I can also fail spectacularly. I do not see myself as someone who is good at video games in general.
I was thinking the other game about your game and thought it would be cool it there were maybe status effects being influenced by which direction characters are moving e.g. taking a hit while moving back could deal more dmg, but I guess it could be scope creep. You are probably close to finishing the game.
I'm still a few months away, and I could totally do that. I already implemented backstab damage a long time ago but only 2 enemies use it so far. Also, pushback sort of, since if a unit is walking back then the pushback actually helps them. The greatest hurdle is tutorializing, really.
I should really add a taste of late game mechanics to the demo so it works better as a vertical slice. The game is becoming too easy ever since I made items more relevant and I'm thinking of adding even more so a bit of rebalancing to early game encounters is probably in order some time in the future. I'll keep your advice in mind when that time comes.
I am sure adding mechanics like that would not be hard, but rebalancing the whole game around interactions like that could take a long time. Dmg could be modified by characters distance from the middle line, and if they face towards the attackers or not. It would make it trickier to calculate damage in advance, but maybe it would make it even more interesting. By the way, it would be cool if when players select an attack and hover over different enemies a pop up by them would appear showing their current hp and hp after the attack if they decide to target them. Something like 22 hp -> 12 hp
After working on an RPG for this long I've realized why almost every RPG ever made is only difficult at the beginning and end; balancing the middle is next to impossible.
I'll add your suggestion to my notes. Instead of printing "damage: X", it could be "target HP: Y -> Z (-X)" or something like that. The issue, as usual, is AoE damage, but I'll figure out something.
