For the first prototype demo of the new combat update, I thought I’d start with an overview of the potential new features and combat systems that we will hopefully be bringing into HMA with the major combat update.

This is not a listing of all of the new features and changes planned for HMA’s next update, just the new features that were currently prototyped and tested with Lily’s Erotic Potion Delivery, the first combat update demo, available now on steam, patreon, subscribestar, and itch.io.

I’ll divide these into General Changes/Systems Updates, Enemy-Actions, and finally Player-Actions

-          The first and perhaps most major system update is that we have working bust images finally!

o   It took me quite some time to learn how to use Live2d for RPGmaker MV (And now MZ, more about that soon), but, along with some in-depth research into its limitations and usage via Lily’s Erotic Potion Delivery, we now have it working pretty well

o   I still have a few things I want to try with it, including learning how the expressions systems work and seeing if it can let me do things like changeable outfits, but for now this system is in a pretty good place! We have idle animations and general expression changing at runtime now!

-          In a similar vein as above, thanks to the plugin AnimaX and its powerful set of features, I can do things like casting, running, and attack animations in pixel art!

o   I only scratched the surface of this system with Lily’s game and hope to have a heavy focus on learning pixel-art animation over the next set of development!

Enemy Actions

-          Standard enemies now can properly grapple and use erotic attacks, and you can struggle (or not, your choice!)

o   The general idea behind this system is for each enemies conditions and resistance scenes to have unique triggers and thresholds, from telegraphed attacks you should probably dodge like a hooligan’s comets to more subtle entry conditions like Imps waiting for you to be incapacitated by paralysis status effects, the goal is for everything to have ways to counter and fall into them!

o   Expect this to go through another iteration or two before I’m happy with its implementation, it’s still a bit too buggy/hard-coded for my liking, and I want to transition to using the standard hotbar and having the player have mostly free access to skills that they have, rather than a hard-coded arrow-key setup that’s a bit more finicky

o   Most enemies with stronger skills or sometimes fun h-scenes (hooligans!) will telegraph them before firing off the attack, either with an animation upon themselves (hooligan brawlers), or a target on the ground indicating the effect range and sometimes timing (Hooligan mages), or even a cast bar with something like “Stabbing Lightning (Straight)” for a straight-shot line of aoes!

o   The goal from this point on is to be more careful and deliberate with enemy design so that these telegraphs can include things such as windup of heavy attacks, flashing enemy sprites, and more!

o   Best exemplified by the slime king, I can now implement colossal enemies much larger than normal ones, finally giving me the option to make a massive dragon in a waterfall cave and have it look epic!

o   Also massive tentacle plants and slime monsters and kinky stuff too! And dragons again, but this time with its dick out! The sky is the limit here!

-          Two-in-one here, but the ability to start channeling a spell and then swivel it around 360degrees is so cool!

o   It’s a bit finicky on the controls at the moment, but I’m thinking of trying something like “The spell faces your direction by default, but will pivot to aiming at the mouse while you’re moving the mouse, then fade back into character-facing after you let go of the mouse!

-          So much more variety in how magic works now, from healing, barriers of water, and a bullet that blasts nearby enemies (Water spirits), to a wind spirit that lets you quickly chant a blade of wind, infuse yourself with wind to run faster for a short time, and compress an orb of wind into your hand for devastating close-range explosions, the new spells are a fun variety of magical effects, ranging from lasers and fireballs to spells that drop lightning bolts under your mouse or a set distance in front of you, depending on your aiming mode!

o   Also potions with throwable animations and attack effects, including slowness and explosives!

-          Currently, E and Q are bound to Attack and Field Skills, 1-8 are bound to combat hotkeys, and I brings up a field inventory, while Home and End are controlling the character bust

o   I hope to make some changes and add H and J for health and mana potions, with a new UI element to show the hotkeys and current stocks/out of stock, and perhaps more,  we could have shift give a sprint, c for crouch/stealth! (if I could get it to feel right, the faint attempt in the imp’s village in Lily’s game fell rather flat to me), and so much more!
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Just as important as knowing what works is knowing what doesn’t work. Here’s a list of features from Lily’s game that won’t be returning directly, either being changed up or dropped completely, at least to begin with.

