Right, once again I've played a little and have feedback:

The "combat effects" add a nice touch of variation and flavour to the combat, I feel, as well as--I presume--suggesting the damage-type involved.

The new Anchor Vine was useful in slowing enemies, but not as much as I'd like, I'll admit. That said, I don't think that I ended up attempting to back out of a dangerous situation, so I may simply have not tried it at its intended use.

Once I reached the levels in which enemy Living Vines appear, I had at least one instance in which I didn't know which of two was mine and which was an enemy. Looking at the update post above, I see that I could presumably have checked my map, but doing so didn't occur to me at the time. It might be helpful (and convenient) to have a more immediate means of telling them apart--perhaps a simple colour-tint? (Admittedly, this issue would likely be obviated if you ended up taking my suggestion of showing a health-bar over player-allies, as the bar would also serve to mark them out.)

It seems that the summoned Living Vine interprets the use of the "Photosynthesis" ability as an attack, as the pet seems to start attacking me when I use it. :/

Now that I'm perhaps more heavily relying on energy than I was with the brigand (especially since I generally want to keep a pet around), I more often want to refresh my energy bar. Potions of energy are rare, and so--when I have them at all--kept for the more urgent situations. However, resting seems to stop once the player's health or stamina (I'm not sure which) becomes full, meaning that it's often not an answer to regaining energy, even in an empty level. I have found that I can simply attempt to walk into a wall repeatedly in order to "waste" turns and regain energy, but it might be handy if resting continued until all bars were filled (or the player cancels it, of course).

(On a related side-note, I've found cleared levels to be good places to rest; I'm glad that one can ascend stairs as well as descend! ^_^)

I do find myself enjoying the game more, I believe; I'm mainly waiting for those additional floramancer abilities to flesh the class out a little and perhaps aid my survival into deeper levels! ^_^

Preview of new combat effects going in next patch. Ouch!

Ooh, I like those effects! ^_^

I hear you that the anchor vine is not 100% useful right now. But I don't want to make them pure random either. What if you are in a bad spot and you want to summon one in a specific place to escape? Or you want to set up for a fight? I'm not sure that should be taken away from the player.

Here's my thought, that I'll try in the next patch. Instead of summoning 1 at a time, you summon 2; one at the target point, and one right next to you. Or maybe it will summon 3 in a line, like a wall. Any monsters you fight that are near these will be SLOWED as the vines grasp at them. This will help deter the monsters who may also turn to try and destroy them before going for you.

This way it has more utility - an obstacle to control the battlefield vs. your enemies, AND a way to set up escapes.

Of course part of this is contingent on having more dynamic combat from the monster side of things, and the dungeon itself, so that's on the list to do also...

Hmm... Fair enough--that seems like a reasonable approach for the most part, I think. I do like the idea of that additional utility, I believe!

However, I'm inclined to suggest that the status effect to apply to all nearby enemies: having the means to slow or stop an enemy seems like a good way to set up combat. (Unless you intend to have another ability that's dedicated to such slowing or stopping, of course.)

(I do think that randomly-placed vines could work, as long as there was some logic ensuring a fairly broad placement of them. However, what you have seems likely to work too, and will likely be easier.)

Quick build to address some crash issues and also quality of life stuff. There will be more coming but I wanted to get this out first.

I have it downloaded, and intend to play it soon, I believe. ^_^

Oh, a thought that I don't believe that I mentioned previously: now that player-allies are available, it might be useful to be able to see their health. (I'm inclined to suggest a small health-bar connected to them) This might allow the player to better evaluate their status; a dying ally might be the player's cue to heal or buff that ally, or perhaps make a hasty escape while the enemy is still engaged, for a few examples.

Your current technique for creating the speech bubbles makes them look good.

Thank you! ^_^

The only thing I would change is to move them a bit farther and higher than the character's head if space allows.

Ah, that's interesting--I'll try to remember that, and thank you. ^_^

Also, depending if it fits, but maybe different characters could have different speech bubble style or color.

It's possible--but I honestly don't think that there are going to be enough speaking characters in any given scene to make it worthwhile. (Indeed, I have one cutscene in mind that might have more than two speaking characters in a single scene, but I believe that most will have two or one.)

