Announcement

What’s new?

With that out of the way i’ll fill you in on what i’ve been working on throughout the past week. There’s going to be a bit to cover:

A new mob – Ogre Brute

So far we’ve established two different types of mobs: the Skeleton Archer which is a ranged enemy and the Slime which is a slow-moving melee enemy. I wanted to add a more intimidating but also tanky type of enemy into the mix so I went ahead with the Ogre Brute – this also fits the arena and fantasy theme.

So far it’s simply just a tankier enemy. Maybe a higher level ogre ability could be to pick up smaller enemies and throw them at the player. Also move animations are so hard to make.

Revamped background and tileset

So this was inevitable because they were placeholders.

The new background is a lot bigger, has softer/more appropriate colours, and an actual stage so it looks more like an arena. The ground tileset has been made darker version of the arena to give the illusion that it’s ground and closer than the background. The people in the background represented by the bright colours might change to look more like people though.

Healthbar

Enemies are now represented with a healthbar that displays their health and also level. I wanted level to be an important part of this game since enemy behaviour scales off of that:

Integrated shop with random loot

In previous updates I showed you guys a mockup of the shop UI. I have also integrated this into Unity and was able to populate said shop with random items. Obviously this will be more refined in future updates as we don’t want the player to receive strong items early-game or weak items late-game.

I’ve set up a basic UI element in the top right to represent the player’s gold and depending on the cost of the item, the player is able to buy and automatically equip these items.

One issue that has been bugging me is how I should address power creep. After all, if i’m going to slowly introduce stronger items to the player then old ones are just going to go through a cycle of being replaced. If anyone has any interesting ideas let me know in the comments.

First boss fight – Skeleton Knight (95% done)

Well… i’m not exactly going to mess with this boss any longer because this guy has been consuming all of my time to get working. There are definitely glaring bugs that i’ve noticed but now is not the time. Anyway, here is a showcase on the fight so far:

As you can see I was trying to run back and forth to encourage different behaviour. In his first state he is a lot more defensive, blocks attacks, moves slower, has a sword attack, and can summon an undead enemy. Once his health reaches a certain threshold his armor comes off and loses his shield, becoming a lot more aggressive in the process. This is where his moveset becomes summoning two undead at a time, a further distance sword attack (work in progress), and a blitz attack where he teleports near the player and slams down.

So that’s it.

Sorry if this post has gotten quite long. I’ll try to get out more frequent but less dense posts in if that’s better. As for my next steps, I want flesh out items a bit more and give the player stats/effects when equip. I’m also in the process of creating my own font. I will end the next post with a bunch of bug fixes. Thanks for checking out Devlog 0.7!