Linkship Competition Devlog 5: Core Battle Mechanics Continued

I came back to working on this game after about a month or so break. I continued to focus a lot on figuring out core battle mechanics and trying to really get that MVP there.

The first thing I did was update the resources and other HUD elements so they would line up properly with our placeholder assets. I also updated the enemy resources to associate with those enemy variables.

Then I started creating the functionality for the health bars so that they'd be tied to the variables and scale based on where the health was at. I also updated the special attack bar to work similarly to this. 

To make this all functional, I started working on the Knight teammate's abilities. I started with an attacking feature where it would deplete health. I also added a healing mechanic to heal them.

While I was adding these, I decided to update the characters (which are actually listed as Armors in the Database) to use the Armor Types. This way, I could check if they're healing, attacking, defending, etc. with just checking their type instead of having to cycle through every character we set as that.

And then after that, I worked more on the cooldown timers. I updated the visual to show their face icon filling up when a cooldown is active, so the player can tell how close they are to completing them. Then, an animation plays on the character to show that they're ready.

Then I took a little break from game dev to draw some rough animations. I decided I wanted to do run cycles instead of walk cycles for the characters to look more natural with the actual speed that they're moving at. So I started with Ralphie. Just doing roughs for right now.

Then I got the animation working in RPG Maker after using Galv's plugins. It took me awhile to figure out how to get it working, but I was able to adjust the animation speed and also show different animations for idle and walking. It allows me to use 4 frames instead of 3 also, which makes it overall more smooth than the typical RPG Maker limitations.

After our full work day, I decided to update some mechanics we talked about. I started with changing the Knight's ability to be a regular cooldown and then the healing and attacking to be button mashing instead.

Then I changed the orange resources to automatically fill up your special meter when picked up instead of acting like a regular resource.

Then I fixed our current issue of resources being stuck on the page with self switch B even after you turn them in to the Inventor. I wrote some code to find the last event on the map, and work within a range to reset those and turn self switch B off.

And I bought Kadaj's Parallel Lives plugin since he added controller support. It had some conflicts with some of our existing plugins and I couldn't quite get it working correctly, but I was messaging with him to try and see if it could get fixed in the future at least so we might actually end up using it. He made some updates and we're still working to see if we can get the rest of the plugin conflicts figured out.

Then I started working on the hacking mini-game functionality and loop. First, the player destroys the room door when they have their weapon. Then, it turns off the roof of the room to reveal what's inside of the room.

And from there, the player can interact with a control panel. If they complete the mini-game, they successfully destroy it. I haven't actually implemented the mini-games, but it does work for what would happen if you did complete the mini-game, as the HUD updates with it.

I added all of the door and control panel events with some placeholder art so I could properly test out all of the mechanics.

I also added a cooldown timer that refreshes where the enemy will actively destroy the player's control panels as well. This is on a timer and it randomly selects one of the rooms to destroy if it hasn't yet.

With most of the core win and lose mechanics set up, I decided to actually implement the win and lose conditions to show that. So I created an event that checks for all of the win and lose conditions, and triggers the end of the battle when that happens.

I did a few performance optimizations since I noticed some lag. So I added a loading screen and set it to fade out when it goes there and back in once everything has finished loading. I'm hoping this will help a bit.

Add that's the update for this time! I spent a few days on all of the updates in this post and our battles are getting closer to including all of the core mechanics needed. Only a few parts left in the battle for the MVP to be fully there, then we can work on polishing things up and testing the fun. I'm looking forward to having everything in place so we can also figure out some of the timing on the cooldowns and seeing how it all works together.