Full guide for the appraisal station (Patreon)

Hello everyone! This last week has been quite rushed; I have been trying to finish the work on the appraisal station the fastest i could, but while implementing the stations, I found a lot of lacking systems to support them and the locations where they are placed. Not all, but some of the most important ones, took a lot of time to solve:

• Light system: previously, the sprites and animations were not affected by light effects on the map, so I needed to solve some engine problems and run some map tests to fix it. Now stations and the locations are affected by darkness and light effects!

• Wanderer system: for starters, the locations were a bit too "static"; the stations are limited to running around a fixed location, which made the locations feel like a bunch of "planted" structures that characters are stuck in. This way, I came up with a solution called "wandering characters".

  Wandering characters are units that can spawn and walk around the locations while you are busy exploring and managing your stations. They are available by unlocking their respective units, or in some cases, they are related to upgrades and other things. Some wanderers are limited by location; others can be "guests" inside other locations

• Some work on upgrades: upgrades need to be reworked. The previous system to unlock upgrades is no longer in use, and now the system requires changes to how stats and unlocks are applied to all units.

There are some other smaller details, but this is what cost most of my time these last few weeks.

Now, returning to the main info about the appraisal station. (Images and aniamtion were needed to be toned down to be posted here because of media upload limitations, so their final quality gifs are a bit low).

The first interactable station the players will have access to is the appraisal station. The appraisal station is managed by the Appraisalshroom, a well-trained unit that works to find every secret skill or talent on your recently captured characters.

With the appraisal station, you can hold your desired character to be attached to the station. Characters now have dialog texts to react to situations and animations. Different stations will have different animations; some will be a lot simpler and more basic.

Some stations can be upgraded and unlock new animations and systems. Upgrades can change the station performance or the performance of certain units and mechanics. In this case, the selected upgrade is the "Guide of ranks," a technical guide for appraisers to expand their basic knowledge. Upgrades cost materials and sometimes require a atached cahracters with specific skills or characteristics.

After acquiring the Guide of Ranks, a new animation is unlocked. These idle animations have a certain % chance of happening when the station is idle.

I try my best to make animations fun and keep quality; sadly, it takes a lot of time to get it right.

The Guide of Ranks now allows us to see characters' ranks without appraisal. Meaning that after combat, when choosing your capturable character, you can target them by rank. Future upgrades will unlock more information.

Clicking the special action button on each station will activate a special interaction. In this case, it will show the button to execute the appraisal and finally put a collar on your attached character

After appraisal, the character's stats and skills are finally visible, and she is ready to be allocated to any other station of the tower!

This is it for this station; it was a lot of work to make this one. I learned a lot, and I need to say that this one will probably be the most complex one in terms of mechanics. Future stations will be more focused on animation and simple features.

Thank you again for the support, and I hope to bring more animations and things to test soon. Next, I will work on simple stations for the dungeon so I can make a test build for supporters to test the capture and appraisal mechanic!

i will now return to my work to plan the next stations. Thank you again for the support, and see you next time!