Hello friends, fans and family!
Loads of new stuff these past weeks. I told you I would back off a bit but instead I upped the tempo and worked more than usual. Life is crazy sometimes 😀 Let’s jump right in!
Game loop
The game loop for the demo is now in place and working! You get a mission and once you complete it you are shown the victory screen (something needs to happen when you lose too which is NOT in place :P) and after that a skill tree where you can select upgrades for your heroes is presented. After that a new level begins. Simple and reliable. As I’ve mentioned before this structure will not remain in the final game but is a pretty fast way for me to get something out of the door “quickly” for feedback. Still have to design levels though so the DEMO itself is not done just the structure.
Skill tree
I’ve made the upgrades work and everything is saved the way its supposed to. Been wasting a lot of time lately thinking about how to actually set up the skill tree etc which is not that important at this stage so in the end I just decided that the player will have two levels up: one automatic skill and one selectable choice of two upgrades to that skill. An important feature I’ve implemented here is to show short clips of how the skills actually work:
Death animation
It’s been bothering me for quite some time that the units just vanish once they die and the other day I was feeling a bit bored and decided that I really needed to do something about it so I opened up Aseprite and drew a floaty skeleton cloud type thing when the enemies die. As usual I limited the amount of frames to 5 which is my limit for effects. For skill animations 2 frames will have to be enough unless something extraordinary happens… Anyway, here’s the animation:
Taunt
I am adding animations to all unit skills and fixing bugs so they work well and the next one I wanted to tackle was the taunt skill. Had to fix a lot of AI stuff that had been messed up too as well as drawing one single frame:
I’ve fixed loads of more issues and really, really hope to get the demo out of the door before this year is over but there is undoubtedly still a lot of work to do. I still have to finish all the skills and test them and add some animations to the enemies, add music/sounds and and and…. GAAAAAAAH!
Loads of fun :). See you in two weeks, have to get back to work!
// Luis
Sinister Siamese Studios 