2/25/18 Development Update

Hello all, and welcome to another development update. For this week, I chose to focus on a few things. The first of course being controller support. This week, support has been added to the game menus which includes functionality for the quest menus, spellbook and bestiary. You can now use the controller to scroll and select items in each of these game menus. Additionally, functionality has also been added to the special rooms, which include treasure chests and Arcana fonts along with all the tooltips associated with them. With these changes, most if not all of the combat dungeon crawling elements now have controller support. Yay! Moving forward I will also begin working on the other interfaces in the game namely the hero soul system, the deck building system, alchemy system and shop.

Next, I have also begun concepting and designing a new boss fight for the Mier Mines dungeon. As of right now I have implemented about half of the fight and I have to say it's looking good! Though it is still a little soon to say, I'll just have to wait and see how all the mechanics interplay with each other when I'm ready to test the fight.

Finally, I had more animations done for the currently implemented character, Cecilia. She now has fully animated spear dashes. On that note I've also begun talking with my artist in order to create other characters to help with another feature I am looking forward to adding, the companion system. More on that later when I begin working on it.

That's it for this week! See you guys next week.

2/19/18 Development Update

Hi, welcome back to another weekly update. Let's get right down to it, this week is a continuation of last week's work to bring controller support to my game. As of right now, support for using player inventory including all menus associated with the inventory has been implemented. Additionally, support for interacting with special rooms, ie Arcana Fonts and treasure chests have also been implemented.

On that note, I ran into an interesting design problem on how to transition the mouse targeting Arcana spells to the controller. Last week, I had a script that emulated the mouse cursor, but have decided to discontinue that idea due to problems with compatibility. Instead, I came up with my own solution to the problem that works virtually the same if not better than the last version. Additionally, I've begun to work on bringing support to the major shop menus as well as the deck building menu and talent menus. In short, bringing controller support to my game is moving along pretty smoothly all things considered, but there is still more work to be done.

I also had another presentation of my game at a demo night, which went pretty well. I got some more people testing as well as giving me some interesting ideas to toy around with. More on that next week hopefully.

Not really much else to report this week. It's really been retrofitting my old controls and UI to support the controller. ^_^"

2/11/18 Development Update

Hi and welcome back to another weekly update for my game, Hero Soul! First I'd like to thank everyone who made it out on Tuesday to playtest my game at the Playcrafting Winter Expo! I had a lot of fun talking with you guys!

For this week, I chose to focus on adding game controller support to my game. This is because during the expo I noticed that many people were not used to using the keyboard and mouse. So, as of thee end of this week many of the actions you can do now with the keyboard and mouse can now be done with an XBox 360 controller. This was actually a pretty fun thing to do, as I've never worked with the controller in Unity before and it was quite interesting learning how it worked.

For the most part, converting the movement controls and the combat were not very difficult, however when thinking how to convert the game mechanics such as certain Arcana Cards' effects or using the inventory menu was an interesting problem I had fun solving. For instance for Arcana cards that use the mouse to aim, you can now also use the right joystick to aim on the Xbox controller. However, as mentioned earlier I found that converting the inventory system I had currently had in place a challenge when converting to the controller, and this ate up most of my time this week. Though after struggling with it for a bit, I am proud to say that using the controller to navigate the inventory and other menus works if not better that with the mouse, but I'll let the player decide that one.

Overall, most of the things you can do in game can now be controlled with the gamepad, however there is still quite of bit of testing ahead of me to fully integrate the controller support. Please look forward to more updates regarding this.

2/4/18 Development Update

Welcome to another development update. For this week, along with testing and tuning of the quest and Soul systems, I focused on preparing the game for playtesting during the Playcrafting Winter Expo this Tuesday.

So first up, the sprite work I had requested was completed. This involves the addition of attack animations for the main character, though, the special attack still needs to be animated. The goal of this switch from the old attack animations to the new ones is because I thought it was awkward seeing the weapon sprite animate whereas the player sprite remained static. I hope this will make combat have more weight behind it and moving forward I want to animate more attacks.

Next up, I made changes to how Arcana Cards are discovered. Originally, cards were discovered 1 at a time, randomly, at Arcana Fonts that spawn in dungeons. The problem with this design is that it was kind of unfulfilling and highly based on randomness. So to remedy this, Arcana Fonts will now display 3 random cards, and players will then choose the one they want and in addition to unlocking the card, will receive 1 copy of the card. Like the previous iteration, cards will still be random, so you can still receive repeats of cards you already own, however now you will have some agency when building your deck as well as lessening the impact of getting repeat cards.

Finally, as I mentioned in previous posts, I've begun working on the new zone. Partially this is because showing off the forest every week is kind of getting bland but also to assist in the implementation of dungeon hazards. In order to spice dungeons up, aside from killing things I want to mix things up adding small puzzles or hazards in addition to killing enemies. For example in the cave level, some rooms will have a bat swarm hazard in which periodically areas will be swarmed by bats, hindering the player's movement. Hopefully through the implementation of these hazards new avenues of play which will emphasize good positioning.

That's it for this week! I'm excited to get people's opinion during the event this week.