trying out a funkier visual style.
i quite like it. once it's a little more polished i think i'll mix it in with what i've already got.
not a lot of other progress because i'm occupied with travelling. but (1) action menu is back in and (2) actions' shapes can be previewed again.
getting the actor info panels back in.
took the opportunity to make my own small font (vs. previously using improv gold by somepx). pentacom's font maker is great, actually, compared to ones i had used before.
been debating centralizing the trait system more. bad dream's traits are like little perma-status effects that apply to specific actors, which can be removed and collected by the woodcarver for use in the forge, which is the main "getting stronger" loop.
bad dream has a health system that uses very low numbers. an average actor has, like, two hit points. what i've been thinking about is removing the health system entirely in favor of using traits as actors' hit points—you kill actors not by reducing their hp to 0 but by chipping away their traits until there's nothing left of them.
it's thematically very fun. will i do that? i dunno.
it's pretty cool in that enemies literally get weaker as they lose "health"/traits. or stronger, if they're losing negative traits. i can customize that curve, something i couldn't do before.
but there's some issues... potentially allowing you to infinitely farm traits if you have an enemy that can heal its allies (here, "healing" would mean "adding more traits"). it also ties the trait collection system directly to winning battles, whereas before it was more of a risk/reward thing—stay in battle and collect as many traits as possible or just kill the enemy to reduce the risk of a wipeout.
i definitely want something to happen when an actor hits 0 traits. i don't think it's death.
i'm doing the one thing no solo developer should ever do: starting over. well, kind of.
the old version was looking good! but its battle systems were (1) imo too derivative and (2) baked into the game's code. so reworking those systems means ripping out a lot of stuff. agh
i'm electing to clean my slate and build these systems over again, with a bit more care. i've got some good stuff written down, but i haven't had time to implement them yet... uni and such.
i think this semi-restart is a good time to start devlogging, yeah?