September Summary

Welcome to the first Milesteone Postmortem for Locus, our turn based, position focused RPG.  Once a month we'll share how the game is progressing, what went right, what went wrong, what you can do to help. For September, this is our first update, so let us know what you'd like to see going forward. 

September Goals

Get battle into a better state. For this milestone, we wanted to add a bit more polish to battle and flesh out some of the most important features. 

How We Did

This milestone we fully completed 7 of the 13 originally planned milestone goals and 3 more are code complete and ready to merge. We added 5 new features mid-month to cover emergent work such as adding art and AI to the game, completing 4 of these features in whole. So what did we get done?

• Added status effects to both the positions that the players and enemies can stand upon and to the characters themselves. These tasks were about adding the core systems to drive status effects. As part of this work, one status effect of each type was added. Our first "tile" status effect is a fire status that lights the ground on fire. If a character is standing on a fire tile they are burned at the end of battle. Likewise, characters can now be poisoned and take damage at the end of each turn.
• Speaking of fire, "elements" are now a concept that provide damage reduction and bonuses. Enemies can have an unlimited amount of element tags such as fire, water, ice, earth.  Attacks can carry a singular tag that says what type of damage they deal. Fire is good against ice, water against fire, etc;
• Got particle effects orienting based on whether the characters are on the left or right of the screen. Up until now even heroes have been shooting off effects in the direction of other heroes. Now they actually throw bursts of particles in the direction they're attacking!
• Made battle able to handle dynamic amounts of characters / enemies. For the prototype it was a hard count of 3 enemies and 4 heroes. Now we have the ability to put unlimited enemies or heroes into battle. (Theoretically. It'd look horrible if you had 100 heroes and enemies!) This will let us have the party grow from one to four and give us enemy encounters that are more unique.
• We got a first version of our hero characters done! Added them to the combat map along with a first pass on lighting.

Some of the things we started didn't quite get finished. These features will have to be finished in October. 

• A better display for who is targeting who. We half finished it with a rainbow set of crosshairs, but we want to try lines going from attacker to attackee.
• Implementing the EvolvingBehavior plugin. This is an AI plugin that will help generate interesting enemy AIs. This feature is so close, but the plugin wasn't originally meant for a turn based game, so we continue to chip away at it and then pause for an update. 

October Goals

Time to make this a well rounded game! In October we hope to nail down some of the final, bigger design question marks. This means getting some more work outside of battle as well as the outstanding question of how to handle abilities in battle. (That can be a whole separate juicy update.)

October Plans

• Name all of the characters. Right now we're living with names like "Tank" and "Assassin". How this goes is that we vote on a big list on our Discord. Then the top four go to a Twitter poll. This month we should name our heroes.
• Finalize the game design document. While it will be a living, breathing document, we still need to start with enough direction to start.
• Test card-based prototype. Some people love this influx of card based systems. This might help make combat more dynamic. Unsure whether this will be a distraction or not.

Important Links

If you want to see the project roadmap, there are two important links to check out.

https://open.codecks.io/prpg is where all tasks that have been scheduled reside. If you see a card here, it means we will work on it.

https://open.codecks.io/prpg-ideas is where all the odds and ends and ideas we have for the game live. Enemies, Abilities, Locations, and Potential Features that need to be fleshed out before we commit.

To join our mailing list and get periodic updates: 

https://dashboard.mailerlite.com/forms/134358/64469039111472360/share

If you want to get WAY involved, the official Binary Solo Discord is the place: https://discord.gg/rNp7E52qBg

See you next month,

Chad