February 2023: Combat, ahoy!
Howdy ho! Your favorite Kentuckian-based developer has returned to report this month’s progress!
We’ve been working on combat steadily. Of course, it’s not so simple as plugging it in. We’ve had to develop the UI for it and build all sorts of system for it to stand on top of. But we’re getting closer. A lot of the month has also been discussing and planning as well, since converting a combat system designed for a 2D game into a design for a 3D game can be a lot more work than it seems like.
Formalities and greetings aside, lets start digging into what we’ve been working on.
Combat HUD
A lot of the month’s work has been in developing all of the HUD elements I’ll need for combat, such as the battle start screen, animated labels, the command deck, and so on. Here’s an early look at these elements in action:
Keep in mind of course, this is all early footage, and there’s a lot of tweaking and polish to be done. Right now, I’m focused on paving the way for all of the core functionality, then we typically go back and make it all buttery smooth.
The menu that opens around the player is called the “Command Deck,” this system a bit of its own design and coding too, since it will vary based on which one of the options you select. It took a bit longer to code than it normally would have because I made it with customization in mind, in case we open it up to modding someday.
You’ll notice that the Command Deck is closing and re-opening on different characters: that’s me testing the “Standby” option, which will let you give up your turn and save it for later. It can be activated at a press of a button later so that you can choose the most opportune time to spend your turn. We’ll let you make your own theories on what the rest of the commands do for now.
A screenshot of how this HUD looked in Robot Farm’s old 2D version for comparison. Tell us what you think of the comparison by @’ing us on Twitter or telling us on our community Discord!
A brand new serializer
We also finally built our own custom serializer back into RF3D. We had made one for the old 2D version of the game so that we would have a lot of control over our serializer, and now it’s working in RF3D.
Just to briefly explain, a “serializer” is just a tool that allows us to save and load files. In our case, really complex ones, easily. The problem is they’re usually a blackbox, so manage save files between different versions of the game is a mess.
Our new custom one gives us full control over the files, so porting save files between different versions of the game should be fine - which gives us tons of control over patches and updates.
This and that
That’s about all I have to say for now. I know it doesn’t seem like much, but there’s a lot of progress being made. I mostly want to try and keep things a bit close to our chest for now, so we can surprise everyone later.
Stay tuned! And if you have some money to spare, consider donating to our Patreon to help with development!
See ya next month!
♥ NOKORIWARE