Every Sprite is Kung-fu fighting!

Rolling Pixels #5 — Indie Game Dev Adventures

I have crossed the threshold of building code for prototyping to playing with prototyping! During this sprint, I returned to Itch.io and picked up some new game assets to play with, specifically sprites with attack, idle, hit, and death animations. A trip to Game-Icons to make a skull hit sprite. I split my new strange characters into two teams and set them at each other! In Last Age of Sorcery, you play a Vancian-styled wizard in a world hostile to wizards. The wizard can have a retinue. These members aren’t controlled directly by the player. In combat encounters, they will have auto-battler-like qualities. That is what this prototype is about. What does combat feel like, how much auto-battler, and how much player control? What are the game mechanics, how much stats and mechanics to show?

Let’s break it down. In the scene above, we have, from left to right, three Enemies, a Player-allied NPC, and the Player. When I end the turn from the keyboard, all the Enemies are triggered to submit actions and select targets. The GM class sorts all the actions by the included initiative values (some are random, some are hardcoded) and executes them individually. At the end of the round, if any NPC state is dead, the Game loop cleans them up. Next round!