Isometric Battle Tactics RPG Devlog 3- New UI, New Party Member, New Enemy!!

NEW UI AND BATTLE COMMANDS

For the UI, I took a lot of inspiration from the Final Fantasy Tactics Advance series. The new menu uses better font and displays the description of the action the mouse is hovering over underneath the menu.

Menu actions

There are two new actions, defend and wait. Defend uses up the party member’s action and raises the player’s defence for the next turn, whileas wait simply skips the party member’s action. After a party member has taken an action, arrows will now pop up over the party member to select the direction that the party member will face at the end of their turn. Eventually I want a system where side and back attacks have greater accuracy and critical hit chance, so this will be important in combat.

Waiting, defending and selecting direction

For movement, each party member now has a walk animation (whereas before they just were moved from one tile to the next with no animation) so they will pathfind and walk to the selected square.

Walk animation

I’ve also added a confirm action menu that pops up when an action is selected, as while I plan for movement being ‘back-trackable’ eventually, I don’t want actions to be able to be undone. The bottom of the screen will confirm the action name and the character performing the action, as well as the character to be attacked.

Confirm Action Menu

For enemy attacks, a confirm action menu won’t show up but it will still show the UI at the bottom for a few seconds to confirm the action the enemy is taking and its target.

Enemy confirm action

NEW PARTY MEMBER

I’ve added a new party member called Art, who will act as the ranger of the group. His art and character design is finished, but I’m waiting until I have a minimum of 3 party members to specify his exact playstyle and actions so I can balance it out in the context of a party.

New Ranged party member (Art) Sprite Sheet

I plan for him to specialise in single target ranged attacks with some weaker melee attacks also- his weapon is a slingshot so for now I have a simple ranged slingshot attack and a whack attack.

New ranged party member in action

NEW ENEMY DESIGN

I’ve created another enemy design, a goblin! Below is his sprite art:

Goblin sprite sheet

He’s going to be a melee preference attacker (so, he will attack melee if in range, but if he’s not in range or already can get a ranged attack in at his position, he will prefer a ranged attack).

Goblin in action

Next month my focus will be on implementing AoE attacks, improving enemy AI so enemies can each have individual behaviours, and implementing a cutscene system that works alongside quests!