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[LightEnt]

It liveeeesss!!

[Savick]

Really nice sprite work here. And the movement of them too! I hope to see the golem's movement next. He must take a while to animate, heh.

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

Cute golem.

By the way, i've got a question for you guys: Do you think graphic kill animations on non-cyborg enemies or people is too edgy?

If you're going for that retro platformer aesthetic you should definitely stay away from blood or 'anatomically believable' death anims. People should just explode, like in the good old days.

[LightEnt]

You can walk under its feet, but its feet can damage you. Attacks will need way more unique frames to look right

Cute golem.

By the way, i've got a question for you guys: Do you think graphic kill animations on non-cyborg enemies or people is too edgy?

If you're going for that retro platformer aesthetic you should definitely stay away from blood or 'anatomically believable' death anims. People should just explode, like in the good old days.

Thanks! Hmm, the old 'red fade' from final fantasy could work. There will be blood but nothing gory, i'm not going for grim.

By the way, this is what I mean by "graphic" for anyone who never played Megaman Zero or ZX. Any enemy finished with a saber slash is bisected, including the bosses. Megaman, Metal Gear Revengence, Star Wars all get away with this because the victims are rarely human.



The latest game added a chargeshot kill along with the saber kill, which blasted a huge chunk out of them.



So, not graphic in these examples, but could be if they aren't machines.

[LightEnt]

I think I may be able to find a way around programming bitmap font. This is a good placeholder for now.



The ranking/style score is designed to track effectiveness in combat, and its average will affect the area bosses' rewards. You get points for using lots of abilities and exploiting weaknesses, and currently only lose points for taking damage.






Evasive dash ability. Provides no invincibility frames, and will consume a bit of resource. It can be upgraded, but at its core it's for dodging and positioning. Enemies don't damage you by touching you, but positioning is important especially for bigger enemies and bosses.

[Flatgub]

My Gosh... 
This game is looking BEAUTIFUL! This is some of the best sprite work i've seen in quite some time!
Keep up the incredible work!

[LightEnt]

My Gosh... 
This game is looking BEAUTIFUL! This is some of the best sprite work i've seen in quite some time!
Keep up the incredible work!

Thanks alot!

Update #8 -- Combat equipment and the HUD -- 8/30/2014

Working on menus, more HUD stuff, and how equipment currently works.



So this is what it currently looks like. There are 3 things the action HUD shows:

- Main weapon & Skills
- Offhand
- Artes




- Main Weapon -

The magic blade Estelle summons when fighting. The spell she uses to weave its form it can be changed using objects dropped from enemies, basically allowing you to equip different weapons. These provide various cool passive traits, and also give Estelle access to different abilities. Her starting weapon, 'Rose', has no special abilities, but a balanced set of stats.

(There's no crafting system, you just get the weapons)



An example of an early weapon, the Flametongue. It converts a percentage of your damage to Fire damage. But unlike the starting weapon Rose, it adds a new attack to your arsenal as long as you have it equipped. For example, this skill, [Heatstrike], is a flaming sword slash that shoots 3 short-range fireballs.

-  Weaved Skills  -


As for how they work, there's a dedicated "Special Attack" button that executes your weapon skills. There's Neutral, Side, Up and Down, kind of like how Smash Brothers does its special attacks. They're also color coded for elements.

- Each weapon has its own combination of special abilities ("Falling Meteor Edge", "Super stabby attack MKII", ect) along with its passive traits (+20 damage, +1 targets, +10% Life Absorb, ect). Some even have negative traits.

- So overall, you will find many different weapons, but they don't progress linearly in power. You can also switch between a few of your choice of them the fly!

(This'll be easier to explain when I show the equipment menu.)

-  Offhand and Artes  -



On the opposite side shows Offhand. It's still in progress, i currently don't know how deep i'd like to make it for worries of overreaching myself, But at its lowest form, it's for environmental interaction. Ideally, it will also involve temporarily taking enemy weapons.

The fireball skill icon there actually refers to your currently equipped magic artes. Just like weapon skills you can have 4 equipped at once, but they are independent of your weapons and are equipped in the Artes menu.



-----------------------------------


Programming more base engine things, everything seems to be going well enough, just a bit slow because I have to design and animate stuff as well. The combat is starting to feel alot more fluid now, especially on gamepad. I just have to put some more enemies in, and I can put out a playtest.

[justincavenagh]

this looks really awesome, any gameplay videos coming soon?

