Hello, happy holidays all. I figured I should do one more of these before the end of the year and since things are starting to get busy now seems like a good time. I dont know that Ill have a ton to say, but usually I think that and then end up writing more than I expect.

I believe the last update I put out I was just starting on combat as well as writing the plotlines for the game. Those are two statements that are basically back loaded with tons of things so Ill go over what I can here.

Starting with combat, it is done-ish. Its a bit hard to qualify specifically but Ill try to explain. At the moment a player could get into a fight, go through the whole fight, have the battle end, and get loot and XP. There are a few qualifiers on all of that though.

The first thing is that in general the UI still needs some freshening up. Im still working with some temporary sprites for the UI at the moment so Im sort of waiting on that, but Id like to have a few minor things added in. Basic QoL stuff like tooltips or prompts on screen, just basic UI stuff to help the player read the combat screen a bit better. None of that is particularly hard but its all important to the overall feel. Going along with this there are a few graphical flourishes Id like to add just to make everything look snappy.

The second major thing is enemies. Without giving too much away enemies in the game are divided into what is effectively 5 difficulty levels. This is mostly in the context of the mines. The mines have 5 sub areas and each sub area has slightly more difficult enemies. At the moment Ive only implemented the 1st tier of enemies, which is around 13 or so.

That probably sounds bad but its actually pretty good. To explain, the systems that make enemies function are in place. Those systems will work for every enemy in the game. At this point I basically have to do data entry for the remainder of enemies. Thats mostly just balance stuff like setting the amount of health something has or how hard it hits.

The slightly more difficult (but not really that difficult) bit is setting up enemy abilities. Every enemy has at least one (usually one) ability in addition to its basic attack. I havent set up every ability yet, however abilities in this game function around a lot of generic effects and statuses.

An example of this might be for instance poison. Say there are two different enemies that can apply poison. Instead of having two completely different poison debuffs there is just one generic poison debuff that both creatures would apply. What this basically means is that aside from keeping the number of statuses low and easy to decipher I can also reuse a lot of code. Since I have a piece of code that applies poison already the next time I make an enemy that applies poison I dont have to write the whole thing again I just have to reference the existing poison function. This has been a very long winded way of saying that adding the rest of the enemies is pretty simple at this point.

To summarize, as far as the mechanics of actual combat go, most stuff is done. There is however more to combat than just that. To quickfire a few of them, enemy spawning has been setup. XP and loot is given out to the player, the entire player spell system along with combos are working, and loot tables for enemies have been setup. And most recently the player talent tree was setup.

Instead of just gaining XP and leveling up I opted for something thats a little more manageable and easy to calculate. The player basically has a 5 level talent tree and they spend their XP to unlock nodes on the tree which grant them bonuses. This is all setup and working, the only thing is that currently you have to press numpad 4 to open the menu because I havent worked in a normal way to open the UI yet.

Ill leave combat at that. Its sort of hard to convey exactly how much work went into it. Id say looking at the systems in this game that players have seen this was probably about 4 times bigger than anything else that was put in. Turns out implementing an entire combat system is complicated, whod have thunk.

A minor note but something to mention because it took up a good chunk of time would be sprites. A whole bunch more have been added and setup. I keep wanting to layout the game world but Im trying to have all the sprites available before I build anything. And I keep adding in detail sprites and making modifications to tilesets and such. I do think that is starting to come to a head however.

The last thing Ive been spending time on is the plot as mentioned prior. Its been a while so for a slight recap there is a main plot planned. Then instead of individual stories for each NPC ala Stardew Valley I chose to group them into small groups of 4 or so and have a more group-oriented story involving all of them. In general Im hoping that will result in more interesting dialogue since it wont just be one on one conversations between the player and an NPC which usually results in the NPC just giving you their life story.

In regards to writing Ive been working on the main plot which is written at this point. Im currently reading back through it to proof read and spruce it up a bit. To give an idea of the size Ive split up the story into scenes. There are 50+ scenes in the main plot. Some of those are just letters that the player receives but most of them are somewhere between 500-to-1000-word conversations. So I hope that gives a bit of context for what to expect in terms of length. The other plots with groups of NPCs probably wont be nearly as long as that, but they should all be lengthy to some degree. And then as mentioned before romance stuff is still on the table although I havent solidified anything yet.

Im not sure that Ive mentioned this before but Im thinking about it now. I dont tend to say much about what my artists are doing. They work away tirelessly, which is great cause I have very little artistic talent. They are usually working on a variety of things but something that came about recently in the last few months or so is character design.

If youve played the game youve probably run into a number of the characters. Pretty much everyone is getting some sort of change. Some are basically being altered entirely others are just getting spruced up. In addition a lot of names are changing to more fantasy oriented names which I think fit the theme better. This is mostly being done because the original portraits were done haphazard. At the time I didnt have things nearly as planned out as I should have and I think it resulted in a lot of generic designs and less visually interesting characters. I think these versions manage that a lot better.

A good simple example of that is that in the current version everyone has realistic hair colors, IE, brown, black, blonde, red. Yeahturns out when you are working with pixel art the hair color becomes a very identifiable part of a character because there isnt a ton of room for details. So now weve opened it up to what Ill refer to as anime hair colors. I didnt want to go overboard with it so its still somewhat subdued, but there are more variations that I think do a lot to make characters stand out from each other.

So thats mostly it in terms of what Ive been doing. Combat really bogged everything down but at this point Im moving back towards the rest of the game. Ive been trying to determine a few other things in the background. Mostly the mines and what exactly Id like to have in terms of layouts and randomization. Ive also been trying to figure out general ideas for the world and ways to make it more interesting to look at while moving around in it.

At the moment, UI is taking up my time for the most part. The pause menu that has your inventory and everything else needs some calibrating to accommodate new things, namely combat related bits. Once that is in though I think it will mostly be down to making the game world for now. There are still sub systems missing like alchemy but as Ive said in the past Id like to get this back to a point where what Im working on is actually live and playable. So Im trying not to dig too deep into systems and instead just get a working product out the door.

While Id love to give an ETA on that Im still not really sure. I work on this every evening (believe it or not I do have a day job alongside this) but several hours a night isnt nearly the amount of time Id like to devote. So progress will likely continue to be slow but steady. Ill be back with an update sometime in the new year. Probably sometime before spring, but well see. Hopefully Ill have more good news then. Thank you all for your patience as always, and happy holidays to you all.