Kinetic Cipher (Ace) Dev Blog #4

You can blame displaying Nero’s second attack for why I am still on 3 maps.

It’s been a while but I’ve been really busy first with work then with personal life but I have worked on Kinetic Cipher. Like anyone who has made a game, the last 10% of something seems to take as long as the first 90%. Displaying the second attack for the dual wielders (and using the correct hand) took a silly length of time to implement. Speaking of things taking a silly length of time, getting the turn order display (not pictured) to work and display both the current and next turn is also taking a silly amount of time – I should really just ignore animating it for the time being.

As for the rest of the battle system, it has come along nicely. Everyone takes their turns individually and you can pass to take your turn later in the turn. I haven’t yet finished the experiment with agility giving you additional turns as I’m working on the turn order display first. I think as much as I loved the icons for stats in Kinetic Cipher, it’s only going to give me headaches going forward, I’m going to try and retain them for  HP/MPs being as the battle sprites have some cool animations for stats involving them but as you can see in the screenshots, the MP symbol didn’t work and honestly I’m not sure why, I got it from the character map of the exact font that is being used.

At least the battle system is beginning to feel almost complete.

It’ll probably be a while before the next dev blog as RMN is having a five week contest but after that it’ll probably be time for release something to come around and I’m hoping I’ll be able to use Kinetic Cipher for that, assuming I move from coding systems to actually making content.

Kinetic Cipher (Ace) Dev Blog #3

So much touching… Also still on 3 maps… Also look the animation is now 1-2-3-2!! Over 30 Aristocrabs were harmed during the making of these gifs.

So I didn’t strictly achieve what I set out to do this week, I had hoped to have completed the battle system by now but when I set that as my goal I didn’t consider how much work the touch encounters would be. It has taken me the best part of three days to code the touch encounters. First to get a satisfying collision detection with the ability to run away and have the enemy wait three seconds before resuming their movement. Second was all the types of encounter which I really did not think about, especially when I then have to code them into the animated battlers… So three days later I’m fairly happy with how they’ve turned out. Everybody now faces the correct way when attacking and attack on the correct side of their target.

As for the other four days I was busy two of them and the other two were spent improving my battle character converter and adding in weapons and trying to change how dual wielding worked animation wise (sadly still not done). I’m away next week so it’s unlikely that I’ll do a dev blog. Naturally the battle system will remain my goal though when I get back.