Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm back with another update with the addition of a new Enemy and Sub-Weapon. I've already finished the update like two weeks prior to writing this post. It just that I had to prepare another video, and if it haven't became obvious enough already, I really dislike video editing.
The video gives a general overview of all the major additions. Unfortunately there are no captions, as the update post is way past overdue. I'd much prefer to redirect my focus towards making content for the game more than anything.
I highly suggest trying the alpha version of the game yourself before you continue reading as this post goes into more detail about the aforementioned additions. Like I said before, the game is open-source, and hosted on GitHub. Feedback is very much appreciated, even though this post will most likely receive radio silence like always.
https://github.com/ProarchwasTaken/tld_skirmish
If you wish to keep closer track of the game's progress. The official True Human Tribulation discord server is probably the best way to go. I regularly post what I'm doing there, and I could but easily answer any questions you might have. It also serves as a place to find media that aligns with the core idea and themes of the series. It wouldn't hurt to check it out for a couple minutes.
If you're still here, I would like to thank you for sticking around for so long. That means a lot to me. Without further ado, let's get right into it.
The Wretch
If you're perceptive, you could deduce what the Wretch's behavior would be from the video and the gif above. This is also intentional as I would want the enemy to be easy to understand at a glance, even without debug helpers. In a way, the Wretch is designed to punish for carelessly rushing ahead, and to prevent the player from cheesing the game by just walking past enemies.
The Wretch inflicts a lot a damage, and she can attack very quicky. If the player were to just run at them, they would get hut before they could even get close enough to perform a normal attack. After attacking, the enemy will "retreat" for a random amount of time. During of which, she will refuse to attack the player, and run away from them. This is here to give the player some breathing room, and make the enemy more harder to defeat. With her only weakness being that she has a long recovery time after attacking.
The Basketball
The Basketball Sub-Weapon is vastly different compared to the Knife. In fact, it may even be harder to use if you became accustomed with the first Sub-Weapon. It certainly was for me... While the Knife's purpose is clear in allowing the player to perform easy combos that are capable of killing a Ghoul in one go, the Basketball is a lot more complicated as to showcase how versatile the Sub-Weapon system could be.
The Light Technique, upon use, makes the player perform a "juking" maneuver of which they are invulnerable during the active phase. They are freely able to change directions, and cancel into any other action command they have access to. This is clearly meant to be as a way for the player to escape out of any sticky situations they might find themselves in, and it has quite a bit of potential if you're skilled enough.
The Heavy Technique is very unique and simple to understand from the gif below. The player will kick the ball, bouncing off the first enemy it hits. Upon use, the player sub-weapon will be disabled, completely disallowing the the use of the Light Technique, but the player would still be able to perform a basic kick without any cost to Morale.
The kick inflicts a small amount of damage, but it's main purpose is to allow the player to kick the ball back, causing it to move faster and inflict more damage to the first enemy it hits. This could only be done a certain number of times before the ball won't bounce off the enemy anymore. Instead, it will just pierce through them. You see where I'm going with this right?
The heavy technique has the potential to inflict damage to multiple enemies at once when timed right. A lot more than the heavy attack, or the Knife's light technique. Although, it requires some set up in order to do that.
What's Next?
All I have to do is implement one more enemy and sub-weapon, and the game would have now reached the Beta stages. I'll be satisfied with that before working on polishing. I can certainly say that the game has reached mid-development hell, something that I failed to get past with my first game. This is possibly one of the biggest challenges I've ever faced so far, but I'll try my best to push through it. I'll see you guys later.