Devlog #7 (Palace, Battle System, Inventory)

First of all, with everything going on in the world, my schedule is fucked. No one in my family is ill or dead or any of that, so it could certainly be worse, but I have three kids, so having the schools shut down makes it much harder to find time to sit down and actually accomplish things.

That said, I've got a lot done! I've spent the past week remaking some of the temple content in the background in a way that I should have done it in the first place. It's now much easier for me to add new skills, new titles, new gods, and new factions (which is what the temple is). I've also managed to remove about a thousand lines of code while also improving functionality. I'm finally feeling like an actual developer.

Anyway, no one will notice those things.

I've started work on the inventory system: equiping, unequipping, stat-modifiers, consumables, money, item icons, item descriptions, stat-change previews, the list is really long. This is a system that will be in the code in the next release, but it won't be used until the next milestone release.

I'm also working on finalizing the battle system (or at least the first version of the battle system). In the images for this post, you'll see the alpha version of the Cockatrice ('chicken', 'cock-a-lota-trice'), for the battle system (obviously you'll need to fight the chicken). The animation isn't finished and the versions I made after that gif have less flicker in the pixels. I think it'll look pretty good. I'm planning on a semi-pixel art style for the adventuring/battle content of the game, but that's something that I'll want patron feedback on when I have more of the underlying system in place.

Next, the palace! I was pleased with an existing asset I found on the Daz store, so I repurposed that instead of making an entirely new environment for the palace parlor/waiting room. Man, that saved me a ton of time. The palace throne chamber and bedroom and some other stuff will need to be made individually, I think, but I've built so many environments at this point that I may have some things I've already done that I can repurpose with some tweaks. We'll see. The next release will introduce some palace characters before we finally see Zelda, but there will be no interactions yet.

Finally! While I'm stuck with kids, I'm working through debugging an Android release version. I hope to have that ready for the next Patron release (hopefully beginning of next week, depending on how much I can get done this weekend.)

Cheers!