DON'T GIVE UP - Social Dysfunction and Demon Slaying in RPG Form!

[trisbee]

Don’t Give Up is the sassy comedic tale of Tris, an anti-social, cynical game developer  and his quest to confront his inner demons. Balance the hilariously dysfunctional tragedy that is your social life all while facing off with the phantoms of your inner conscious and those that would claim it.

It's a modern story focused RPG with real time battle and an original fighting system that gives both the enemy AND the player real time turns!

DON'T GIVE UP and is the official name and reinvention for the title Cynical 7 I've been working on and it features a new battle system and story telling. The new demo should hopefully be along in June!


           








Combat

The combat is still being implemented but the idea is to have an ebb and flow between the player and the enemy, where the player has a defend phase where they can do things like earn buffs and weaken the enemy, and then an offensive phase where they have a certain amount of time to dish out combos to the enemy!



In this gif the player just executed a combo move where he leaps up, fires a missile and runs back toward the enemy in order to dish more damage.


The Main Character




Tris

An aspiring game developer who suffers from anxiety and chronic “people disliking disorder”. He moved to Threeson 4 years ago after the “incident”. An unemployed introvert with only a handful of friends, Tris desperately seeks to find some sort of fulfillment in his life before his time (and his bank account) runs dry.

Likes: Anything with pork belly in it, especially pizza, mmmm
Dislikes: Social media zombies


You might even see some familiar faces during your stay in Threeson!





Thanks for looking!

https://twitter.com/tacopizzacats
https://www.facebook.com/dontgiveupgame/

[trisbee]

here is a small peek at an early version of combat for screenshot saturday!

[trisbee]

Here we go again!

My last post was a quick peek at the first instance of combat! Since then it's mostly been prepping and polishing assets for the new demo and only a handful require cleanup or adjustments.

Right now ironing out the look, feel, and balance of the turns and speed.

Since the last version we've added:

Cumulative Damage- Instead of throwing out a bunch of numbers each time an attack lands, each attack is added to the old total, as you hit higher thresholds of damage, the numbers will get bigger and more rewarding!

Combos- We added the first player turn specific move, the downward strike! More to come!




Player and Enemy Buffs, indicated by the icons, I'm glad they are implemented but are currently a bit ugly stationarily floating with the characters, I've already come up with a solution for this!




Tris has a better animation transitioning between turns




Enemy Size reduced (although now I think he looks too small, so we'll play around with it a bit more as I think to accomomdate the new format the battle area needs to be reduced as a whole)


Here is a gif of it all slowly coming together!





Well social media has eaten up more than enough time for today, time to get back to it!
If you are digging the game please show me some support on social media, I could really use it  

https://twitter.com/tacopizzacats
https://www.facebook.com/dontgiveupgame/

[eishiya]

The critical attacks look less impactful than the regular ones ): I think it's because the colour doesn't stand out as much, since the value is closer to that of the background. Instead of just using a different colour, I think you should have the critical attacks pop up a larger number, maybe with a slightly different animation. That way, you might not even need the "critical" text there, the visible impact of the attack will make it obvious that it's critical.

I'm not a fan of mixing pixel resolutions (unless it's for comic effect or something). If the enemy is meant to be big, I think the actual sprite should be bigger, instead of being resized relative to everything else. Ditto for pixel text, etc - keep it all at the same scale if possible.

[trisbee]

The critical attacks look less impactful than the regular ones ): I think it's because the colour doesn't stand out as much, since the value is closer to that of the background. Instead of just using a different colour, I think you should have the critical attacks pop up a larger number, maybe with a slightly different animation. That way, you might not even need the "critical" text there, the visible impact of the attack will make it obvious that it's critical.

I'm not a fan of mixing pixel resolutions (unless it's for comic effect or something). If the enemy is meant to be big, I think the actual sprite should be bigger, instead of being resized relative to everything else. Ditto for pixel text, etc - keep it all at the same scale if possible.

I def agree with your sprite size feedback, I wanted the boss to be larger, but the only way to do that was to make more detailed sprites, which also ended up not looking right because the single border line made it look too thin- I took polls but ultimately people's viewpoints were split. As for the crits and damage numbers that was just basic implementation, there's a lot of polish to be done here! I'm also not a super experienced pixel artist, this is my first attempt at making a full game with pixel are, I've gotten droves better but still much to learn



Actually looking at it now I kind of like it, but it definitely requires me to apply a level of effort that I'm not 100% comfortable, I think it would be a lot of stress on the final product, since this is my first commercial dev, I don't want the scope to get too crazy because I know there will still be a ton for me to learn by the time I finish it.

[trisbee]

Combat Update!

So going forward with these posts I want to definitely try to show more of my process in both thought and design- I know people say you should share everything you do in your dev logs but I’ve always kind of felt that was more in a “something is better than nothing” sense and that what people really wanted to see was the final result.

