Combat Rework & Other Changes

Good Morning,

it's been a busy week and I have a lot to report. So let's get through it.

On monday I did some last fixing on the bonus scene and also added in the missing repeatable option for the camp route of Liandra. After that was done all focus went to the combat system.

As you can see in the image of this post a lot has changed compared to before. I've added some numbers in red for better orientation.

• 1. I reworked the MC's combat animations. (this was long overdue)
• 2. Skills are now opened directly on the combat screen and not as before in a fullscreen window. The info what a skill does can be seen on the top, below the new turn order.
• 3. Each actor now has shields, these break when the actor is attacked by an element he is weak to. if reduced to 0 the actor is stunned as can be seen by the right orc who has a crushed shield symbol. When that happens the actor is stunned and will receive more damage.
• 4. Weakness system: Each enemy now has weaknesses. There are now 19 damage types in the game, one for each weapon (sword, dagger, bow...) and for each element (fire, water, darkness...). Currently not all weapons are implemented as you know, but that will change in the future. Also Lyvia will now be able to use flails and Tia clubs.
  If an enemy is hit by an element for which he is weak to, this will be revealed (the ? below his name will change into the fitting icon, this will stay even the next time you encounter the same enemy). these weak spots reduce the shields that I mentioned before under 3.
• 5. A new Turn order system, Actors will now take their action when their turn comes and not all together at the start of a turn, you can also see how that will influence his next turn in terms of order. the position in this turnorder will be determined by the agility stat and the action the user does.
• 6. I've written short info texts for all states. The window you see here will only show if you hover your mouse over a state. this will also work for enemy states. I hope this will make it easier to understand what each icon actually means.

I hope this gives you a little insight into the work I'm currently doing, the goal is of course to make combat more fun. For that I'll now do balancing over the next days and I hope I can get the fights into a good state. I will rework some of the existing skills and also add some new ones for enemies.
zARRR has helped me a lot with both the weaknesses and has suggested a lot of new skills for enemies. So at this point a big thank you to him!
Some changes were already made. For example the MC's quickshot is now an instant ability. this means he can do it additionally in his turn. This means when using that skill he can do an additional attack afterwards. Targets can now be selected with the mouse, you can directly click on the enemy you want to attack (using arrow keys is of course still possible).

I've also made changes to some of the combat animations already, more will follow. The MC now actually shoots arrows over the screen to his target (Before he was only doing an attack motion and the target get's a hit indication). The same will happen if other bow using enemies shoot arrows.

Ok... still not finished. I also worked on 2 new animations for Kate. She was missing a BJ scene and I thought since the scene in the MC's room at the inn could use a little extra I added it there.

And last but not least: I've found a better way to compress the images of the game. For this I would like to thank Yazda, who gave me the idea to look into this matter again.
Short explanation: All images were already compressed. I started with that very early on, to reduce the size of the game. This ofc reduced the quality of the images (For example, Kate's makeup turned into red streaks on her face in most pictures). But over the years the game still got to the size it is now and was now close to 6gb (uncompressed images 17,3GB).
Yazda mentioned webp to me. I already knew the format, but rpgmaker only recognises the png format for images. However, I looked it up again and found that there is a programm that can mask the images during compression from png to webp so that they can still be read as png. Using this, not only was the compression much higher than before, but the quality was also better (no more red streaks for Kate, yay). Compressing all images took 3 days (This happened while I was working on the other stuff), but it was worth it. The size of the whole game is now 2,13GB.

Ok I think that is all news. I'll now continue with the balancing. I hope I get it done until the 30th. and then I'm looking forward to feedback on the combat system. 0.5.6.5 will be mostly to test how the changes work and if it is really balanced out good enough. Btw I did all tests so far with existing saves, so you don't have to worry about your save getting broken.

Another thing: I will start the next content poll for 0.5.8.0 in short as well as the next bonus scene poll on the coming Monday.

Thank you for reading all this ;)
I wish you a nice weekend!