WHAT HAVE I DONE?!

Once again, I decided to completely rework the battle system from the ground up BUT!!!!!! THIS TIME!!!! THIS IS THE ONE!!!!

Basically, I wanted a much more data-driven battle system and one that can easily take in weird additional changes that I come up with down the line. For instance, I was thinking... what if I want an enemy to force you to play a game of tic-tac-toe on the screen and you take damage whether or not you win... that would have been really hard to add in my previous system, but the new one allows me to just pop those in whenever I come up with them.

Anyway, here's some art I drew. Maybe not Patreon-exclusive this time... I think I'm gonna post it on my bluesky, too.

She's going sicko mode.

FORMATIONS

Finally got around to doing something I have been meaning to do forever, which is decoupling the order that the party members appear on screen and their positions in battle. Every character now just has an enum value like "TOP_LEFT" that determines their position in battle.

I would like to add something similar to FF4 for the SNES where you can press R1 and L1 to cycle through party leaders on screen.

BLOOD

Dang, there is so much blood now.

Whenever a character has the "Bleeding" effect applied to them or a critical hit is done, that character or enemy erupts in a fountain of blood and it's awesome.

I know what you're thinking... "Did Curtis recently watch The Substance and become so delighted by the buckets of guts in that movie that he is adding it to Negative Reverie?"
Look.... maybe.

GRAY

There is a gray color palette now. How exciting.

SKILLS

I JUST realized the other day.... HEY WAIT A MINUTE.... you can't use skills outside of battle. What if you want to cure the party? So... I added a skills menu.

The skills themselves don't actually WORK yet, but they're at least separated into usable and non usable skills. That should make flipping through them a little more convenient.

BATTLES

HOO BOY, like I said.... I have done SO MUCH WORK ON THE BATTLE SYSTEM. Also, why the heck did I wait til I have a date to show off a demo to decide to rework it from the ground up!?!! Oh well, nothing like a deadline to inspire a work ethic...

ANYWAY, the functionality of the system is more or less the same, outside of adding an option to hide the menu while you're selecting your turn option and a confirmation prompt for defending. But, BEHIND THE SCENES... it's totally different. It took a while to get used to the state machine / event bus structure, but now that I've been working on it for a week... I can see why people do this. Much more convenient. Also, SO MANY THINGS are now packaged in resources. Every attack or poison tick is stored in a nested class called "attack data" and those have various resources attached to them... it's pretty deep but it's very easy to work with.

Also the battle BG has an audio visualizer??

UPCOMING SHOWS

We have a Mountain Chiefs show coming up in early November, but I don't have a flyer for it yet. I'll letcha know when I do. I've also been announcing those things on the discord too, if you wanna keep up with them there.

OK THAT'S ALL

Time for me to do a few hours of Japanese study. I gotta make sure I'm practiced up for the JLPT. Also, I'm hungry. I'm gonna eat... idk popcorn maybe.

OK thank you so much for your support! See you next week!!!!