[Starlight] Arts! (Patreon)

hello darling patrons! i hope everyone is set to have a lovely new year! i, unfortunately, am dying.

marcello is over with us visiting and we were absolutely planning to stream for you while he is here. however, the timing sucks, because i came down with probably-the-flu literally overnight before our holiday party and i currently can't still can't even speak. i tried last night despite the pain, and in my personal opinion i sounded like the aural equivalent of someone dropping a crate full of wooden puppets down a flight of stairs.
to say nothing of the uh fever and such.
bad time all around, 0/10 would not recommend 

stream may still happen if i end up getting better before he has to leave but right now is very up in the air and i regret every single thing

but
when has feeling like shit ever stopped me from doing things!
"frequently", you say?
"less often than it should", i hear?
perhaps true! but that's not the point. 

the point is progress.

like most other things in this screenshot, both the art icons and the art names... if you can call them that... are placeholders from rpg maker default. i just used the pre-filled spell entries to code around for now and i'll go back and actually fill them later. 

key features.
mana cost on right; the art is dimmed pre-emptively if you can't afford it.
as with the other menus, there is no scrolling to select; everything is one button press away.
the purple range in the middle shows the collective range of all of the skills you can use-- it'll update when you select one:

and you can freely switch between with one press which i'm sure will be a disaster when i try to implement combat forecasts but that's tomorrow-me's problem

speaking of combat.

you already know what's going on here. whereas normal combat is just a one-button timing challenge, using arts goes back to the older rhythm game format of needing to sync up the right timing to the right button as well. in return, effects of spells (including buffs, healing, etc) scales based on how many correct hits you get. 

i've set it up already so that i can already freely customize patterns, block lengths and spacing per spell (all using rpg maker's built in editor), so i'm really looking forward to seeing how varied i can make them feel.

...combat arts had a lot of smaller steps they needed that i wasn't expecting, but even considering those, this also wasn't as difficult to do as i expected. frankly the only reason it feels like it's taken forever is because of the sudden drop-everything-for-18.2, she says, trying to reassure herself. 

so, what's next? let me check my list
..a-ah.. combat forecast....
.i see....
well played, yester-ame... well played.................................................