11/26/17 Development Update

Hello all!  If you are from the US, I hope your Thanksgiving was great.

This week, I worked almost extensively on the the deck building system that I showcases last week. I am glad to say that I accomplished more that I expected this week. As of now, you can build a deck, craft and disenchant cards! Here is a preview on how it works:

You will start the game with a randomly generated deck, which includes 3 copies of 4 common cards and 1 uncommon card. These will be your starter deck. By playing through the game you will discover new cards which you can then craft using Arcana, which is collected by killing monsters. Besides crafting cards, you can also disenchant cards receiving some of the Arcana used to craft them. With that out of the way I can now begin to focus on making cool cards and cool card effects. :D

Moving on, I also began working more the town, Weiss. Specifically, I wanted to work on the interiors of the shops and stores. Originally, entering a store/shop would just open the shopping interface, though, after some thought I think it would be a better game play experience to have players walk into the stores and interact with the shop keep to open the shopping interface. Here is a WIP, of the Inn.

11/19/17 Development Update

Hello all! Welcome back to another weekly update for my game Hero Soul. This was a pretty eventful week.

First off, I flushed out the caves I was working on last week. Here's a picture below:

As of now the caves level is not quite a fully functional dungeon, thought many aspects are done. Most of the rooms, the loot tables, the levels have been finished. All that's really left now is the hard part, creating the enemies and most importantly the boss.

Moving on, I also started work on a major system for the game. Magic in my game is handled through the Arcana system where players use cards to cast spells. Currently there is still a lot of work that still needs to be done and this week I took a step forward. A key component to the Arcana System is the player's ability to create their own Arcana Decks to use. To do this, a deck building system needed to be built up. Below is the first progress I have made on the deck building system.

This first prototype is heavily derived from Hearthstone's deck builder which I like because of it's simplicity. Moving forward, I'd like to see how this turns out . ^.^

11/12/17 Development Update

Hello and welcome back to another development update! If you haven't  noticed already, my game now has a logo, created by the artists Eadgear and ElieTaping, who did the character art and logo art respectively.

On that note, let's start the update.A lot of this week has been working on the break skill system and editing other systems to fit with it. Here's a video on what a break skill looks like. The video below shows a sample break skill this character will have available to them.

Essentially these are powerful skills that build up over time, after being attacked or doing damage. These break skills will be tied into a future system, which I will discuss later. Characters will also have multiple "levels" of break, where each level unleashes a stronger skill. (Similar to fighting games like Street Fighter). There is still much more work that needs to be done!

I also spent this week creating more rooms for my game. This included more rooms for the first level, the forest zone and starting work on a new zone. This is mainly to increase the variance when a player enters a level. I really want players to see less repeated rooms when the a dungeon is generated. Additionally, I've been thinking of ways to spice rooms up. Instead of always having rooms filled with monsters maybe have rooms with puzzles? I'm excited to see if I can! I'll leave off this week teasing the new level in development. Stay tuned. :)

11/5/2017 Development Update

Howdy all! I'm here for another development update for my game Hero Soul.

First off, the bugs found in the Halloween Expo have mostly been fixed! On that note I want to talk about some of the fixes. Aside from the glaring bugs, a big thing that I noticed was the lack of clarity with the player's "special skill", the right mouse click. For the first character, Cecilia, her special skill is a dash where the player holds and releases the right mouse button. The longer the mouse key is held, the further they will go and more damage they will deal. However I noticed that many players just clicked instead of holding. To increase the clarity of this, a charge bar has been added.

Example of player charging

Now, when a player uses the dash "special skill" they will see a bar in addition to the visual queue of the character sprite turning red. Hopefully this will allow people to grasp the charge mechanic better.

For this update I'd like to also discuss another game mechanic that I am in the process of implementing the "Break Skill"(totally not a limit break rip off). In my opinion nothing makes a player genuinely feel like a hero unless they have an over-the-top super ability. Along those lines, I have decided to begin implementing this feature. Pretty much, as you attack and get hurt your "Break Meter" will fill up. When it is sufficiently full, you are then allowed to use you "Break Skill" or super power. These "Break Skills" will be associated with the Hero Soul, but that's for another time. I'm still working out the details of this so stay tuned!

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