Good afternoon everyone,

This past weekend I’ve been working fairly hard getting combat working, and I would say that I am fairly close to finishing a basic combat system. Currently, the only thing that isn’t done is the ability for the enemy to attack back, so right now the test scene is pretty much just you and a training dummy. Still, now that for the most part I have decided how combat is going to work, I can finally explain it.

This is currently what the game looks like, there are four noticeable changes to the UI from the last screenshot that I posted, the first is that the unit frames are no longer just white boxes, they now contain the portraits of your units. They also have an element color indicator in the upper right corner of their frame, this indicates that unit’s element. Units only attack if pieces matching their element are cleared, for example if I cleared some water(blue) chains all of my water units would attack, and if I cleared a fire chain all of my fire units would attack.

Damage calculation in this game is fairly simple, whenever you clear a chain of pieces all units of that element will store an attack the base damage of this attack is determined by that unit’s attack and the length of the chain. Note, in order to clear a chain and store an attack you must match at least three pieces. For every piece after the third in the chain, the base damage of the attack is increased by 25 percent. After you clear a chain, you can then clear more chains, until the timer (the blue bar in the last post’s picture) runs out. Note, this timer only appears in place of that red and green health bar(which was the second major change to the UI) after you begin matching.

Once the timer runs out, every attack stored by all units will receive a 10 percent bonus for every chain cleared after the first. Technically speaking, this means that clearing two three length chains will deal more damage than one chain of six. However, enemies have a defense value, which can be anything zero or greater. The enemy will take damage from each attack after subtracting it’s defense value from it. This means that in some situations, going for longer chains may yield more damage than clearing a larger quantity of chains.

The third noticeable change is that enemies now have a turn delay above their head, this indicates how long until that enemy uses a skill or attacks. However, since as I mentioned, enemy attacks are not yet implemented, this is nothing more than a number. The fourth noticeable change is a counter for all the pieces you have cleared, this will be used in future updates for the activation of skills, which will spend certain types of “mana”. However, the mana display is currently not implemented either so they will always remain as zero no matter how many matches you make.

That is all I have for combat so far, now to talk about the Units.

As mentioned earlier, all Units will have an element. Along with that they will also have basic RPG stats like a level, experience, attack, health. There is also an extra stat called the support stat, and a value for enhancing, and a sell value. Increasing the level of a unit will increase all of it’s other parameters by a variable amount differing from unit to unit. Attack is used to determine the damage dealt with every attack. Health is added up between all units in a party, meaning five units with 100 HP will give the player 500 HP, and when this number hits zero, it’s GG. Support is used primarily for healing, eventually there will be healing pieces that randomly appear and creating a chain adjacent to that heal piece will heal for the total support value for the team. Support will also be used for certain skills, outside of healing, but as skills are not implemented yet, I won’t go over that yet.

The last two parameters are the Enhance value, and the Sell value. Eventually there will be a mechanic in the game called Enhancement where you sacrifice multiple units into one, and that one unit gains EXP equal to that enhancement value, this goes up with level just like the other stats. The sell value is similar, and determines how much that unit will sell for when the sell feature is added (which by the way is a long way off).

That is all for now, in the next update I will have completed the combat system and will probably move to creating other features of the game, such as displaying Unit’s stats, and other stuff like that. Anyways, I will see you guys in the next update when it comes!