Boosting Battles: combos, pouncing, bombs and movement
posted 6th Aug 2022 by Tyrus

I've been updating battles a lot.

Combos! Comboing Lil' J's lightning strike with Pug in her JARPUG stance results in STRIKE ROCKET.

Also: these videos span a good year of progress, and the UI changed a lot during that time! Hopefully for the better!

I've had the goal of dynamic move combos in JARPUG since day 1. Initially I imagined that it'd be based on positioning your teammates and then chaining things off of them, but the movement system and emphasis on dodging don't really play well with that. And characters do the very normal JRPG thing of moving toward their target for normal attacks, any way! Making it more complicated for combos seems clunky and unnecessary.

I also have been wanting more reasons for your team's stances to matter. So now, your teammate's current stance combines with your attack when you combo to turn it into a new one! Each stance has its own verb and AOE shape that gets bolted onto the existing attack. It all gets animated together into a glorious mess of dog-on-ghost violence. In this case, JARPUG's verb is __ ROCKET and it gives attacks that lovely death beam shape.

Stances used to change your stats rather drastically mid-battle, meaning you might stay in a more boring stance just to keep your defense up. Yeah, that was a bad idea. Now stances cause characters to drop stat-boosting combo crystals on the ground, instead.

Picking these up gives a temporary stat boost AND fills your combo bar. Right now you target them with attacks to do that, but I can imagine running into them being a better way of doing it.

Here you can see those crystals in action! After filling that combo bar, Pug combos her Poison Zone attack with Lil' J's __ POUND verb to make a Poison Zone Pound.

I use the same color focusing technique here that I used for parries to help highlight the relevant characters/effects. There's a lot going on, but focusing on the action helps keep things clear and exciting.

Pouncing! Pug can now get a head start in battle by jumping on enemies and doing a good job on this pounce meter:

Bombs! Shield domes! I've added spawnable and knockable objects to the battlefield to make battles feel more physical, dynamic and fun. It's also a way to make player positioning matter more without grating instant punishment for a misstep by your dog AI teammates.

Don't worry, I've made the shield dome prettier since this video was recorded.

Movement! I've made movement more responsive. By default characters now run the same way as your controlled character does, right away. The "scatter" and "group up" commands now show arrows to and from the controlled character to help you quickly see what the command is doing.

jarpug-follow

The current character indicator now has a large arrow hanging off it so you're clear about that, as well. jarpug-character-indicator That used to be a circle, but now it's a ring so it plays better with the character's feet and the ground. And are you seeing that transition from ring to sphere for the bounce animation from one character to the next? Who does that?

There's a new problem created by this: characters that are faster than you will end up sprinting headlong into enemies. Most of the time telling your teammates to scatter avoids this, but I'm considering a "stop" / "freeze" button. I don't want squad commands to get too complicated, though. I'll try to update the scatter AI to be better at avoiding enemies. It's already supposed to be doing that, so, uh, we'll see.

Also: it took me forever to get arbitrary button icons rendering for keyboard inputs. Putting a white outline around those button icons led to me pushing the parry UI into that outline. The old progress bar wasn't getting a look withthat beautiful button front and center.

I've also added a lot of sounds to battle and have been improving the attack effects in general! I've been putting off both of those things for far too long. It's a slow pile of work but it helps battles feel a lot better.

Byeee