A Battle Beyond Measure

Battle animations and player feedback is in! The things still missing are animations for spells, as well as their visual and sound effects.

Click 'Read more' to read more about the animations and some of the choices I've made for the battles.

Titling the Battle

Most obvious from the get-go, the "title" at the start of battle. Lots of RPGs have a quick moment to let the player divert their attention to the battle. Fighting games also give the player a moment to steel themselves:

• Street Fighter has "Round 1... Fight!"
• Guilty Gear has "Heaven or Hell! Duel 1, Let's Rock!"
• Pokémon has "Trainer Joey would like to battle!"
• Undertale has "Lesser Dog blocks the way!"

I wanted this momentary pause for the player to adapt to the new situation, as well as add a little bit of flair. Hence, the musical pun: "A Battle Beyond Measure!", referring to a measure of music, the other name for a "bar". In the final game, I want to give different flairs randomly, and/or ones that change depending on the battle. "We're in for some treble!" is also a title I thought about, but I haven't yet figured out what the others might be.

Player Feedback

My experience in mobile gaming finally paid off. Each attack has different signifiers, or "floaters", based on the player's input. Succeeding at an attack can net you a "Good!" or a "Perfect!", succeeding at spells can get you a "Success!" while failing can get you a "Meh!" or even a "Failure..."

The floaters have a little popping animation, as well as flying, bouncy particles. The screen also shakes at different velocities depending on the action:

• Pressing a button during an attack nets you a very minor shake.
• Landing attacks and being hit by them gets you a moderate shake.
• Hitting a spell or being hit by a spell gets you a big shake.

Screenshakes are a great way to make the combat feel impactful. In Viola's case, I may have overdone it a little, but I can always scale back.

Animations

Animations are finally in, and luckily animations are easy enough to import into Unity, if a bit tedious. The real effort on the code part was making characters move forward and backward whenever it's their turn, or when their turn ends.

The characters dash forward when it's their turn, and leap back when they're done. The leap in particular required me to redo the structure of the character objects, as well as how characters are spawned: the shadows underneath their feet had to stay on the same Y axis. Before, the shadows were children of the character object, meaning they would follow the character perfectly. So, when hopping back, the shadow would move up with them. Fixing that was a bit of a headache...

Next week, I'll work on putting in the different spell animations, and hopefully doing lots of visual effects and sound effects. After that, I have a list of polish tasks I'd like to do, but I really want to get the game out to publishers as soon as I can.