Delving Update 8 Placeholder

Hi!

I never quite know how to start these updates. Oh well. I took a break from Delver last week to work on the Brackeys game jam with some pals. I hope everyone saw our submission, Skytanic! I’m very proud of it, I think we did a great job.

Back to Delver! I took a break, but not before getting a whole heap of stuff done. My focus lately has been polishing up some core bits of the combat. I took a bash previously at improving the Healthbars. In the last update I overhauled them, but wasn’t very happy with the result. This time I planned out a little better and learned from what went wrong last time, and I’m really happy to say the third iteration came out more or less exactly how I wanted. The display fits together better with the UI, the bar scales in a more intuitive way based on how much block you have, and there’s even an animation that plays when block is broken and the shield on the bar shatters.

Other than that, there are various extra visual touches. When characters enter battle or swap in they do a little cheering animation if they’re ready, and there are now different animations with missiles attached, rather than just fireballs.There are a few more sprites now to boot.

I implemented character traits months and months and months ago, but never got around to actually making very many of them, so just in the last week I’ve started popping in more to round out the cast. These are reactive abilities that will grant a buff or use a skill when a trigger happens, like being attacked, block breaking, etc. The more I look at these the more ideas I get for skills and traits I could fit in without too much work, which is really satisfying.

I often worry I'm losing sight of the goal working on long term projects. If I work on the healthbars, I wonder if that's polish that I shouldn't be touching, if I keep tinkering with the combat system I feel like I'm never making content. I think for the next update I'm going to try to refocus on getting something fit to release. There's a lot of stuff in the game now, and I'd really love to hear what other people think of it.

Until next time!