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[Chis]

Updates for today:
- Characters can now perform basic attacks. No skills yet but the system is almost there.
- Mini health bars are shown for characters when you move your cursor over them.
- I was able to unblurrify the sprites by using a power of two texture. Who would've guessed  

on the other hand, soul stranding is giving me a headache.

Ignore the patch to the left and random trailing line at the bottom, that's just bad math on my part. The point is that the boundary for these tiles isn't very intuitive, and I don't want to player to guess if a tile's going to be in range or not.
I see two solutions to this:

- force a mathematically perfect formation.
You would be restricted to one of the six hexagonal directions as you move to the next character. Actually, this doesn't seem so bad now that I think about it. You could form triangles and hexagons and other nonconvex shapes of arbitrary dimensions. Also requires a bit more strategy since you need to think carefully about positioning of characters.

- or do away with the grid entirely.
It's painful thinking about this option, mostly because all the coding I've done has revolved around the grid. But I feel like eliminating it would also solve a lot of problems.
The one glaring issue is that without a grid, I'm not sure how to plot the range of a character's movement, let alone enemy pathfinding. Has anyone ever tried something like this?


Nevermind, I opted for the grid. It would have been way too complicated otherwise.

Well, it's working now! I feel pre-tty good The strange bending issues with the lines shall be fixed later.

->

Works for non-convex polygons too!



Oh and here's a cool bug that might turn into a feature:

If you draw the formation clockwise the boundary is inclusive but if you draw it counterclockwise it's exclusive. I could see this being useful for an attack type strand vs a heal/boost type strand.

Sorry for image spam, I just thought it was cool 

Quarry: Thanks! I can fit a lot of tiles onscreen with the current sprite size so everything's good.

happymonster: That's certainly something I'll consider. I'll take another stab at them later.

Superb Joe: Soo ... good or bad? :O

[HernanZh]

I love the graphics
Can't really comment on the gameplay ideas though, since I never play tactical/strategy RPGs.

[Connor]

love the sounds of this/gameplay/visuals, so i basically love everything you have done atm. good work and good luck fellow dev!

[Chis]

HernanZh: Thanks! You should, you're missing out

Connor: That's great to know, thanks so much!


Still not as loose as I would've liked, but I think it's a step in the right direction.

[happymonster]

Looks better to me.. have you tried adding the more loose wispy lines around her?

[green]

That little sprite looks great except for the glassy eyes.

[Chis]

happymonster: I'm trying to now, but it's really difficult to do without cluttering up the sprite. For the idle animation I'll definitely get a few lines streaming off of her, it'll look awesome  

green: Better? It's kinda hard to see.

Not too much to say today, but I've implemented throwing of items - to other characters, and to the ground. Some items are fragile, meaning that if you throw them onto the ground, they break. (don't throw them on the ground!) Throwing items at monsters hurts them, unless they are humanoid monsters, in which case they just catch them.
Oh, but perhaps holding something makes you more vulnerable to damage, therefore making this an interesting battle tactic?!
HMMMMMMMM

Also came up with a tutorial level. My immediate goal for now is to implement everything needed to get the tutorial up and running. That includes:

- six initial characters (will reuse sprites to save time)
- modelling the level
- camera panning
- ability to undo an entire turn
- a floor switch system
- enemies
- at least one skill for 3 characters
- drawing strands
- dialogue
- GUI

whooo boy  

[happymonster]

Looks better to me, very nice sprite work!

[Chis]

happymonster: Thanks!

I ended up rewriting half of my code again, but this time I have a much more solid system working!

>watch my derpy preview<

Updates I've made:

- given everyone really simple drop shadows.
- totally generalized character actions. Now all actions basically just have an execute function, which makes em really easy to deal with.
- the undo turn function! You can go back/forward in your turn history, but unfortunately you lose the progress on your current turn. Will be disabled if monsters are on the map.
- the character action menu now displays options depending on your character's state, instead of vomiting out all possible options. Eg. you can't throw an item if you're not holding anything.
- the new turn function. I kind of needed it for the undo turn.
- tweening actions! I have yet to make any animations, but characters now move to their destination/throw objects at the appropriate speed instead of just appearing there.
- camera now pans around. It could still use a little work.
- not showing highlighted tiles for now, because it slows down the game x1000. I need to figure out a better way to do this.

I've had a bad history of giving up on past projects, but I feel really really good about this one 8D

[McMutton]

The art style is incredulously awesome. That is all.

[Seiseki]

Those sprites look incredible! Love the colors! :D

[Chis]

So I finally made an enemy AI. It's really dumb and only attacks the closest character in its current movement range, if there are any. Which is okay though, because every enemy will have a different behavior. That's the other thing - except in some instances, enemies will generally make independent decisions instead of one invisible AI controlling everyone.

In other news, I seem to have lost my arting abilities   After a frustrating day of literally not being able to pixel anything, I managed to make health and mana pots lol



Thanks so much, McMutton, Seiseki, glad to know you're enjoying the art! I'll try to keep chugging out more  

[gears]

Looks good! Any thoughts on visualizing available moves (for both the player and opponent units)? In regard to allowing only 'perfect' formations, I wonder if you could highlight all available positions, but the positions in the formation would be brighter or otherwise distinguishable.

I like the idea of a formation based game. I've got a hexgrid game in the works with a focus on individual movement and positioning, but I've kept thinking about collaborative attacks.

Any ideas on terrain, obstacles, line of sight, or anything else related to the map itself?

[Chis]

Annd the deuteragonist. Will redo later, too frustrated with it now   at least now I have a design I don't want to throw out the window. I realized his colors were too similar to everyone else's so now I get to draw him again! fffff

gears: Incidentally I do have a way to show the reachable tiles (like a modified Bellman Ford), but I'm temporarily taking it out because the actual highlighting of the tiles was slowing down the game. I need to find a better way than creating a bajillion projector objects  
That's a good idea - you mean like brightening the positions along the six hexagonal directions? In that case maybe I can get away with not highlighting the rest of the map at all.
It's nice to find a fellow person using hexgrids! Your devlog looks awesome and although I am no authority on the subject, I'd definitely encourage experimenting. I'd be interested in seeing what you come up with   What sort of collaborative attacks are you thinking about?
Well, I haven't though about too much, but my idea was that that soul strands, being made of spiritual material, can pass through obstacles and terrain and the like. But all characters in a formation have to be at the same height, otherwise there's all sorts of weirdness with checking if lines actually intersect or not. It'd be interesting to have some material that blocks stranding though, I'll have to look into that.

[Peregrinus]

Your art is really astonishing. And I'm a big fan of tactics rpg! I can't wait to see the next update of this!