Fresh Start! Guildies 2.0

So after a break, I'm excited to get back into developing Guildies further.  Right of the bat I realized that I was going to be better off with a fresh start.  The game jam version was personally instructive, and a lot of fun to play (when it was fixed), but it was as thrown together as it could be.  As soon as I started to try and untangle the mess, it quickly became apparent there was no reason to start from this version for many reasons.

For one, I'm not even exactly sure how I'm going to be implementing most of the ideas in the game yet.  Building an army so quickly was great for a quick prototype, but in reality I would like the party size to grow over many rounds.  The 1.0 version demonstrated the "meta" progression of the party adding a bunch of healing and DPS to your death ball, as well as new recruits to sort of act as HP, but there was no individual character/item progression outside of when a Guildie picked up an item and it updated its type and its stats.

Also, while quite serviceable for the jam, I don't think the lottery system is going to be effective for the behaviors I am looking for.  Now that I have time, I want to get into NPC behavior to figure out the best way forward.  I feel like learning about and fleshing out the behavior system will help me develop the stat and item system, as well as figure out how the overall progression of your Guildies as individuals and a group is going to work.

So.... just fresh start.  2.0 - Here we go!

Right off the bat I need to increase the resolution of the Tiny Sprites (https://zerie.itch.io/tiny-rpg-character-asset-pack) to 32x32 from their original 16x16.  I also want to simply the overall color pallet and update the damage animation to not change colors.  This is all because I want to use shaders and other variations on the character sprites to show differences in their progression/stats/subtypes and I think the extra resolution and simplified color would help me accomplish this - particularly for scaling.

I also want to adjust the "knight" sword like I did for the jam version when I scale it.  The original makes the sprite too horizontal in its idle/walking state (had issues with layered background tiles for instance) and it just looks a little goofy.  So I need to raise it back up to an angled pose again like I did for the jam version.  I also made the three eye slits into two and spread them out a bit to look a bit like eyes.

I'm still using these sprites for my main character set, as well as https://zaebucca.itch.io/adventure-begins for my main tile set.  I think my game looked fantastic, and I don't want to waste energy trying to come up with these assets on my own.  I love the selection of characters available on the Tiny RPG set, and there is more than enough for me to work with to get a complete proof of concept going.  Same for Adventure Begins.  I think I will be modding it a lot to get it to work exactly how I want, but really I have no idea how the characters are going to progress geographically and level by level yet.  I just now this tile set has everything I need to get started - I mean its in the title!

The two worked great together, and give me a LOT of development room to work with.  Of all the issues I had with the 1.0 version, the LOOK was spot on.  I really loved how the GBC pallet tiles worked with the more colorful and boldly outlined characters.

As far as the game itself, I need to start right where I did for 1.0 - the player character.  At first I was just concerned with getting the PC functional, but now my focus is on how the player character feels.  I still want to keep the Golden Axe beat 'em up belt scroller as my core PC gameplay inspiration, as the simplicity and familiarity will help when the army management aspect start to grow.

1.0 attack was a meager single swing that was more utilitarian than satisfying.  I never even adjusted damage/health levels from my first guesses, so something like crunchy hit feel and chaining combos weren't on my mind.  The knight animation I am using as my MainTank base has three attack animation.  The basic single swing that I used already is 1.  Then there is a double sweeping swing for attack 2 that is designed to either be chained off of the first swing, or on it own.  Then there is a charging flaming swing for attack 3 that can either be used with or without the charge animations, and can be incorporated into the combo as well.

Not an insane amount of attack variety for the MainTank considering it is the Player Character, but it is more than enough for our purposes and there is plenty here to build on if we need to mod it, even with my meager art skills.

So, in addition to working on the character walk speed and animations to get them to line up better, I want to have a simple 1-2-3 combo system for the MainTank using attacks 1 and 2.  Swinging without connecting will result in much the same behavior as 1.0, just a single wooshing swing that takes a bit of time to swing again.  If it connects, then another key press will start the attack 2 animation which is a swing up and then complete the third swing down with a third key press... gotta figure this out including input buffering.

I also would like to refine damage taking and receiving, with more visceral results than just a flash of red and a decreased health bar.  I think I would like to use SF2/Final Fight type hit/block damage bursts for familiarity and readability.

For now I guess I can use a dummy sprite to take damage so I can test the combat feel - I don't think I want to use slimes for a bit... a little burnt out on them from the 1.0 version and I don't want to even think about NPCs.  Getting the PC up and running and feeling like an actual beat em up character is my immediate goal to start off 2.0

After all, even though you will have your NPC party/army, I still want the core PC gameplay to be satisfying and Tanky/Brawly feeling.