(I'm also not sure that such colouration would quite fit the style that I'm going for.)

I love your cutscene idea. Having the 2D stop-motion will work well for you, I think. It's a great style and I wholeheartedly approve

Ah, thank you very much! I appreciate that! ^_^

Sure I'm always happy to hear any and all ideas. Go for it!

Great, and thank you. ^_^

I'll try to keep most of the below fairly vague as to flavour; it could work with a number of themes, I think. (In my head it's largely traditional magic: fire, lightning, etc.)

The basic concept is of a Job-Skill-only class: this class doesn't use weapons at all, and none drop for it. Instead, all attacks take the form of job-skills. Each drains energy; if no energy is available, they instead drain stamina; if no stamina is available, they drain health.

The skills would include both utility and damage abilities. The aim is to have combat in which each turn calls for thought, and perhaps forethought.

Possible abilities, largely drawn from traditional RPG spells:

• A simple "cone of damage"
• "Marching" spells: These move by one or more tile per turn.
  
  • A "marching cone": The player targets a tile neighbouring their character, and the effect then spreads outwards in a cone from that point.
  • A "spreading pool of damage": The player targets a single point as the origin of the effect. On each turn it spreads outwards, stopping at walls and extending to some maximum range.
  • A single-tile, seeking, "marching damage" spell: The player targets a single, nearby point from which the spell then starts. On each turn, it moves towards the nearest enemy, damaging anything in its current tile.
  • A "direct-damage" spell: This darts off along a specified line, perhaps moving multiple tiles per turn, damaging a single target on "impact"
• A wall raised to block off a region (perhaps specified by indicating start and end tiles for the wall)
  
  • This might allow the player to control the flow of battle and affect the movement of enemies
• Similarly, a wall raised that doesn't block passage, but that damages those that pass through--much like the floramancer's "bed of thorns".
  
  • Creatures with higher intelligence might think to go around it
• A "chain damage" spell: upon hitting the target, a lesser version hits another nearby, etc. The catch would be that the player is a valid target for these lesser blasts, if near enough.
• Perhaps a spell that moves enemies in some way--something that might work well with the cone and chain spells above, increasing the number of targets within reach.

Finally, this class might not acquire job-points via the killing of monsters (although experience would still be acquired this way). Instead, job-points would be gained by finding items specific to the class--a wizard might find grimoires, or crystals of power, or wells of knowledge, for example.

(This last might contrast with a class that does somewhat the opposite: job-points and experience are gained normally, but job-skills are only added to the list of skills available to learn by finding class-specific items.)

~

I've spent a little time playing as a floramancer, and have some feedback:

First of all, it's an interesting class, and I am indeed finding it rather more enjoyable than I did the brigand. It's still not quite my style, but I'm having more fun with it, I do think.

My read on it--which may colour my thoughts below--is that it's essentially a ranger/summoner, using the "pet" to hold off enemies while avoiding contact and striking at range.

(Part of my enjoyment of the class may come from a personal rule that I've established of not using any melee weapons, even in desperation, thus reducing the temptation to slip into the gameplay that I've previously mentioned finding unappealing. Indeed, I'm inclined to suggest simply not dropping melee weapons for this class (or restricting melee weapons to only include the lighter items--knives, etc.), and slightly increasing the rate at which ranged weapons drop.)

The "pet" is a very welcome addition--for one thing, it's lovely to have a third party to handle the boring "hit things until they die" gameplay. I've noticed that multiple summons are disallowed; is the pet intended to improve as the player levels, thus making it capable of taking on stronger foes?

My main critique right now is that I feel that the class could use more job-skills--it feels a little anaemic to me as it is. A few ideas, if I may:
 - Clinging vines, much like the bed of thorns, that hold enemies in place.
 - A "Ring a' rosie" spell that surrounds the player in thorny rose-bushes. These prevent movement either in or out, but not ranged attacks--although the player might still be able to use "vine swing" to pass through.
 - Buffs for the pet--poisonous thorns, extra health, etc.
 - Transformation of the pet into a static "turret" with increased range.
 - Perhaps an ability that commands the pet to go to a point and attack the nearest enemy (flavoured as a small plant that releases a chemical signal, perhaps).

