Let’s take a look at the backlog for this week:

Let’s just say that I had a lot of free time this weekend and spent basically all of it working on BYTE.

For starters, the UI wound up being a major task for this week. I wanted to get to work on the second battle and add in another skill, but in order to do that I had to get the MP system working and get UI that could communicate multiple skills as well as the MP you have.

I also wound up making more UI for the day/month in the process. Now, in the world, the player can see the month, day, day of the week, their party (just Jonathan for now), and how much MP their party has (shown as a filled bar).

On the battle side, the player can now see the buttons in the bottom-right for general controls, pull up a skills panel in the top left, and see their party stats in the bottom left (this is displayed with the exact numbers). They can also see the goal of the battle at the top of the screen, which I think should be helpful for explaining what is actually happening.

All of this was a pretty wild process that involved my brain going “Oh, I need this UI element”, bouncing into Illustrator to make it, adding it to the game, going “Nice, that should be good”, and then immediately thinking of another UI element I needed before I could continue. It was a chaotic process, but it worked well, and I think I have basically all of the UI I’ll need for the game.

Then I set about making the new skill, which I decided would be a “Sprint” skill that lets the player move around faster for one turn. Once again, though, in order to get this skill in, I needed to give the player the means of getting it. Therefore, before I made the Sprint skill, I had to make a little reading activity that would allow Jonathan to read a book and learn the new skill from it. (This is one of my favorite parts of the game so far.)

The animation for the reading is, I would say a mess. Apparently, Mixamo doesn’t have a single reading animation and I was way too in the zone to dedicate time to finding one somewhere else, so I just downloaded a typing animation and parented to book to Jonathan’s hand and called it good. It looks insane, but I kind of love it.

Then I added the Sprint skill. This was more straightforward so I don’t have too much to add to it.

Lastly, I made the second fight. This one requires the player to go to a computer in the scene and get the code for the safe where they’ll get the key to the attic door. This battle is actually pretty cool. The player starts the process once they get to the computer, but they have to wait for three turns until it’s ready, so they need to spend the intervening time avoiding the enemy. It still needs a lot of balancing, but it’s pretty neat.

I also did other stuff but I’m fried from this weekend and barely remember it. I was in the zone and just hammering out stuff. It’s a pretty complete game now, it just needs the ending and a bunch of polish. Oh also I made Jonathan and Dracula sit next to each other in the intro scenes. See the featured image for more content on that front.