact number is not as important (and is still visible on the new status panel, if you need it). You can select pips, digits, or no display, and players and enemies can be configured separately, as they are in this GIF.
As a side note, I really like Godot’s GUI tools. Themes make it easy to ensure that each menu has a consistent look and feel, and containers do most of the sizing and positioning work for me. Adding the new “Status” button to the combat menu was as simple as copy and pasting an existing button and editing the copy, no need to recalculate, reposition, and resize everything by hand, like I had to do in Unity. The new panel just holds a flow container with a bunch of child elements that arrange themselves automatically. The panel even dynamically expands itself when needed (I have to tell it when to shrink again, but it’s a single method call, no calculations needed).
GUI work will never be my favorite thing, but I find it a lot less painful in Godot than in Unity. It has exceeded my expectations by supporting the detailed interface I needed for this game while also making it fast and easy to build and iterate, once I learned how to use it.
Lots of miscellaneous work over the past week or so.
My final dungeon level is implemented, except for the final boss, but needs some visual polishing. I tried something slightly different this time, so I’m not sure yet if it worked out, both visually and in terms of gameplay. I have not playtested the final dungeon yet at all other than just making sure the scripting works, so it’s still a rough draft. It might be too mean, or not mean enough. It’s comprised of four levels and is (rightly so) the most complex of all the dungeons, so it was a lot of work to build it all. It’s also the only dungeon to be built from scratch in Godot, rather than being converted from Unity.
Aside from that, I have been cleaning up some rough parts of the game rules that have needed attention for a while. I am not making major rules changes at this point, but I do want to refine a few things that aren’t quite where I want them. It’s not the perfect RPG system, but I think it works well enough. There will be plenty of opportunity to revise it in the next game. The rules for Minerva Labyrinth are already dramatically more advanced than the rules for MM0.
I also added a few small features. One is a unique equipment effect that has been on my to-do list for a while. Another is an optional confirmation box for fleeing combat, instead of immediately attempting to flee after clicking the flee button. I accidentally click that way too often and wanted to stop those mistakes, but I also added the option to turn it off, for people who are not as careless as me.
Speaking of fleeing, you actually get a small cumulative bonus to your chance to flee for every failed attempt, but this wasn’t apparent to the user. I updated the Flee command so that it reads “Flee (+X)” after a failed attempt to show your current bonus.
Finally, I added one more improvement to the combat GUI, which twky gave me the idea for. If a character’s turn is skipped because of a status effect like stun or fear, there is now a popup that says “skip” along with the effect icon. Previously the timeline just skipped over them completely, unless they had other effect resolutions that produced popups. I am thinking this will help communicate that someone is currently disabled and why, though I might add an option to turn it back off, as well.
I made a trailer! Not sure how to embed it, so here’s a link. I have never made a trailer before, so it was a learning experience. I also have my Steam capsule assets ready to go, though I probably should have registered a Steamworks account a long time ago, since I guess there’s a lead time in getting it set up. It was just never something I thought much about or prioritized.
This week I filled out and submitted my Steam page for approval (there’s a lot to fill out) and also spent a lot of time on making the game a bit more presentable. The Steam Next Fest is in June (not the next Next Fest, the next Next Fest after the next one) and I would like to have a demo ready at least by then. Six One Indie is also doing their showcase next month and I think I will try submitting to it, though I don’t expect to get in.
I could technically set up a demo build right now, but I’m not quite ready to show it yet because it still has some rough spots. Some of the things I have been working on are updating some early-game art and music that I wasn’t happy with, adding another hairstyle and hair color or two, and creating an on-screen keyboard for name entry with a controller (this was the only part of the game that wasn’t controller-accessible). Today I have been redoing most of my sound effects. The sounds currently in the game are from Tower of Metal, which I made very quickly during the jam period and without taking much time to figure out how BFXR works. My results today are noticeably better, I think, but I still have some work to do.
One new thing on my to-do list is to add controller glyphs. This is required to list full controller support on Steam. I don’t know why I need to show a picture of the A button when I can just print [A], but I should probably do it if I can.
Meanwhile, I did get controller glyphs working. It actually wasn’t too much trouble, so I went ahead and made all three major glyph sets, with the option to choose the one you want. I also cleaned up some rough spots in the rebinding menu while I was at it. I think I can safely claim “full controller support” now on Steam.
Really appreciate the option to manually choose the preferred glyphs. I almost exclusively use steam input (for the screenshot button to work). And so in any game with auto-detect only i always get shown xbox glyphs no matter the controller. Somehow all big games fail to implement this