Welcome back everyone to Update 4 of Project Phases. These next two updates are two parts of the same update of Multiple Player Combat. One part will be multiple player combat while the next one will be multiple enemy combat. Before this update, you could only fight with one character in your party at a time but now you can fight with three at once! Oh, before we start too, another reminder that every Project Phases Update also releases with a corresponding video showing what’s new. It’s link on this page so be sure to check it out! With that explanation out of the way, lets go over what’s new!
Main Menu
First, we got some main menu changes. Since there is not proper party screen or anything, you need a way to select which characters you want in battle. In the “Setup” menu on the main menu, there is a new button called “Player Select”. Here you can select which character(s) you want to use. You have 3 options, Daryl, Clint and Oliver. Daryl is a balanced character (and the character that was already in the game), Clint is the healer and Oliver is a tank like character. Each character works independently from each other; meaning if you only want to fight with one by themselves, you can.
Overworld Changes
Jumping into the game, you will instantly see the characters on the left-hand side of the screen along with their stats. This is a temporary menu for the player stats until I get something a bit more official. The characters shown here will change depending if you have selected them in the menu discussed earlier; so if you only select Oliver, only Oliver will appear in the menu.
One final thing about the overworld. The character you move around in the overworld is dependent on who you have selected. Daryl always takes priority, followed by Clint and then Oliver. So, if you select Clint and Oliver, you will play as Clint. If you select Daryl and Oliver, you will play as Daryl. Just a small detail, but hopefully that makes sense.
Battle Changes
The bulk of the changes in this update are in the battles. When you start a battle, you will see all of your selected characters on the left side. I think it looks really great to have all that space filled with the different characters (especially after looking at a lot of empty space before).
There are a lot of back-end changes that needed to be made to make this possible. Before, I only ever had the one player/enemy to worry about so I only checked for them. I had to adjust everything to check for the other players too which took quite a bit of time. Outside of those, there are a lot of small front-facing changes that I will just list off for simplicity.
- Everyone has a new skip button next to their character, clicking that will allow you to skip any phase you are in including the wait and defend phase.
- The attack menu now disappears whenever it is not in use (i.e. when nobody is in their attack phase).
- The attack menu is now outlined with a color (either blue, green or red). This corresponds to one of the character’s shirt and helps you figure out who you are controlling.
- Depending on who is fighting, the positions of the players will always be centered. If you only selected two players, they will be centered accordingly.
- The enemy attacks everyone at once now. This is temporary until I get all of the other enemies in but is something to note. This means that a lot of what I did last update is currently broken, but hopefully I get everything fixed up again soon.
- Everyone now has a maximum health and cannot go over it. I’m shocked I didn’t have this in before.
New Characters
Since there are two new characters, I had to make new attacks and stats for them. I mentioned briefly before, but the new characters fill typical RPG roles. Clint is a healer with many support attacks while Oliver is a tank with slow, but hard hitting attacks. I made three attacks for each making six new attacks in total (nine attacks if we include Daryl). Here is a quick rundown of every character’s attacks and stats…
Characters –
- Daryl – 25 Max Health, 8 Points, 10 Time
- Clint – 30 Max Health, 12 Points, 6 Time
- Oliver – 50 Max Health, 10 Points, 16 Time
Attacks –
- Slash (Daryl) – Does 10 damage, uses 3 Points and 5 Time. Does 2 damage in the defend phase.
- Fury(Daryl) – Does 15 damage, uses 5 Points and 7 Time.
- Heal (Daryl) – Heal 5 HP to whoever used it, uses 4 Points and 3 Time
- Wide Slash (Oliver) – Does 10 damage, uses 7 Points and 8 Time. Does damage to all enemies.
- Smash Down (Oliver) – Does 20 damage, uses 10 Points and 12 Time.
- Defense Break (Oliver) – Does 10 damage, uses 10 Points and 4 Time. Only work if hits in the Defend phase. If successfully hit in defend phase, it will make enemy’s defend phase act like a wait phase. (Demonstration in gif)
- Choice Heal (Clint) – Heal 10 HP to whoever is selected, uses 5 Points and 2 Time.
- Party Heal (Clint) – Heal 7 HP to the entire party, uses 8 Points and 5 Time.
- Living strike (Clint) – Does a certain amount of damage depending on the health of the user. The lower the user’s health, the more powerful the attack. Uses 4 Points and 4 time.
By far the hardest move to program was Choice Heal. This is because for it to work, you must select a player. Up to this point, you didn’t have to select anything for any move, so this was a whole new system for me. It took quite a bit of time to get it working, but I am happy on how it turned out. I would have had to have implemented it eventually for the next update anyways since you must select which enemy to attack for almost every move, so it was worth it.
This has been the most difficult update yet. There is so many small things that had to be programmed in to get anything to work, I’m really only going over the changes that effect the player. There are a lot of bugs and glitches that still need to be figured out, and honestly, it’s a bit intimidating knowing I have to fix those. However, I am happy with the results and I am ready to keep it going with the next update. As mentioned, the next update will be multiple enemy combat. Hopefully Clockman will bring some friends along since he seems pretty outnumbered right now.
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!