Making a combat system is hard. Doubly so when you're trying something a bit new.

With the combat demo, I chose to begin my focus with the potions and artifacts systems. This made for an interesting theming for the demo ("Erotic Potion Delivery!"), as well as start development on a much-neglected system for HMA, that being the crafting and potions/witchcraft courses.

This led to some rather interesting problems a week ago when I finally completed enough to send a rough draft of the demo to my fiance and a friend or two, who responded with "It's looking good... but combat feels kinda off"

To make a long story short.... it's going to be a bit longer before I have the demo out! My goal was by the end of April, but things had to go back to the drawing board for a bit. In this devlog we'll go into the hows and whys, as well as showing progress on the artwork for Lily's first scenes and more.

So, starting with my original idea for the combat system. Your basic attack (a punch), does basically nothing, which makes sense as Lily isn't particularly a powerful melee fighter. Your two starting skills are poison flask and healing potions, both of which are active skills that require you to have the appropriate item to use, pretty much exactly like the previous versions for HMA.

I implemented a rough day-night system and resource/monster spawning and sent it out for feedback, and the feedback was... not the best.

It just didn't feel good to not have a basic attack that could kill enemies, even if it was a little weak, was the main one. The starting tutorial also didn't quite cover things in a good way, and to make matters worse, crafting itself was apparently "boring" Gathering materials was fine, but not quite keeping up with usage and made it feel a bit grindy to craft and gather.

All problems that needed some more time to work on and fix!

I worked in a tiered system of potions now, where you can upgrade your poison and healing potions with a slightly more in-depth crafting system. At the lowest level, a "Poison Dust" skill was added to give a weak but always-usable attack option. In addition, the tutorials are in the process of being entirely overhauled to have better pacing and structure.

As a result of these setbacks, as well as a general desire to do better, the demo's going to take a bit longer! I'm not going to give a specific date, but hopefully not too long. There's still lots more to do, as I hadn't quite finished the drawing and animation process for Lily's artwork either, as well as still needing to rework the stats screen for the demo so it shows Lily instead of Olivia!

Although it won't be in the first demo, I also started design/mockups of the first proper dungeon in the game, a location style that should be familiar to everyone.

A slimey waterway! The goal here being to create a style for the waterways of HMA. It's a little dark (because I'm using a fog and fun lighting), but the brighten spell should make a return to help see better! (Although in Lily's case, it might just be torches since she's not a strong magic user without spirits!)

Here's it without any of the fow effects, for comparison. All just a rough draft for the area's style and decoration, tall walls give it an interesting feeling i want to experiment with.

Speaking of spirits though, they also have a rough implementation that needs more work! Instead of having them be immediately used upon pickup like they are now, I'm thinking of having a system now where you pick it up and it's "stored" as a UI element and the spirit bar is filled but drains at a slow rate of 1/10th speed until you activate them. This would allow more strategic usage of spirits by allowing you to delay their usage until you need it.