The beginning of last week was rough. Being a programmer at heart, balancing is often hard for me to do because there is no obvious right answer. My goal has been to improve combat; however, this is much trickier than I would like.
There are two major constraints that are making this much more challenging than it should be. First is that the terrain is randomly generated and players can change it around. Secondly, adding animations to our characters can be troublesome. Despite these constraints, combat is starting to come around. Some things I have done so far:
- Refine timing of some monster attacks
- Oil slime second attack
- Sand Runner (now called Ortomi) second attack
- Scrapped shields and dashing
- Brought back dashing with double direction key press
- Started working on new monster spawning system dubbed “Conflict”
The Oil Slime’s new ranged attack
Beyond combat, modding API reference documentation has finally began to take shape. Even though it still has a long ways to go it still is looking good. Here is a sample of what it looks like.
Right now nearly all functions look like this Player.canEquip() with no named arguments and no description text. I would like to eventually have all functions documented (or at least all of the frequently used) like Player.loadInfo() with nice arg names and docstrings. This documentation will also provide how-to mod tutorials. However, this work that can quickly become outdated, so I will cautiously work on it and may seek outside help. If you want to work with me on writing documentation, let me know. Once complete, this will undoubtedly prove to be an invaluable resource to modders.
Lastly, I finally convinced myself to plan the next few months of development which involves several features and much content. For most of Crea’s development I just have been designing as I go, but lately I have found myself getting slowed down by having to context switch too frequently. I am just about done planning things and am quite excited with the results which I will divulge later. Now I just have to implement them!
This next week I am hoping to wrap up these combat changes and the conflict system, which will probably take up the majority of the week. I am anxious to get a new beta build out so I will be working towards getting things cleaned up and ready for a release.