Mech Test concept demo (Patreon)

As compensation for this months much slower work pace due to unexpected issues I'll be posting some of my previous works I've kept to myself.  Hopefully things will be returning to normal soon and work can continue as planned .  There will be an update at the end of the month for Elven Curse but it will be quite small unfortunately.  Sorry for that but I hope you will enjoy what I have for you today. 

Early in the year I was messing around with various ideas and various programs to create some new project.  This was the result of that process.  I finished this one about six months ago but never posted it anywhere.  It's pretty short and rough but I was satisified with it for testing purposes.

You can download this test project from the attachment on this post.

In short the idea is a visual novel that plays out like a mecha anime.  This project was made in Ren'py, a program for creating viaul novels.  But mechs would be pretty boring without some kind of battle system.  So I began experimenting with how to make that work in this program.  

Combat is fairly straight forward.  Clicking on the attack button allows the player to then click on the enemy they'd like to target and one more click begins the round.  The health bar and the energy gauge are at the top left.  Pressing the Shift action consumes energy.  The player can use Shift to dodge the mega beam.  Defend serves no function in this demo.  An unfinished idea I had was it would be used to parry the enemy with the beam sword.

I was fairly satisfied with how this turned out.  With having crossed the hurdle of making this work I had ideas on how to improve and expand on that combat system.  

On top of that there were some grander ideas I had for this project, ideas that were far beyond the scope of this demo.  

I did have a concept for a player character but also considered being able to customize your pilot might be more interesting.  I'd certainly be interested to see how that would turn out.  For this demo you are of course a nameless, faceless entity.

One feature I would have liked to include is that if you lost too many times your ship could get shot down.  As a result of that you'd end up reassigned to another vessel and under a new captain with a different crew.  Following that idea I prepared four different captains that the player might have ended up serving under.  

Between missions you could spend some time going around your ship and interacting with characters and repair or upgrade your mech.  Some dating sim elements were also something I would have liked to explore.  Building camaraderie/romance with your fellow pilots could perhaps increase their abilities.  Though I didn't have a solid idea of how your teammates would work out in the combat segments.  

This was a fun little experiment that I'd like to return to some day.  I'd still like to make the combat more interesting if I could.  Somehow less rigid.  Currently I'm not working on this one anymore but maybe I'll dust it off sometime in the future.   

Well that pretty much concludes the look at this project.  I hope it was an entertaining experience for you.