I'm not entirely convinced of the utility of the "Conjure Anchor Vine" spell. Since there are no environmental hazards or obstacles (that I've thus far seen), the main use that I see for it is to escape dire situations. However, simply moving away from an enemy doesn't make it go away, so this just buys a few turns. If the pet is present (or I can summon it), I can simply vine swing to that, giving me an "anchor" that also holds off enemies. If I don't have sufficient energy to call the pet, I might as well stand and fight, I feel. On top of this, casting the spell takes up a turn, potentially giving nearby enemies the opportunity for a free attack.

I'm inclined to suggest dropping the "anchor vine" spell and simply scattering anchor vines (and other such plants) about the dungeon. Not only does this provide single-turn vine-swings, but it might provide an opportunity for a little extra class variation: while the floramancer swings to these vines, the brigand might cut them down to create camouflage that provides a single-use sneak-attack, while some other class might cut them down to gain a random potion, and yet another might cut them down to drink sap and regain stamina and energy.

(Indeed, I'm somewhat of a fan of objects that are present for all classes, but work differently for each.)

Finally, I found a bug, I fear: I started the game, opened the "help" screen, then closed it. After this, the UI buttons seemed to no longer respond--they were visible, but didn't seem to accept clicks. I believe that I was playing in windowed mode, with a resolution of 960x720,

More work on my cutscene system--specifically, on speech-bubbles:

Greetings and salutations!

For this week's screenshot/gif, a continuation of last week's little cutscene, showing the speech-bubbles implemented this week:

The past week was a bit of a slow one, I feel. Nevertheless, as shown above, I did manage to (more or less) complete one major feature for my cutscene system: speech bubbles.

Putting text onto the screen in Panda3D isn't difficult in and of itself, I feel. (Although I did spend a little time getting the text aligned with its backdrop.) The main challenge, as I recall, was in generating a "bubble" that I felt worked with the intended art-style.

I could have simply created a number of static speech-bubble images, but I imagine that a fair few such images would be called for, and even then the set of shapes created might place a nuisance of a constraint on the writing and layout. I very much preferred the idea of a dynamically-generated speech-bubble.

I looked at a few of the webcomics that I particularly respect for their art, which provided at least one idea that might have worked. However, this was a somewhat-traditional sort of bubble, slightly angular but nevertheless... well, "bubble-shaped", conforming somewhat to the shape of the text. I considered attempting to implement an algorithm to generate such a bubble, but I fear that it might have taken longer to do so than I would have liked.

Something like this

However, an inspiration and little experimentation provided a simpler solution: treat the text as though it were backed by long, straight paint-strokes, producing a "bubble" that's roughly rectangular--and thus relatively easy to generate--but nevertheless pleasingly "painted"-looking.

This did have its challenges. An early attempt at implementation took a procedural approach: I created a set of "brush" images, and used Panda3D's image-painting classes to create simple "paint-strokes" across a larger image, finally applying this to the backing of the text. It worked, and I was fairly pleased with the results--but it also took a good few seconds to generate four medium-sized boxes. While a few seconds is perhaps not much when loading a level, I felt that it was a bit long for so lightweight an element as a cutscene.

What I ended up doing was somewhat simpler: In short, each "bubble" is composed of three parts: a central "box", and a "cap" at each end. The caps each have a texture applied to them, depicting the ends of brush-strokes, selected from a small set. (I believe that I have four each for single-line, two-line, and three- or four- line speech-bubbles.) These images are also applied to the central box, but offset such that only their edges extend into it, and blending from one to the other to create a somewhat-seamless merging of the two. It's not perfect, but I'm overall happy with the effect, I believe.

The pieces of a speech-bubble's backing

For a while I gave some thought to how I might implement narration boxes (as distinct from speech-bubbles that simply contain text being spoken by someone not present). Then I realised that I don't actually intend to have any third-person narration, and simply dropped the matter!

Aside from the implementation of speech bubbles, a variety of bugs were fixed and minor features added, many aimed at making the editor a little easier and more intuitive to use, I believe.

As you may have gathered, I haven't yet started in on the introductory cutscene--that I intend to be a major part of this new week's work!

