This week I began by scripting some of the scenes for the game. I scripted the scenes all the up to the first battle, the day after Jonathan arrives at the castle, and while I will still need to revise and cut (Ink currently has my word count for the day and a half at 1600), the core structure is there, in an Ink file that I can copy to my Unity project when I add Ink in.

From there I went back to work on the battle prototype. First, I added in an enemy. The AI is very basic at the moment–the enemy can just chase the player–but the structure is pretty straightforward and scales to a larger party as well.

I finished that with some extra time, so I went to work trying to add skills for the player to use. I think that Jonathan’s basic skill will be a “Decoy” skill where Jonathan can create a decoy object that can trick the enemy into chasing it instead of an actual party member.

I got stuck for a while figuring out the best way to implement this into the actual game, but for now, each skill will be stored as its own script that can be added to or removed from the party member’s prefab. Once I decided on that, I set to work getting the actual functionality in place.

The way it works is that the player presses the Decoy key when it’s their turn, and the decoy will spawn randomly within the range allowed by their speed. Once the decoy has spawned, there is a chance that the enemy will get tricked by the decoy and pursue the decoy instead. The decoy cannot move, cannot take any actions, and will get destroyed after three turns.

The skills function is a little messy at the moment, because I don’t have any UI yet, so the player just presses a button and the single skill gets triggered, but I will make that a more refined system in the future.

For the next week, the key will be adding Ink into the game. Because the first scenes are all scripted in some way, I should be able to create a scene that plays all the dialogue and then cuts to the first battle. It won’t be pretty and likely won’t make much sense without any art, but that will be a good framework to flesh out and work on.