The Fool's Path | devlog 8

It's that time again. Time to write down what I've been working on and what my plans are. 

I haven't finished level 9 yet but I started work on level 10 anyway. I originally planned on having 9 levels, but it didn't feel right. I needed something different to end on.  So I decided one more level. This level is more like an arena. Its a big square lawn with a checkered grass pattern to better show the tiles. There are 4 doors on each wall of the square. The plan is every few turns a door will open and let in more enemies. So the player needs to rush to kill the first wave before the second wave shows up. I needed the doors to be wider so the enemies get vision so I had to come up with a whole other door system. The first door is opened by a floor switch and the rest will be opened when the turn count reaches a certain number. This will need lots of testing and may change by the time I am done with it. 

I was thinking each wave of enemies that is spawned will be of a different type. So a group of skeletons, then a group of slimes and so on for every type of enemy in the game. X-COM EW did the same thing. I want to have a final boss necromancer that will be the last enemy to show up. I need to find another model for this, because the regular wizard model won't cut it. The boss necromancer could have multiple abilities, lots of hit points, and maybe multiple phases. This last level is going to be pretty elaborate and should be a good test of what I have. If I can get this last level to work, then the rest should be no problem. 

I added yet another enemy type. The ice wizard. He's just the evil wizard colored blue. He shoots bolts of ice that can freeze your units for a turn. If a unit is hit by the ice bolt, their AP goes to 0 and I instance a transparent ice block on top of them to show that they are frozen. They remain frozen until the next enemy turn, where the wizard could freeze you again before you can act. So 1v1 against an ice wizard won't work. The ice wizard can also attack with his staff if you get close. When paired with other enemies it will take a bit more strategy to win. 

The penalty for one of your units dying is the level restarts from the beginning. This might be too harsh for the arena map. I had plans on a revive system if one of your units health goes to zero. I could still try to add it but it's a little late in the game. I will just have to test it and see how it feels, and go from there. 

I'm slowly fixing one of the problems with my tile system. In order to turn off navigation for occupied tiles, I need to swap the tile the unit is standing on with a unwalkable tile. Right now I switch it to a generic brown tile that doesn't match the surrounding floor tiles. So by the time the battle is done the floor is pocked with these brown tiles. This was especially bad for the winter levels that have ice tiles. So I had to make a corresponding unwalkable tile for every walkable tile in the game. Then check what type of tile the unit starts on, and switch back to it on death or movement. It's still not perfect but I think I'm ok with sometimes the tiles get messed up. 

I added a backdrop to the escape menu. It's a unfurled scroll that I generated using DALL-E. I signed up for a mid journey beta too, but I think DALL-E is better for my purposes of making UI elements. It's still time consuming to get it to make something I can use. I ended up drawing a pixel art version of what I wanted and gave it as a reference. I just said like this but more detailed and what I got I think fits ok. I'm making this game like solo so I'm allowed to generate some art here and there. 

I think there are people out there who would appreciate this game for it's DIY style. All the models are scavenged from the internet and remixed into something unique. It's hard to promote because the art for the game isn't exactly triple A, and it being turn based there's not that many good action shots. I think if people knew the amount of work and years of knowledge needed to make this, they would give it a chance and like it. One minute I think it's the greatest shit of all time, and the next I think it's trash. With no feedback I can't be sure.

I wanted to make one of these devlogs before I really started on level 10 to force myself to think about what my plans are. When making something this complicated I usually just start with the dumbest, simplest way I can think of, but this may require a bit more planning. We will see in the next one of these if I failed, or got it working.  

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