That's all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^

* Brigand feedback: Yes it's very possible it's not the class for you, because it does rely on melee attacks. But if you're just standing in one spot trading blows you're not making use of its abilities, especially the learned ones. Once you learn stuff like Backstab and Improved Parry you get big bonuses for strafing around enemies. Combine that with Find Weakness (which has been buffed) and you can get some huge hits in.

I've given a little more thought to my tendency to end up trading blows. I do move around, and do make use of my abilities, but I suspect that it's often simply easier to just click on the enemy than to pick out an ability and apply it, especially when dealing with weaker enemies that pose little threat.

(On top of that, I sometimes find myself short on stamina or energy, leaving me with only standard attacks.)

Another motivation to stay mobile is Precision Jab and Hemorrhage. Set up bleed effects and kite your enemies while they bleed. Once you get Lacerate you can then pop the bleeds to do even bigger damage (AOE).

I don't use "Lacerate" very much, but I am indeed a fan of "Hemorrhage". Letting an enemy bleed to death while keeping out of its range likely appeals to my caster-appropriate preference for attacking in a context in which my opponent is prevented from attacking in return.

BUT of course not every class is for everyone and indeed I want each one to have a different feel, which goes for the magic users as well. Let me know what you think of the Floramancer!

I'll give it a try, I think! ^_^

(I do have a partial concept for a classical caster, if you're interested--but I have no argument if you'd prefer to stick with your own concepts!)

Thanks for your feedback as always Thaumaturge.

My pleasure. ^_^

I decided to move the health bar, and most of the information down low after looking at the UIs of 3rd and 1st person games. It seems that 1st person games tend to have information in the bottom area of the screen and 3rd person games more often use the top (often times in addition to the bottom left or right around the character).

Hmm--that's interesting, I hadn't noticed such a correlation. (But then, I haven't done the research myself.)

This may also have something to do with playing on a TV vs a desktop computer. When playing a game on a TV you are usually sitting farther away and are more likely to have the entire screen in complete view at all times, making a well spaced out UI a non issue, and maybe even preferable. Where as sitting closely to a large screen when playing on a pc (as I do) grouping the UI becomes preferable.

Perhaps. That said, I don't play on a TV either.

An alternative hypothesis: In a first-person game, I imagine that the player's focus tends to remain near the centre of the screen, where their actions would take effect (whether weapons-fire or other interactions). A third-person game might allow the player to act more broadly, meaning that the player's view may tend to move around the screen a little more. Thus a player of a first-person game might be more likely than a player of a third-person game to lose track of a health bar placed near the left of the screen.

(Either hypothesis would seem to support a central health-bar, I do note.)

Though some UI things can be left a little vague, like XP or weapon skill level (just a bar no numbers, not centered on screen) the player's health is of critical importance, it can affect a lot of immediate decisions: fight or flight, look for potions, drink a potion, use a more careful approach in combat (ranged perhaps) all depending on the player's health. It is after all what determines if you lose or are about to lose the game. Many modern games use blood spattered on screen or discoloration to show health, and I'm not opposed to adding this in addition to the health bar, but I think the health bar is a necessity.

I wasn't suggesting that it be vague, just that the health-bar not be placed centrally. When I referred to hit-flashes, etc., I was rather referring to more ephemeral indicators, I believe: brief splashes or flashes indicating an individual instance of damage (and sometimes the direction from which the damage came).

(My apologies if I didn't convey the above clearly. ^^; )

That looks really good indeed! ^_^

(And quite unlike the dungeon areas--I think that it could be quite an improvement if the dungeons were to look somewhat as lavish as this area.)

~

I've spent a bit of time playing the most recent build, and have some feedback, I believe:

Things that I liked:
 - I really like the lower zoom--I think that it helps to be able to see further around my character.

 - I like having a JP-counter on the screen, and the presence of learned skills in the JP screen.

 - The music is a rather welcome addition! It adds a bit of atmosphere to the gameplay, I feel. ^_^

Mechanics:
 - Having spent a bit more time with the ranged weapons, I find that I don't really like pressing "f" first, then selecting a target--it's less convenient than I'd like, especially for an action that I might want to take often. Since melee-ranged combat is simply point-and-click, why not do the same for ranged? Perhaps something like this: when a ranged weapon is selected, hovering over an enemy brings up the range-overlay, and clicking attempts the attack, as with melee weapons.

