So I finally got to making a small video for pearlessential. Like the game, it was overscoped and I spent a bit too much time producing it, but I'm happy with how it turned out.

It also let me polish up my video producing skills which is nice.

Character Switching

So until this point, you could only play as Alice. But now you can play as the other six! Still need to work on their field abilities haha. I want one of them to do a ground pound move, but the animation I cooked up looks pretty bad... most of my animations look pretty bad tbh...

Wishlist -> as if I would give you the link to this game's Steam page that easily.

Explosives Cont.

Physics objects are really fun to play with! Another reason you should just make a 3D game with an isometric perspective instead of a pure 2D one. Not to say you couldn't do this in pure 2D...

Anyway, I guess this means I need to come up with a reason you'd find a ton of crates lying around. Maybe a warehouse level... and a quest to find a needle in a crate stack...?

⚠️TRADE OFFER ⚠️ i receive: a wishlist -> https://store.steampowered.com/app/3163190 you receive: an email on release!

Explosives

So I sorta like to develop by copying Zelda's homework. In this case, that means adding a bomb object. You can bomb jump with it, although not as crazy as the BOTW speedrun tech shenanigans lol.

I plan for the player to use this when they need MORE destructive power to proceed. I guess I should work on a breakable wall model.

You can wishlist this game on Steam! -> https://store.steampowered.com/app/3163190

Party Management

While you can do some light management in other places, this is a menu dedicated to tweaking your party. The design was inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics and it works for the most part haha. It's been a while since I posted! This game has a Steam page now which you can find here -> https://store.steampowered.com/app/3163190

Personalization

I dream of adding alternate character skins and whatnot, but that's a lot of work and I should focus on other things. So for now all you can change is the X-ray color.

Procedural Cyclic Slash

Get the code for this shader here -> https://godotshaders.com/shader/procedural-cyclic-slash/

This is a really jank shader, but it looks pretty nice when the values are just right. So that's what this post is for! I'll help you with understanding the uniforms and value setup and leave some general tips so you can experiment easily on your own.

Options Menu

The coolest thing this menu has is keybinding. I need to tweak it a bit so that the user has to specify that they want to apply changes rather than instantly updating the game settings

NPC Reactivity

It's a small thing, but I added this system so that other game objects can pull the attention of NPCs nearby so that it seems like they are reacting to what the player or environment does. I really need to look into drawing more sprites, all my game characters have so little in terms of expression. It's a bit sad...

Dialogue and Camera

So this is really basic but also really cool. Once you get displaying text sorted, a cool feature you should add to your dialogue system is the ability for it to move the camera around, with good application I think you can get really cinematic with it haha. In-game cutscenes are kinda crazy now that I think about it. I wonder if there are any resources diving into how studios tackle making them. I need to hit up the GDC vault lol.

Plaintext parser

So my dialogue scripts used to be JSON since the initial tutorials and resources I found suggested it. For some reason, I thought writing my own Yarnspinner-like system would be better, so I did that. Now my dialogue scripts are written as plain text. The tool in the video above lets me write and see changes in the actual game UI. All in all it's incredibly jank.