Enemies and Interaction/Presentation and Graphics

Enemies

We've touched on randomisation of enemies in a previous update around, but here is the current state of enemies and how the player interacts with them.

The enemies have their own class which essentially combines with the character class for a battle. The enemy class has specific attributes such as their HP, physical attack damage and attack speed etc. they also have a list of floors in which they can appear in the game world. For example, if an enemy has a list of [2, 3, 4] then they can appear on floors 2-4 and no others.

When a battle commences, it will check which enemies are available for selection on the current floor and choose randomly from those. The battle will then assign the players character and the selected enemy to participate in the battle. When this occurs, the enemy's sprite is assigned dependent on the selected enemy's name.

At the moment, each enemy has different attack speeds, health, strength etc. and a focus in the future will be that they have their own special attributes, such as applying burn, poison , freeze or other special attack.

Enemies appear in the battle with a health bar and attack indicator bar that shows progress towards their next attack. Some equipment and relics can delay an enemy's attack. When attacking, the enemy will swiftly move towards the player's character and back to indicate the attac occurring.

Interactions

Interactions are currently only through the use of the mouse by clicking on buttons to select options. This includes choosing a character, selecting a node to navigate to on the world map, select options in events and making stat assignment choices on the level up screen.

While interactions are quite basic, the intent is to make the game as easy to play as possible in terms of mechanics and for the player to make strategic choices throughout the progression of the game.

Presentation and graphics

While a lot of the core gameplay mechanisms are functioning well, a lot of time needs to be spent to improve presentation and graphics. As shown in the sections above, temporary sprites have been used for both the character and enemies with simple drawn sprites or referenced images as placeholders. The presentation of the character selection is presentable but it's quite bland and doesn't haven't alignment with the theme of the game and would like to add to this if time persists, though, a focus will be to ensure the game cycle is complete before spending more time on this.
The world scene has custom office-styled background though is lacking indication of collected relics or the ability to switch equipment and will be important for gameplay to have visual representation of this.

The battle scene is quite nicely organised with the player and enemies statistics on each side with the battle occurring in the centre of the screen. The combatants each show their health and time until next attack displayed with their sprite. The character and enemy sprites will be updated before the end of the assignment, but again I would like to add in representation of the collected relics. The player and enemy also have indicators next to their sprite as to which equipment items they currently have. another small update with be to fix the bars so they show as full when at the maximum value.