I’ve sort of found that that is only true depending on your execution and people will take interest in your process if you’re captivating in its presentation, so going forward, I will try to be a bit more in depth with my milestones and such


Previous Combat System





So, in the first demo “Cynical 7” the battle system made the player feel that they were fully at the mercy of the enemy. This is usually true to some extent with most enemies in any kind of game, whether it’s the hordes of enemies in beat em ups, the power spiking bosses in RPGs, or the progressively harder AI in fighting games.

But with all of those in beat em ups you can usually combo a number of enemies at once, grind levels to becomes strong in RPGs, and master the game until the AI submits in fighting games. But in Cynical 7, all you could do was wait for the enemy to line up within your attack line and hope you got off a hit or two. That combined with the relentless enemy attacks ended up making combat more of a chore than I wanted it to (even though I didn’t feel like it was a chore- but I might be biased)





So the most important thing for me with this new demo was to completely revamp the battle system, with one major focus, giving the player more control with perks to be gained for its mastery.


The new battle system has two phases: Enemy Turn and Player Turn





Enemy Turn

During the enemy turn combat will play out a lot like it did in the first version, the player will dodge the enemy and try to land blows of their own. One major difference is this time around the player will also be able to parry attacks as well. These parries will take timing to execute but pulling them off in succession will grant the player a stackable buff


Player Turn

When the enemy turn ends the player turn begins. During the player turn Tris will get into hand to hand range with the enemy and be able to unleash and assortment of combos on the enemy triggered by the player in real time! Players will have to pull off combos in order to execute special moves like Harutaru Missile and Pogo Pounce! Different moves will have different uses and some might debuff or do more damage depending on the enemy and its status! The key to this system is knowing what combos do what and executing them without tripping up to maximize your turn!





But how do the turns flow?

The active turn is decided by the “momentum meter” which is much different than the one from Cynical 7. In Cynical 7 the momentum meter decided how quickly the player could move and dodge enemy attacks. In Don’t Give Up the momentum acts as a “timer” between turns. During the enemy turns the momentum bar depletes over time until it reaches the “break point”, once that happens the next hit the player lands will break the enemy’s guard and they enter “exhaustion” status and the player turn begins. The player can also deplete the enemy’s momentum faster by landing ranged attacks and successfully parrying.





Once the enemy goes into exhaustion the momentum meter begins to regenerate until it fills up at which point it becomes to enemy’s turn again. During that regeneration time the player can execute combos and special moves on the enemy.





The phases see-saw like this until the player or the enemy’s HP is depleted!

So what does it all look like? Well- something like this






Thanks for tuning in to this edition!

[trisbee]

It's been a while since my last update and there's a good chance I'll proooobably miss a couple of things that have happen since the last post so today I'll just talk about the UI.

The UI in the last demo... wasn't much of a UI, it was a bunch of components slapped into a section of the screen and I tried to make it as minimal as possible to avoid the player needing to look at it too much!





Well, the theme for this demo was SEXY. Make. Everything. Sexy. As possible as I can.


So the UI got an update, enemy sprites got an updates, and I even stepped up some of my work with effects!


But back to UI- the 4 5 major things that needed to be addressed were:

Player Buffs/Debuffs
Enemy Buffs/Debuffs
Enemy Guard Meter
Special Meter

Originally player buffs were going to follow the player, but I found that to be cumbersome, and well- ugly!





So I carved out a little nest for them on the left side.





Next up was enemy buffs, I think often times players rather see an enemy be visually effected OR not have to look somewhere else to keep track of an enemy's ailments, ESPECIALLY with real time, so the enemy buffs will stay with them. This works because the player is FAR more mobile than the enemy's in the game.


Enemy Guard Meter is actually pretty similar to the old system, except to avoid confusion it's hanging out with the enemy on the right side of the screen.



The special meter worked okay before and remains unchanged, there's a possibility of animating the meter itself expanding the sword once its full but I have reservations about having it take up any further real estate so we'll see! (probably not though, I tend to not like making extra work for myself to flesh out an idea i'm unsure of from the jump)





So that was all sorted out, but we still have this BIG. FAT. SPACE. in the middle. Gosh, it feels like something is missing here. Trying to wrack my brain for a solution, EUREKA! It came to me! What about some fancy way to be SEXY about switching the turns?

I'd actually chosen a sound for the turn swapping which was a "dj scratch"... so... what about having a spinning disc in the middle?! Brilliant!





So what does it all look like in the end?






So there we have it, a new sexy much more legitimate looking UI for the battle system! Now let's see it in action!





With that out of the way most of the new items for the demo are finished! Some bug checking and polish remains but I'll be sure to flesh out another feature before it's done!

Thanks for reading!