Began the day working on particle effects and their timing during attacks. Actually a pending task from last week but I didn’t do crap on Friday.

I like it.

Here’s a snippet of how the combat looks at the moment after newprogrammer implemented my crude vfx.

This is a test room where we have fun fighting permutations of enemy groups. The idea is to go for quality vs quantity and design each enemy as unique as humanly possible so every encounter has a different strategy even if you’ve faced the same foes in other occasions. Lots of focus is going towards readability as well.

You guys know I love Parasite Eve and gameplay-wise is pretty much the template, but something that always bugged me about it was that some foes were really hard to read; both because the animation work was on the rougher side with almost no anticipation and battles being generaly static due to the limitations of pre-rendered environments. Here we did our best to avoid those sorts of trappings and I think we’re on the right path.

Still lots to adjust but we’re near a level of polish that makes me very comfortable. Next is player skills once we iron out a bunch of things that bother me. Chief among them is the weird timing for the melee attack visual effect; It happens before the model does the animation.

Dude with the sword thingie also has the habit of hitting me instantly after shooting them, as if it was resuming an a canceled attack but the damage was received well after the animation ended so that’s gotta be adjusted.

With this more or less done on my end I’ll focus on the story sequences again and see if I can polish most (if not all) of them by the end of the week.