Here's the latest update from our hidden pirate cove in video form, enjoy!

Changes from last week

• New swords: real steel, no more wood!
• Parry (miss) and evade animations: more dynamic melee combat
• Initial support for hit, miss, evade based on character stats
• Particle systems: used for sword "sparkles" together with the parry animation
• New target selection style (red circle on floor): less cluttered screen

This is week I'm going to show you the updated enemy AI and the first arena of the game.

Enemy AI

The first step for a great enemy AI is to give them some senses. At the moment the enemies cannot use the pathfind system to find the player position but instead they're relying only on sight and hearing.

Sight is pretty easy and straightforward to implement (remember Week 15?) and the only thing I added this week is different "Field of view" when patrolling and when in combat.

This "line-of-sight" technique works fine, but...it was too easy to sneak behind an enemy unnoticed, so I added a hearing sense.

Each footstep or combat sound now emits a "sound stimulus" directed (with a maximum range) to every NPC in the game. This is useful to alert nearby NPC about a fight or something suspicios.

These "sounds stimuli" are also using the pathfind system to reach the NPCs: this way when you make some noise inside a room the NPC can hear it coming (apparently) from the door.

All this things makes me eager to add a "sneak" ability to the player...but I must resist 'cause there's no time for it now :(

The first arena

In order to achieve the "one year milestone with a game" we decided to strip down all the features that are not the core of the game.

The game that will be playable in late february is going to be focused entirely on combat and party/inventory management. This is a huge part and need to be perfectly balanced and tested before adding all the rest (story, exploration, quests, etc...).

In short: we're giving you a smaller but tasty cake istead of a bigger but half baked one. And yes, we will add the frosting later!

There will be many combat arenas and various challenges to complete. We almost completed the first arena: is pretty small and is perfect for a 1vs1 or 2vs2 introductory fights.

Ok...ok, enough talk, here's the weekly video showing some new gameplay bugs features.

Diary of Capt'n Cominu - Week 48 of 52
Week 48...that means we only have 4 weeks left to create this little game. I'm really starting to feel the pressure now, and I've been in "crunch mode" for almost one year now: I'm tired as hell and going crazy.

Am I going to survive this? Oh, here's my bottle of rum!

Hey everybody, we're back with some new video goodness! This time you can see some great progress on the action bar and the combat system.

Action bar and "warmup" time

Another big chunk of code was completed this week: the warmup time indicator in the action bar!

Wait...what? You will probably know the meaning of a action "cooldown" time often used in RPG...well, we're heading to a opposite approach: the warmup time. In short, you can use any action you want (if the character have enough stamina) but you need to wait a little before is really executed.

Oh, don't worry, this wait is very short, from 1 (generic attack) to 3 seconds (for bigger and powerful attacks).

New combat animations

From a graphic point of view now each action can have multiple animations: this means a single attack action will never use the same animation all over again.

Here's a short video with all the cool things...I'm going back to my rum

Happy new year! We took some time to recharge our batteries and we're back stronger than ever, so here's the 47th week update!

Combat actions

I spent a lot of time thinking and working on the action and abilities bar.

The biggest change is the introduction of the stamina bar: there will be no "cooldown" time for attack actions. Every action use a bit of stamina, so you can use powerful attacks until the character's stamina run out, then you have to wait for the stamina bar to recharge before to be able to use more powerful attacks.

Savegames

You have 3 character profiles with auto-save now. Once you choose the profile to use there's no need to save manually the game.

Did I mentioned all the savegames will be backed up automatically on the cloud? Yes, you will be able to use the same character profile on the ipad, web or the stand alone desktop version.

Weapon types and combat animations

All weapons are now categorized into:

• sword
• mace
• axe
• gun

Instead of using always the same animation for all weapon types I choose to create several animations related to each type. We have now 5 new animations for sword attacks (4 generic and 1 special attack).

Character stats

Each character now can have its own strength, constitution, dexterity and attack speed (melee/ranged).

Updates from user feedback

• Double click on enemy will trigger the default attack action
• The animations are now faster

New weapons

Here's some new weapons: