Another Year / Another Milestone

It’s the end of the year and time to celebrate “shipping” another milestone on the game.  Since our last milestone check-in, here’s everything that’s changed:

• Added a version label to main menu

• Integrated with MMFeel and migrated action animations to use MMF_Feedbacks

• Updated every UI in the game (all of them)

• Fancy new loading screens

• New particle and projectiles for attacks

• Status Effects (like poison or stat up)

• In-world health bars & status indicators

• Added Unit Abilities (triggered effects)

• Added Class Abilities

• Added Weapon Proficiency tracking & bonuses

• Added lots of new support equipment and consumables

• Added AoE targeting for some actions

• Converted units to using a standardised level notation

• Conditional terrain effects

• Openable Doors

• Mission Objective UI

• Player units go downed for 3 turns upon defeat and can be rescued.

• Walk and Idle animations for core unit types

• Units can dynamically change colors to match hair and skin with portraits.

• Created a custom font

• Added Fog of War system for foggy and night missions

• Added weather

• Rebuilt (nearly) all the city assets in blender so they render correctly and efficiently

• Integrated with Fmod (and migrated a ton of sounds over)

• Added a ton of new sounds

• Integrated with Yarn Spinner (and migrated dialogue system over)

• Improved unit info panel(s) behavior in the enemy turn.

• Main Menu glow up

• Fixed a ton of bugs, too many to list (I didn't write them all down)

• Other quality of life fixes in the ux.

Night mode mission, showing off that real-time lighting magic.

I won’t go through all of it here since we covered ⅔ of it in previous blog posts.  This month was smaller than others in terms of features, partially due to all the family holidays going on, and partially due to the nature of the work I was trying to get wrapped up for the end of the milestone.

The big feature for this month was fmod integration, I don’t know much about the inner workings of Fmod and fortunately I don’t have to.  I’m working with a local composer who is already bringing the game to life with new sfx and ambiance.  I was fortunate because I had been using a simple custom audio manager that already had a pretty close abstraction to what fmod uses with its events and event parameters. So it was really fast to just write a thin conversion class and plug it all in. We also made a big spreadsheet of all the sounds we thought should be in the game and I’ve been going through and setting up events for them.

Can you hear the SFX in this picture?

You may notice a new character in the game with some “main character energy” her name is Maebh and she’s the product of my work with another fantastic person. I’m working with a local narrative designer who came *highly* recommended. And we’re ironing out the major arc for the game’s story.  Maebh is just the start, she’s got her own custom class, the Opportunist and she’ll be leading our merry band for the foreseeable. A side effect is that characters and portraits are starting to move and get recycled and repurposed as we change things around. This is only the beginning, a lot more to come in this space.

Maebh has “main character energy”

One final thing for this month came as I was doing my playtesting for a little Friends & Family playtest build.  Grenades were way too good, I kept getting iced by a random yeoman with a grenade from nowhere.  My original thinking is that grenades should just do flat damage.  They always hit, they do a fixed amount of damage, you get one per battle, and it doesn’t give you XP.  But in my testing it was really hard to find a good balance point. They never felt strong enough to warrant use by players, and they always felt too strong for enemies to have.   So I decided to make them work more like a regular attack. They now have a hit chance, they take armor into account, and they give XP like a normal attack. However they’re still in this middle ground where they’re not *quite* a regular weapon. You can’t crit with them, your might doesn’t affect their damage, and they don’t provoke counter attacks.  It’s an interesting middle ground and I’m going to keep playing it, but initial results feel much better.

Ye olde granatus

It’s time to define my next milestone and this is a big one. In March I’ll have been working on this game for a whole year, and so I’m setting myself the goal of having a vertical slice build and with it being able to announce the name of the game (and make a steam page and that stuff).  I already have a lot moving in the narrative and audio departments and I think it’ll be doable.  With that all said here’s my todo list for the next 3 months:

• Cutscenes - in-engine cutscenes

• Walking / idle animations for all classes

• Upgraded VFX for attacks

• 3 mission arc telling a piece of the final story.

• Campaign mode & unlocks

• Sizzle Reel / Trailer

• Polish and bug fixes.

It’s a much shorter list than previous but these are all pretty big ticket items.  Wish me luck.

Happy New Year