Hi there, it's time for another devlog!

The final devlog of 2024 is upon us. It's been an interesting year, to say the least. I hope everyone's been having happy holidays. I have taken a bit of a break for the past few weeks, but there's still some progress to be shared with you guys, so let's go over it, shall we?

Status Effects!

Last devlog, I added party mechanics to the game, a staple for all traditional JRPGs and the key difference between Undertale's and Deltarune's combat systems.

However, there was another JRPG-staple that I wanted to add to the game - Status Effects! They aren't anything too complex - they stay on the inflicted character/enemy for a few turns - during which they can run specific code - then they vanish again.

So, why status effects? Well, I will go further into this a little later, but I think status effects are one of the best ways to give different characters unique abilities - something that is kind of important for a game with a lot of different playable characters. For testing purposes, the status effect I programmed into the game is the ever so iconic "Poison" effect, but really, a status effect could boil down to something like "every third attack of this character heals them a little", or something like that.

Here's a feature I bet a lot of you are happy to see again. Spells! From the player's perspective, they are effectively identical to the spells in the Legacy version of the game. Though, of course, under the hood they are implemented very differently. You may even recognize the way the spell selection looks now - that's because it's directly based on the in-battle inventory from the original game? Hm? What's that? You don't remember it looking like that? That's probably because most of you reading this have only ever played the game in english, however, when playing the game in japanese, the battle system actually uses a different inventory menu altogether.

Now, what about the actual spells? Well, for now I've focussed primarily on the base system functionality required to make Spells actually work, rather than making the individual spells, so all I have right now is a placeholder Spell that spawns dogs.

Some of you longer-time fans might even remember that I used a very similar placeholder Spell when implementing the Spell system into the legacy version of the game.

Some of you might wonder how Spells interact with party mechanics. While for multiplayer, there are plans to make some Spells "compatible" in a way that allows one or more player to attack at the same time, incompatible Spells (or all Spells when not playing with other people) instead play out separately from other spells, with all characters getting a turn - with the duration of that turn being based on how many of them there are. Here's an example of what that looks like:

Finally, the last big addition for us to take a look at is the SKILL System. You've probably noticed that "SKILL" button co-existing with that "SPELL" button for a bit now. In MTO Legacy, "SKILL" served as an alternate "SPELL" button for characters that didn't use magic - only really being used by Jotaro and DIO. Now, however, it's a standalone button that co-exists with the "SPELL" button. Its functionality is about the same as the "Magic" button from deltarune, giving you access to buffs, debuffs, healing and other fun effects. Nothing to deal damage though, since that's what SPELL is for.

Obviously, this includes Deltarune Chapter 2's "X-Action", allowing characters other than your main player character to perform ACTs.

There are various other, smaller changes and additions as well, like adding a proper system for loop regions in music and such, but those are the big additions I've made since the last devlog.

So, what's the overall progress like? Well, the majority of core features are implemented. The only major thing missing so far is the shop system. Outside of that, it's all mostly just various tweaks, fixes and smaller additions (like currently unimplemented SOUL modes). Once all of those things have been taken care of, which I expect not to be all that much effort and/or time consuming, it'll be time to work on multiplayer functionality for this new version of the game. It's actually kind of exciting to be honest. For a while, I felt like the core engine was something I'd just work on forever and that the actual game itself would just always be a far-off little dream, and yet, we're actually getting really close now. I've officially worked on this new engine for over a year now and it's basically almost done and ready to be used for the actual game.

Of course, it's still gonna take a bit to remake the actual game. For the most part, I can't exactly just drag and drop all of the legacy version's content and features into the new engine and just expect it to work. While, yes, there are aspects I can reuse, such as just directly porting over some assets and tilemap data, maybe pasting some dialogue, maybe some partial bullet code for cases like Papyrus' bone attacks or Mad Dummy's, well, dummies, there's a lot I basically have to redo. For starters, I can only realistically import tilemap data for the individual maps, putting in the collisions and objects and such is something I'd have to basically completely redo. I can reference the old spells and such, but they do technically need to be reprogrammed, due to fundamental differences between the old engine and the new engine. I can port over all of the assets used for the individual skins, but the way that character sprites are handled by both engines are also, again, fundamentally different. As such, I'm honestly kinda debating releasing early versions of the game without all the content from the legacy version being there from day 1, but I also feel like people would be unhappy about missing content. There have been multiple cases of content that people enjoyed being removed from the game for later touch-ups, including plenty of skins that were temporarily removed at one point, PvP, which was removed, like, twice already, the old racing mode and plenty of other stuff. Then again, as long as GameMaker Server stays up, none of these "preview builds" would have to directly replace the GMS version of the game and serve as yet another alternative. While it would be a bit ridiculous to have 3 separate versions available of the game, none of which with any ability to interact with each other, it would still only be temporary.

Well, regardless, that's for the future. For now, I'm incredibly excited to see where we'll go in the future. Perhaps we'll even redesign some older parts of the game?

And with that, the year 2024 draws to a close. I'd meant to post this devlog a little sooner, but life gets in the way of things sometimes. Regardless, it's definitely been an interesting year. I hope all of you have had wonderful holidays and I wish you a happy new year.