DevBlog - Characters, stations, and location systems! (Patreon)

Hey everyone, can't wait to bring you some news of what I have been doing and what is to come soon!

First things first, I wish to give my thanks for your patience as I work on this rework of our game systems. I know a lot of my content has been late, and I still need to return to the comic and other arts. I'm trying to find a testable milestone so i can branch out to other ideas and projects. 

So here are my plans for the new game system:

1- Captured characters:

 Captured characters are not just simple items anymore. Now, after combat, you will receive a drop of captured characters based on the difficulty of the boss fight and how fast you can finish it! 

About these captured characters:

- Captured characters will have a rank from E to S rank; some characters' ranks are really rare to find. So what do the ranks do if characters are not just items anymore? 

Well, characters now have stats and skills! The number of stats and skills the character has is based on its rank and some other factors, like species and others.

Example:

Character Rank S at the moment has a pool of 12 points of main stats that are randomly allocated, they have up to 6 random skills of rarer or better quality, and they have access to more points of training to customize your character by training inside the tower!

Characters Rank D have around 5 main stats points and around 2 skills with only 1 training point.

Combined with their custom appearance, this system is planned to make every character unique!

It took a lot of time to make these characters viable, as the old animation system I was using was not compatible with making custom characters work in all types of animations. I needed to make a new animation system, but in the end, everything worked!

That's all very cool, but what do we do with these new characters? Well, for that, we need to talk about stations

2 - Stations

Stations are buildable facilities/locations that use attached characters to produce/function resources for the overlord tower!

You can allocate a character into a lust extractor machine to produce more energy, or maybe place a character into the leafhound den to produce leafling eggs!

This will include animations with stages, variants, and more!

The stations have a time of production that needs to pass so they can produce/trigger their effect. In our game, we count time by the Boss fight attempts, meaning that every attempt is considered a day. So every time you make a new attempt, time passes, and all your stations in the tower make some progress!

Now comes the fun part: each station has a main stat and a secondary stat that will use the respective stats from its attached character to function. Meaning if you put a good character taht has good stats taht fit the station, the station will be more productive and generate resources faster! This and characters' skills that give bonuses to certain station tags are the key to making a very functional lust empire!

But where can we find these stations?

3- Reworked tower locations:

Tower locations will not have an upgrade tree anymore; instead, we will have an explorable area where you will be able to see your minions and characters interacting. The upgrades will be converted into stations that can be improved and built to upgrade your units!

Your favorite NPCs will still be around guiding you inside these new locations, and maybe they can even appear walking around their zones!

These are the basics of the systems I have been working on. I know it's not much, but there are a ton of things that changed in the project to make it work. I'm still solving a lot of details, but as soon i have the Wildgrounds location working I will make a new build for all of you to try!

Systems that are missing:

1 - Character generation and character animation system that works with all customizations (100% done)

2- Stations to allocate characters (70%): is still missing the system to build the station inside locations and their upgrade system, but everything else is working

3- Location exploration system: (90%): It's missing some camera controls and some ways to zoom into stations

4- Character collection: (95%): the only thing that is missing is some of the interaction of skills and tags in stations, and actually having different areas with different characters to move them around the tower 

I'm really sorry for it taking so long; this kind of new system requires a lot of experimentation and testing. Mostly, I lost a lot of time trying to make the new animation system work with custom characters, but at least now I have a system that works for all my future projects!

I plan to finish some basic wildgrounds stations soon, so I can let you supporters try the characters and stations as soon as possible. Please just be a little more patient!

Thanks again for the support. I hope you like what I'm creating with this project, and please let me know what you think!