Hello Patreons! My name is Devin, and I am one of the programming interns here at DVNC. The past few weeks I have been working on Monochrome. So, this is going to be an update covering what I have been working on recently.
I have been working on recreating Monochrome’s battle system from the ground up using the Ork Framework Unity plugin. We have been going through, and testing some of the different types of battles Ork allows, and have decided that we are going to change the old turn-based style of combat to an active-time battle system. We believe that this will be more engaging for the player, and allow for some more interesting strategies, and overall combat.
I currently have a basic battle setup with all of the basic functionality, and placeholder UI. A screenshot can be seen below.
As you can see in the screen shot, both the player, and the enemies have Garde (health), Affinity, and time bars in their respective UI. Garde will decrease when hit with attacks, affinity will increase when hit with certain abilities, and the time bar will continuously fill as long as the battle continues.
Every attack, and/or ability that the player can use will have a time units cost. This can be seen in the top left of the screenshot. The current attacks/abilities range from 100-300 time units, and 300 is the max time on the time bar.
The battle is currently only setup to end if the player, or enemies are killed. However, we are going to add a new version of the capturing feature that can be seen in our current Itch build. I have already started laying the framework for this. The small green bar seen in the screenshot represents the Garde threshold that the player needs to take down in order to capture the enemy. However, the player will also need to meet an affinity threshold, and then use their high cost “Joke” ability in order to finally capture the enemy.
With most of the framework that I have setup we are almost ready to start adding animations, art, and even more engaging mechanics like; items, Otto’s troupe, etc. I hope you enjoyed what I have had to show off, and I am looking forward to making more progress on the battle system so we can get you a playable build soon!
Thanks for reading.