October Summary

Welcome to the second 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. In October we tried to finalize some of our major combat design decisions, and I feel happy about where we're at. There was progress every day and it was exciting to see.

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.)

How We Did

This milestone I went off-book. Early on the idea of abilities being in a deck that get shuffled and dealt to the player was back of mind. We tried it in a few playtests and decided it was time to make it a proper feature. Out of those playtests, we spent most of the month cleaning up combat to make it more legible. This was mostly untasked work. 

• Fixed up a prototype of a version of combat where instead of just disabling spots when you use all charges, a new ability is shuffled into that position. We had this working before without the idea of abilities having a number of charges. It met the design goal of feeling dynamic, but players were getting confused easily. Since ability charges was the other front runner, we tried combining the two and it works much better this time around. 
• Switch combat over to a finite state machine. This is actually kind of important because it means you can no longer drag characters around when you're watching combat unfold. It allows us to have obvious spots to put our status effect code. Boring, but important!
• Got the evolving behaviour plugin integrated into the game. This isn't 100% useful in the short term, but what it does is exciting. Evolving Behaviour uses learning to help create AIs that best accomplish the goals you define for them. What does that malarky mean for Locus? We can tell Evolving Behaviour to try and generate an AI that worries about self preservation and let it run trials to see what kind of behavior tree would best accomplish this goal. We can then select the one we liked best. To make this useful, we need to make a bunch of different actions with fine-grained logic, but we're on our way!
  
• Added the art for the Buttdile and Owl Mole and created them as enemies you can fight. (If you have a better name idea for Owl Mole, drop it in the comments!)
  
  
• Added a bunch of new abilities. This was key to make sure there was enough variance in testing out the combat decks. I added five new abilities:
  • Freeze. Does minor ice damage and freezes the position under the enemy. A frozen space cannot be stopped on when selecting the character's position / ability.
  • Acid. Poisons the target, causing them to take a small amount of damage after each turn for the next X turns.
  • Chain Lightning. Chain lightning deals electric damage to the chosen target and to those one space away.  Each time they chain the damage is decreased slightly.
  • Earthquake. The Earth version of Chain Lightning.
  • Rock Throw. A medium Earth damage attack.
• UI Work! Redid the UI to add a little bit of style. This ties the UI more directly to the party and makes it more obvious who is currently selected. It also adds descriptions of the selected ability and makes the UI fit much better on certain devices.
• Lots of little combat visual tweaks to make things look better.
  • Added camera shakes to give weight to attacks.
  • Reduced all the particles getting in the way.
  • Made the damage numbers appear right when the attack happens.
  • Made the ability uses go down 
  • Removed the targets while attacks are displaying to reduce visual clutter.
  • Made the next ability from the deck go directly to the correct spot.
  • Moved the ability UI to be in front of the player instead of under.

We had a small handful of things that we wanted to get done but ended up slipping into November. Nothing major, but a few things. 

• Worked on the Windows build system but ended up falling short. Ended up hitting a wall in which hardware was required, so this feature was pushed. (It should be done in November! The hardware has been acquired!)
• Added the idea of a Save Game. We added levels to heroes and metadata to abilities so that a player can save their characters and those characters abilities. (You can edit abilities!) It was almost done in October but caused a huge ripple in how to get this info from save game to combat. (It is finished for November, though!)
• Showing who the heroes are targeting better. It almost made it in October, but the idea is that we will show more obvious lines going from hero to enemy. This part got done a few days after, but now we also need to tweak the targets to make sure it all works well.

November Goals

Make a playable demo. The goal here is to make it so that the player can start in Town, talk to some people, and then play through a small dungeon.

November Plans

• Finish the save data system. (Or enough for the demo.) This is mostly done, though we don't have code paths to add / remove abilities from the character or upgrade an ability.
• Create a status effect that works every time the character is dragged from one spot to another.  This would be useful for making status effects that limit the player's movement. Perhaps fire does a damage every time you drag across instead of stay on it. Or maybe a trap that locks you to the spot if you move across it.
• Have to save the status of a dungeon so that if you quit and restart, it comes back as you left it.
• Replace the little alien dude in explore mode with the active party.
• Make the Buttdile and Mole Owl (give us a name!) first class enemies with their real abilities.
• Hopefully we get the sprite animations for Bronx. Then we can add the flipbook animations so that a big heavy punch will actually be a big heavy punch instead of just kinda jumping around.
• Answer the big remaining question about ability decks:  How do players manage their deck? Does it work like Dominion or other card builders where buying / disposing of abilities is an important aspect? Or do we encourage trying tons of decks by having a simple deck building menu?

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

And if you want to see sweet, sweet live dev streams of the game, check out http://www.twitch.tv/binarysologames on Fridays from 1 - 3 PM EST.

See you next month,

Chad