UI:
 - I'm inclined to suggest collecting the various character-related screens into a single, central screen, perhaps separated via tabs. While I visit the "Equipment" screen often, I find that I tend to forget about the "Job" screen (even with the JP counter at the top-right), and barely ever remember the "Character" screen. Collecting all of the screens into one place might make for a useful reminder: as the saying goes, "out of sight, out of mind".

 - It might be useful to have a means of comparing items, or at least of comparing an item to the one currently equipped. At simplest, perhaps place "up" or "down" arrows next to values in the item being considered that are higher or lower than those of the equipped item.

 - I find that I keep expecting to be able to close the map by pressing the "escape" key, as with other screens in the game.

 - It might be useful to have the inventory sort items by type, or perhaps to provide "auto-sort" buttons for various sorting methods.

Stats:
 - What do the character stats do? I can guess at the effect of "swiftness", but what does "guile" do for me, or "spirit"? Perhaps it would be helpful to have tooltips for stat-values, both in item-descriptions and the character screen.

 - On a similar note, how do I determine what damage-types a given enemy deals, or is weak to? Right now I'm not really seeing it, and tend to simply ignore the damage types and simply select the highest damage/defence numbers. (That said, I'm not a huge fan of damage types anyway, and don't really like the idea of swapping and changing my gear for every other monster.)

Possible Bugs:
 - I had one case (possibly two) in which a breakable dropped two items (reported in the log, I believe), but only one seemed to be collectable. An image remained that I presume applied to the second item, but it seemed non-interactive.

 - Finally, I encountered another case of the game seeming to become stuck. I believe that I had just killed a "Gleaming Summoned Living Vine of Evasion"; upon dying it dropped a Verdant Tonic. I found that I could no longer move nor act, by either keys or mouse. I could still open screens, and select weapons and abilities, but not target anything.

~

All that said, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that either the game or the "brigand" class is not quite for me. Something's not quite "clicking" for me during play, I fear. :/

Part of this is perhaps because, even with the job-skills, the brigand (as I play it) seems to still rely heavily on basic melee attacks, and thus on repeatedly clicking on an enemy until it dies--a mechanic that I just don't find particularly engaging.

However, some of this may well be fundamental: I'm not a huge fan of stat-based mechanics, preferring ability-based ones; for example, I tend to play casters in RPGs, with the fun of a level coming from the new spells that I gain access to more than changes to my stats.

Finally, I'm currently not finding there to be much reward for exploration: loot is acquired from enemies more than breakables, and the various rooms are all more or less the same. (One suggestion might be to take a leaf from Pixel Dungeon's book and have a variety of "special rooms" salted around the levels, offering a bit of extra variety. That said, even a bit more visual variety--as in the screenshot above--might help a little.)

I still intend to keep an eye on, and perhaps respond in, this thread--especially if a new character class is made available!

Overall, I like it! It seems likely to communicate fairly clearly what the player's current abilities and items are, and how to activate them. I like the fact that the various icons seem to correspond roughly to the (presumed common) locations of their controls--the three key-based items on the left, and the two mouse-based items on the right.

A few thoughts:

I'm not sure that I don't prefer having the health in the top-left, thus reducing the clutter near the centre of the screen. Is health something that I'm likely to want to watch at all times, or something that I'm likely to want to check every so often, with individual losses of health being communicated via other means (hit-flashes, blood-splotches, etc.)? If the latter, there might be little reason to have it placed so centrally.

The non-health elements, while of good quality, feel a little... simple, perhaps, especially compared to the stylisation of the health bar. Perhaps they could use a little bit of embellishment? This is quite likely a matter of personal taste, however.

Ah, of course! Indeed, I do think that I've seen this done elsewhere. Thank you for elaborating! (And for taking the time to create those GIFs.) ^_^

... GML (GameMaker language) isn't object oriented ...
...
... (GM doesn't allow for anything bigger than 2D arrays).

