For June I tried to complete a lot of the core features of the game and make sure that all the data could be read off of JSON files so I can easily change stuff like character/item stats and dialogue text. I also wanted to start working on creating more finalized versions of the settlements that you can encounter.

So right now the basic battle system is complete. You can move, perform basic attacks, use abilities that target single/multiple allies/enemies, use items, and defend. Also added some better vfx for when abilities are used and have an automatic camera that pans to the next squad.

One of the things I also needed to do was have a way to keep track of the decisions that the player makes so that the game knows how to instantiate the next scene. Not 100% sure if this is the best way to approach this but I have a single StoryState class that keeps track of a bunch of booleans which represent an event that can affect the story. Each event has an associate string so “S1E4:2” means “Story 1, Event 4 is true”. Since some dialogue options and scene transitions depend on certain events happening, I needed to be able to capture these values in the corresponding Dialogue and SceneTransition data objects but didn’t want to parse the entire content of the StoryState class as a string since that would be enormous. So doing it like the above mentioned way, I can just isolate certain states that are important.

Another big thing that needed to be done was to create the three settlements that would be in the demo (hopefully out by the end of 2018). I’m sure I need to revise them at some point but 2/3 of these settlements have been completed! These are Dosero, the starting settlement, and Vickery, the first settlement that you encounter.

I also reworked how the equipment screen looks like, but after looking at it again it looks pretty amateur for some reason. I think the text might be too big but I definitely know I need to change something about it.

Did an early prototype of the New Game+ scene. Again looking back at it, it looks pretty amateurish so I need to spice it up later.

Finally, the last notable thing that was done was updating the dialogue interactions so the portrait-to-text proportions are a bit bigger and added some speech bubbles for the minor interactions.

Overall I think this was pretty good for a month’s work. I probably could have done more, but was pretty distracted in trying to up my social media presence. I think for July I’m just going to focus more on the development side of things since there are a bunch of minor fixes and updates I have listed that I really need to start going through.

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