[Starlight] Combat Forecast (Patreon)

about a week ago i boldly thought that i was just about over being sick. then it showed back up knocked on my front door and didn't wait for me to answer before bitch slapping me across my entire face and i was out for another handful of days again.
but this time.
this time for sure
i will Achieve Health ™️ 

let's talk about other achievements. stuff is moving. some of that stuff even involves reborn-- crazy. but we won't talk about that in this post. little bit more before that. some of that stuff does not involve reborn, and i'm looking forward to that getting done and hitting y'all with it. 

today, i'm hitting you with another of our big ticket implementations checked off.
you know combat forecasts from fire emblem-- the little boxes that tell you you have a 60% chance of hitting the enemy, which you can then understand actually means you have a 0% chance of hitting the enemy, and the same box that tells you that the opposing boss has a 4% chance to crit, which you can then understand means that you are absolutely about to get crit and have to reset the level.
those.
fortunately, and definitely not out of sheer salt, we don't have RNG in our combat system, so, that little problem is fixed.

our combat forecast, to start, looks like this. 

so, three main features here. i'll start from the bottom. instead of a percentage rating, the hit forecast is an out-of-five start rating representing both the size of the hitblocks (based on the attacker's accuracy etc) and the speed the track moves at. this is gonna take some tweaking, but i'll show some differences a little below. 

second up, damage per hit, and the number of hits. this part's pretty much just like FE, down to the floating multiplier text, because i'm pretty endeared to it from the GBA games. also, given that there's a lot more hits per round of combat and as a player you probably want to know how many hits you're in for, it's a lot more important that it stands out in this game compared to FE. 

the top piece is graciously taken from Valkyria Chronicles. when aiming at a soldier, their combat forecast does you the service of telling you exactly how many bullets need to hit the part you're aiming at in order to KO the target. this is basically the same deal, doing the math for you. it's probably less exciting when i have everything set to 1 damage per hit though.

oh also the orange diamond only shows up when the opponent can counter attack, naturally. 

so another cool thing that's happened that absolutely is not reflected in the damage is that stats actually do things now.... yeah..... that wasn't a thing before.. it didn't need to be, and it was super easy to hook up, but combat forecast without stats would be a little hard to test, ne?

so, aside from damage values, the stats do the stuff i mentioned above, like this:

those hitboxes are pretty small because this target's evasion exceeds the attacker's accuracy. however, if you have a higher speed, the track moves slower, so it may still be possible to hit. conversely, if you're outsped, the track moves faster, so it becomes that much more difficult. 

the below screen has a blip in the form of the crit block which i'll have to fix, but nevertheless, here's an example of what happens when defending against a very accurate opponent:

those bright white lines are the hitboxes to dodge. you're probably not going to hit them, but there will be cases where it gets reduce to a one-frame window and you sure can try. this, however, is a case where the combat forecast would display a whopping 0 out of 5 stars, meaning that try as you might, you will not be hitting any blocks today. 

this is our protection against high level enemies being cheesable with god-like timing. i'm sure we'll have some solaris-garchomp tier folks too, but there will be some that you Simply Cannot Kill (at first?) and you're just going to have to deal with that. 

i also redid all of the existing animations in 30 FPS instead of 24 (the game still runs at 60 tho) and trimmed down the wind up animations so the attacks are a lot snappier now and it feels so much better. i'll have to show a different time though. 

that'll be it for today. three features left for core implementation. next one is going to be a lot of UI work, because it's Unit Summaries. we'll see how that goes....