Battle System Progress
This past week has been all about one of the biggest milestones so far: the battle system. It’s been a ton of iteration, testing, and re‑thinking old design notes, but it’s finally at a point where I can show it off — and it’s genuinely starting to feel like the core of the game.
From the beginning, I knew I wanted in‑field battles inspired by Chrono Trigger — no separate battle screens, no random encounters pulling you out of the world. That meant no compromises, even if it made the system harder to build.
Building the Foundation To get the basics in place, I first created all the HUD elements and windows in Photoshop so I wasn’t working with placeholders. Once those were implemented, I wired them into a simple battle sequence: - Standard attacks for both player and enemy - Damage pop‑ups - Basic turn flow
Once that worked, I expanded into: - One special attack - Defend - Item usage, which required getting consumables functional behind the scenes
With that prototype battle running, it became clear I needed to bring the system closer to my original design docs. That meant making everything scalable, data‑driven, and mathematically consistent — which took a lot of tweaking, testing, and re‑thinking how stats interact.
Encounter Triggers & Polish After the core logic was stable, I added collision‑based battle triggers and placed some slimes around the map to test encounters in the actual environment.
From there, I started polishing:
- Temporary run‑in and run‑out animations
- Improved glows and selectors for clearer targeting
- A victory screen that calculates XP (currently set to zero until I finalize the XP curve)
Item drops aren’t implemented yet, but they’re on the list.
Where Things Stand Honestly, this is the first time the project has started to feel like a game rather than a collection of systems. Seeing everything working together — UI, encounters, stats, animations — has been incredibly motivating.
Next up is the dialog system, which will unlock story progression and NPC interactions. Once that’s in, most of the core systems will exist, and I can shift focus toward building out the world itself. Devlogs may become a bit less frequent at that stage, but I’ll keep them coming regularly.