Ouch--that sounds like it might be a pain to work with at times. (At least for someone who, like myself, is very used to object-orientation.) :/

I don't know much about GML, but your solution sounds fine at first blush, at least. Given the above-quoted constraints, if it works, performs reasonably well, and doesn't cause issues later on, then I don't see a problem. ^_^

(The visual representation continues to look rather good, I feel! ^_^)

Downloaded, I believe! I'll hopefully get around to trying it soon. ^_^

Actually, thinking about ranged weapons, I've been finding that some of them feel a little limited in range. In many cases I can only get one or two shots in before the enemy reaches melee range. Conversely, it can be tricky to approach an enemy without having them step either out of range or too near for comfort.

I agree that motion comic is a good (i.e. time-saving and looks decent) alternative to fully animated cutscenes.

Thank you, and thank you for the suggestions! ^_^

I've seen fade in/out transitions used well for implying movement.  Both for a certain body part (e.g. at the beginning of your cutscene) and also for full character movement (walking, jumping, etc) from one location to another.  When to start fading in/out the current and new location is something you may need to play around with but it can definitely work well.  So, that could be one alternative to your current sliding motion.

Interesting... How is that done, precisely? Is it just a matter of having--effectively--a two-frame walk-cycle, and transitioning back and forth between frames? Or is there an approach that I'm missing?

(Could you recommend a game that does this well, please? I'd like to look for a YouTube video showing the technique in use.)

Also, there are other fx that can be applied:
-add glow around object
-change brightness or tint color

Hmm... A glow might be implemented via a second "glow" object being overlaid on the first (if I add means to specify that additive blending should be used), or by simply creating two versions of the object--one in which a glow has been added and one without--and transitioning between the two, I think.

Brightness and tint might be useful, and should be pretty easy to add.

That said, I'll likely only add such features if I find myself wanting them--I don't want to implement them only to have them go unused! ^^;

-little text (e.g. POW!) but these are obviously use only if they fit the theme of the game.

It very much fits, I do believe--in fact, I'm busy implementing text-boxes/speech-"bubbles" to allow dialogue and narration. ^_^

Interesting! ^_^

I have a few thoughts, if I may:

First, points for (as far as I see) not including a "battery charge" mechanic for the torch, and for the screen not being pitch-black outside of its circle of light. ^_^

As to the actual gameplay, right now it feels a little... empty to me, I think: there are several "rooms" to explore, but they're all more or less the same, and have little to offer. It might help to differentiate them visually, but perhaps more important, I think, might be to include some additional gameplay elements that add some purpose to rooms other than the entrance, exit, and the room that holds the rope. A few ideas, off the top of my head:
 - You might follow traditional roguelike design and include a variety of items (passive or otherwise) that may or may not be found in various side-rooms.
 - You might follow other horror games in providing optional backstory and lore. At their simplest, these might take the form of pages from diaries or lorebooks, or text/images on the walls; conversely, you might implement a mechanic of some sort into them (perhaps representing translation), adding risk to the counter the potential reward.
 - There might be stationary objects that can interact with the monster--noisy things that catch its attention, or that release scents that briefly drive it away, for two examples.

A small test/demonstration of my new "motion comic" cutscene system:

Greetings and salutations!

This week's screenshot/gif is a short test/demonstration of the new "motion comic" cutscene system:



(Don't worry, this isn't the quality or art-style that I intend for the cutscenes in the full game--it's just something that could be produced fairly quickly and easily for testing and demonstration purposes.)

As you may have gathered, the work of this past week was primarily dedicated to implementing "motion comic" cutscenes, alongside a simple editor for the creation of these cutscenes.

It feels a little strange--and pleasant--to have a single, central element of progress to discuss, rather than the miscellanies that have occupied the past several updates. It feels... more focussed, perhaps.

For the most part, I want to keep the cutscenes in A Door to the Mists fairly short. The main exceptions, I fear, will be the introduction and the cutscene that plays before the first (non-prologue) level: they have narrative and context that I want to convey, but for which I don't see a better opportunity.

I chose the "motion comic" style of cutscene, I suppose, as a balance between quality and feasibility. Fully-animated cutscenes (whether in-engine or pre -rendered/-drawn) seem likely to call for quite a bit of time and work, on top of the work already being done on the game itself. Conversely, simpler forms of cutscene, such as static images backing text, feel a little unsatisfying to me. Having no cutscenes at all means dropping a rather useful tool for conveying narrative and providing context.