                As this was only included because Lily doesn’t have proper training as a mage and, as a result, couldn’t use magic without something helping her, this isn’t needed in HMA.  While some small changes are planned for how spells are learned, the general gist of it will still be the same, requiring study and courses at the academy to be able to learn them is integral to how they work.

                Despite not directly contributing, the general systems behind it, which include runtime skill-swapping between different spirits and item skills, will be integral in the coding behind many other systems I do have planned, such as the next iteration of the resistance system.  Spirits are also still a thing and may show up during elemental magic training/combat as modifiers for already-learned magic, potentially enhancing spells of their element if their magic is borrowed.

An idea originating in Horny Mage Academy, this was just too finicky to get it to work right. A menu in combat slowed gameplay down to a crawl, took a potentially useful button(Q) away from the combat system, and trivialized puzzle design into “If I have X, hit button, use it, ignore mechanics”

Instead the working idea now is to replace Q as a keybind with some sort of guarding skill, the current plan being a magic barrier with different upgrade paths to block status/elemental attacks/etc

The idea to replace them is, interestingly enough, just… making you equip the spells or bring the items and use them from inventory/hotbars!  The trick would be then to make a wide variety of situations/uses for each spell, like with brighten and torches there has to be dark places in the world for them to be used in for it to work and feel good as a skill, same with stuff like trap detection magic, growth magic, and anything else utility-wise that I can think of.

I realized that this pushes the combat system into a more grindy path than intended, making it optimal to spam weak spells or get hit with weak attacks to grind up stats. HMA’s life-stats system will continue to be the main stat system, though I have ideas on redoing how character class works from a stat-cap to instead have a second layer of stats on top of these base stat systems and give combat light, but ultimately capped progression, by limiting the availability and stat ranges of classes at each stage of the game and leaving life-stats to be the most core layer, always there, always applying, while class can change and level up faster and in combat, but is limited by capped level ranges.

Crafting will return to HMA, but not in its current format. It’s too grindy as-is and not engaging enough yet.

I think I’m going to focus on gathering/looting dropping base materials that you then refine via alchemy or artifact crafting, with stuff like magic crystals being able to be infused with mana or inscribed with known spells to create elemental or status variants, with your knowledge and known spells and artifact crafting training gating how you can manipulate these ingredients for unique and fun artifacts and potions.

Similarly, I think that having gardening club take the focus for any plant-related ingredients, and making it more integral into the crafting game might be a good move.  Make it be easy-ish to set up and just check in every once in a while if you’re just making mana and healing potions, but add some extra steps/interesting plant raising requirements for more fun potions like explosive flasks or special recovery/buff potions, in addition to a proper gardening storyline.

In this way, finding a patch of healing berries will be a rare event on the field, but will provide you with seeds as well as a few potions worth of berries, potentially well before you unlock said seeds from the village shop (and perhaps some ingredients are not sold at all and used for fun, spicy illegal asphoradic/erotic potions!)

I’m going to follow this up with two more devlogs in the coming days, the next being a rough plan for how I’m going to tackle the HMA combat update, including rough plans for all of the content I want to work through before the next release (it’s… a lot) and introducing the plans for the next stages of the combat update.

The second will follow this one up with more information on the next combat demo and how it’s going to be used to develop and prototype the next iteration on these systems while also advancing HMA’s development properly!

I know this is turning into a longer process than originally intended, but I don’t want to just slap a fresh coat of paint over what was an inherently flawed combat system that almost felt tacked onto the game at times.  I want a system that lives and breathes in the same way that the core game works, that ties together the experience of studying magic with the excitement of exploring the secrets of an new and exciting world filled with fantastical landscapes, deep dungeons, and strange and unique creatures and plants.

As I was developing this first combat demo I let my imagination run free, tossing everything I could to see what sticks.  Now I need to carefully collect these fragments and weave them together into a system that feels good and fun to play, while also harmonizing both sides of the game, combining the excitement of exploration and adventure with the steady peacefulness of life as a fledgling magic student!