[LightEnt]

this looks really awesome, any gameplay videos coming soon?

Thanks! Not at the moment, the game is still very early on. Im just sticking to the occasional gif for progress.

I am thinking of releasing a playtest level though. Just to see how people react to the difficulty and mechanics.

[LightEnt]

"Subject spotted!"

[Raku]

Ah, I like that armor design! Especially the arms! Following this for sure.

[McMutton]

My goodness this is great! The combat system sounds quite fun and especially in-depth; Smash Bros is definitely a good place to draw ideas from for this sort of thing.

Have you seen Valtis Story? Seems to me that they were going for sort of the same thing, so there may be inspiration there, as well.

[MereMonkey]

ArcEdge is looking amazing Light, I can easily see myself playing this for hours on end!!

[Connor]

i saw some screenshots of this recently in screenshot sunday or whatever, but you hadnt had the project as a devlog yet, :O glad to see you finally got a devlog up! :D this game looks amazing so i was bummed that i couldnt follow it. im following this now,

[yaomon17]

Oh boy I hope this fills the void that megaman left for me. 

[LightEnt]

My goodness this is great! The combat system sounds quite fun and especially in-depth; Smash Bros is definitely a good place to draw ideas from for this sort of thing.

Have you seen Valtis Story? Seems to me that they were going for sort of the same thing, so there may be inspiration there, as well.

Thanks! Valdis Story looks pretty awesome, I was thinking of doing magic similarly to VS, but decided to use the neutral input for a bit more clarity (instead of hold + direction)

Oh boy I hope this fills the void that megaman left for me. 

That's quite a tall order, but i'll do my best to make it happen! The X/Z/ZX series influence alot of my decisions.

[Pehesse]

That's quite a tall order, but i'll do my best to make it happen! The X/Z/ZX series influence alot of my decisions.

That's all I need to hear :-D I really like most things, but one thing that really catches my eye is actually... the HUD. It looks so clean! Functional, yet stylish. A very hard balance to achive...

(And the moving grass of course, but I've said that already :-D)

[LightEnt]

Been a while, so i guess i should update with something  

Development momentum has kind of been shot by my new job, which now consumes the vast majority of my blinking hours. I'll lose some hours after training though, and i'll be able to put more towards this project again.

I haven't stopped completley though! Another technical bump I came across in Construct has pretty much forced me to take a different approach to how i'll be doing environments. To put plainly, i'll be building areas as one super large environment, and clipping them off with the camera, similar to Megaman or Metroid. In some of my slow time at work, i've been working on programming a simple system that will save and load objects as you enter/leave areas.

This is actually feeling more like a blessing than a curse though. By simply clipping off areas in the the same test stage ive been running for months and changing the camera margins slightly, i can make it feel like a vastly different and larger place. I'm just glad i caught the flaw before i got too far, just to have it drop kick me in the teeth.

[Julien]

Voilà; moving grass!



I also just use the X-move values of the attack hitboxes to move the grass also. Works well enough. I've been playing around with this alot to use with things like shrubs, trees, even NPCs, anything I can possibly apply it to without it looking odd.

I love this effect with the grass

[LightEnt]

"Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days."

 ...seriously? Damn. Sorry about that, it has been alot more than 4 months...

Update #9 (ish) -- Not dead! -- 3/10/2015

Still working, getting stuff done mostly in my spare time at work. Not much has changed visually, but under the hood a few things have been getting the wrench. (Please warn me if the GIFs are obsessive, i'm looking for an alternative!)



 - Changed code for assigning HP/Defense values and registering hits to be easily applied to other objects, like floating squares.

 - More optimizing efforts. Realized alot (most) of my framerate dips were due to bad shader usage.

 - Also, changing how i manage how objects are parented has helped with that too.

 - rethinking alot of the formulas and other previously intended mechanics, like target limits on attacks. I'll have to release a playtest before i settle on anything though.



 - Area changes and camera controlling. Currently just a simple fadeout

 

 - Playing around with ways to do neat visual effects! (This has consumed more of my time than I'd like to admit)

 
What i'm currently doing ::

I've decided how i'm going to handle gear, customization and powerups. Once i finish programming a base for it, i'll explain away. I had a mockup of the menu system done, but somehow i managed to complete it at work and forget to save a single time before i turned my laptop off. So it's only saved in my brain :<

Wont take another month for an update, i promise