"Motion comic" cutscenes sit, then, between the two extremes: they use only a limited sort of animation (there are no frame-by-frame animations), but can nevertheless (I think) look halfway decent. Additionally, given the "painted" aesthetic that I have in mind for the game, it seems stylistically appropriate to employ "painted" cutscenes.

As to the cutscene system itself, it is, I believe, largely complete. It's not perfect--there's at least one feature that I'd like to have that I may not include--but overall I'm fairly happy with it.

I didn't start entirely from scratch: I had a base "Cutscene" class, which itself inherited from my base "World" class, and so some functionality was already present. (If I recall correctly, I started to implement music support--only for code-completion to remind me that my base "World" class already included such a feature! A little tweaking and additional implementation was called for, admittedly, but nevertheless I recall that it was a welcome discovery.)

However, that "Cutscene" class was very basic indeed--the functionality of the "World" class aside, I'm not sure that it offered anything much beyond simple starting and stopping of cutscenes.

In short, the design of the "motion comic" cutscene system is (more or less), as follows: A cutscene consists of a sequence of scenes, shown one after the other. Each scene in turn holds a number of objects, each potentially having an image and a sound, which appear and are removed at specified times. Each object has a "track" that it follows, controlling its position, orientation, scale, and so on.

Motion might then be conveyed in a few ways: transitions (as between the hand and the arm in the first scene above); linear transformations--movement, scaling, fading, etc. (as in the third scene above); and by implication (as between scenes above). (And there may be other ways that I've either not thought of, or not implemented.) Some techniques work better than others--that sliding motion in the second scene above doesn't look good to my eye, while I'm actually fairly happy with the pose-transition before it, for two examples.

As to the new week, I have a few features and issues remaining that I intend to work on. That done, I want to start work on the first major cutscene of the game: the introduction.

That's all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^

(PS: I've just updated the "Media" and "Projects" pages of my website to more closely reflect the current state of the game.)

All right, I've spent a little bit of time with the new build, and have some feedback:

First of all, I think that it's improved! Overall, I believe that I had more fun with this build than the previous. ^_^

The game runs much more smoothly now--I didn't notice any slowing down as the game progressed.

The new hero-sprite is cute, and an improvement over the old sprite, to my eye. ^_^

The "champion" monsters are a welcome addition: not only do they provide a guaranteed source of magical items, this same property makes them particularly appealing targets.

I'm not sure of whether this is an issue, but I did discover a "club of cunning and cunning", which seemed a little odd.

I did encounter a few issues:

The cursor in the "equipment" screen seems at times to resist control--I think that I encountered this when I had an armour item equipped and selected, and attempted to move "right" to the inventory list.

The same cursor is also sometimes not visible when the screen is opened. A little experimentation seems to suggest that it might effectively be "in the wrong column", as I think that pressing the "right" arrow a few times brought the cursor back into the screen. I believe that I replicated this issue by closing the screen with nothing in the inventory column.

Finally, I ended up in a state in which I could no longer act, neither moving nor attacking; attempting to do either seemed to simply pass the turn (with enemies moving around me). I could activate abilities and ranged weapons, bringing up their targeting regions, but once again clicking simply dismissed them with no effect, if I recall correctly. The equipment and character screens responded as expected. Speaking of which, the latter did show that I had a very negative amount of "CP"--but I'm not sure of what that value represents, so I don't know whether this is relevant or not.

Fair enough! ^_^

(With regards to the parry animation, I think that I guessed as much, but thought it better to mention the issue and risk the advice being unnecessary than not mention it and risk an issue going unnoticed.)

Alpha-fades, whether static (i.e. the alpha-value remains constant until further changed by another event) or animated (e.g. fading away during an attack, then fading in again afterwards).

These might indicate such things as an object being intangible (or partially so), or changes in the state of a relatively intangible object (a cloud of dust, or a spectre, perhaps), for two examples.

Recolouring of sprites/models might be useful to indicate changes in state, such as status effects--green for regeneration or poison, for example.