Improvements & A Look at the Farm- TLR November Monthly Update #3

It's time for another Monthly Update on The Last Root's development!

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Art

October did not feel very productive to me, possibly because I was working on touch-ups which are often unsatisfying. 

My biggest project was maps. Mapmaking can be very tedious and uninteresting, but I'm always glad to see my work pay off in the added dimension and visual interest. 

To the battle area, I added some variation and shading, made the tall grass look a little smoother, and put in the stairs leading to the next scene. I also finished the farm, including a NPC and his little chickens(!!). 

For the valley town, I played with the layout a little, adding canals and bridges throughout instead of the very straightforward configuration I had before.

Last, I made an assortment of (literal) bugs, which will be catchable. I'm excited to see them coded in and livening up the environments. 

All in all, it's not much, but I hope for a more fruitful November!

-Asiyah

Programming

This month I mostly continued work on already existing systems. 

This included the factories. The biggest addition was the boss fight. While I can't show any images for the boss scene as it is not complete yet, I did go through and code in three brand-new moves for this dungeon’s boss. 

There is also now art for the light fixtures inside the factory, so I went ahead and added lighting to them and some post-processing effects throughout the entire factory.

Rogi’s ( The game’s main character) ability outside of battle is now complete. She can absorb light and later use it to light up dark places! The only thing left is animations.

In the grasslands, seedlings will be introduced so it was important that I finally tackled adding their functionality into battles. 

Seedlings are a little tricky to code within the battle scene code structure as they are three battlers in one, so I’ve been dreading doing this. Though storywise, seedlings will have to be able to work inside the enemy's party, so I started there first.

 After making it possible for enemies to have seedlings on their side, I made a new move for them. You can now battle against a trio of seedlings.

 In the future, I have to do the same but instead for the player's side.

Another system I touched up, was day and night inside the battle scene. Specifically nighttime’s visual effects. Now inside the battle scene, the sun will change to a moon, the dark overlay will be a more precise midnight color, and a star shader to top it all off.

The last mechanic I invested a large chunk of my time is the assisting mechanic. This is when allies in battle intercept oncoming enemies' attacks.

Originally it was very janky and the enemies were overlapping the ally who was assisting, and things of that sort. So I fixed it, to make it look more seamless. I also changed the assisting UI a bit, even though I'm still not totally satisfied with it. In the future I would like to add particle effects to the minigames to juice things up, So look out for that on Twitter!

And that's my programming recap! ~ Maryam

Thanks for tuning into this month's dev blog. Cya in the next one!👋

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