Welcome back everyone, this is Update 2 to Project Phases. It focuses primarily on the new overworld. This is a much smaller update, since the biggest new change are some new graphics. I’ll also talk a bit about what’s next at the end. So lets see what is new.
Overworld Changes
Starting up the game, you can see a big change immediately with the new overworld graphics. They are basic (and not very good looking) tile sprites. There are only two sprites, grass and dirt but it is better than what we had before (which was literally nothing). I also added some other things to the overworld. First, signs which simply create a message when you hover over them. This is certainly something I’ll flesh out more later, but this was more to test having multiple objects in the world with unique data. Second is the heart, when you touch it, you will be healed to full health. Your health is always displayed in the top right corner, so you can check it there.
Battle Changes
There are barely any changes to the battle system besides small bug fixes. The big one is that if you don’t have enough points or time for something, a message appears at the top of the attack menu. Before it was a debug pop-up box, but now it is an in-game message. There are also small temporary changes for testing, such as the enemy only has 1 health to start the battle.
Like I said, it’s a pretty small update but good none the less. I have some things to figure out as I continue to work on this. For example, I’m not sure if I want points to be persistent between battles like your health. On one hand, doing so would allow for more variance between battles. However, starting a battle when low points is a huge disadvantage and could be especially brutal for something like boss fights. So I will have to mess around and decide what works best. In the immediate future however, the next update should be about enemy AI which will help lead into multiple-player combat. Lot to look forward to!
Thanks for reading,
Andy
Note: Project Phases Update 1-7 all had their posts written after their release. I did not launch the website until January 25th, 2019, so any post dated before then were created after the fact for the site and the date listed for these posts is when I released the video. I wrote these posts using the showcase videos and my notes from each update as reference and I tried to make sure I didn’t include any future information (i.e. I only wrote what I would have written at the time). However, they are also less in depth since I didn’t write notes as I do know for the purpose of the site. Just want to be clear about the timeline since it may be a bit confusing. Thanks!