Welcome to another Outhoused Studio devlog! This time we're going to make another progress update since the last time we checked in. Last time we went over the decisions we made about how battle would work in our game, as well as how we went about making a system to get the player skills into the context of our game. This time we're going to talk about how we've set up a party selection scene and how this fits into the context of our MVP.
How this fits into our MVP
Beginning with how a party selection segment fits into our plan for our MVP, we plan to allow the player to select their party from a roster of characters, and that party would be the player's party for the remainder of the MVP. In other words, they'd first choose the four charactrs they want to take with them, from the knight, mage, hunter, priest, brawler, and hunter. Notice the priest and brawler haven't been spoken about before, and indeed we haven't defined any abilities for those characters as of yet.
The purpose of the party selection screen is to allow the player to choose the characters they want to have in their party for the upcoming battle, as well as to choose the party slot configuration. Recall that where characters are is significant to the combat experience. You'd probably want your knight to be further to the right, or closer to the enemy's party, for instance. We want to affect the position of each character in the party by selecting the character to be moved and then selecting the slot to which we want to move that character.
We're not sure yet whether we want to have the player choose their party members only once at the beginning of the MVP, or whether we want them to have the freedom to make changes to their roster between fights.
The two-dimensional iteration
Initially, we went for a more two-dimensional approach, with the player party being displayed similar to a series of cards on a table. We implemented a system for selecting the party with mouse clicks. At the time where we made this, we were not yet considering the position of our party characters. This layout looked great and worked very well, but a few weeks later we found ourselves considering a more three-dimensional approach.
The three-dimensional iteration
We found that having a more three-dimensional approach allowed for us to bring the player more into the world of the game. Obviously the background of our three-dimensional selection menu is still subject to change, but it's a good start for the moment! We also added a side panel to later fill with more specific details about the characters being selected. We're now more satisfied with the esthetic of our party selection menu.
We've implemented the functionality of being able to select which characters are added to the party, as well as where the characters are positioned within the party. This is done by clicking the target and specifying a destination, in both cases.
What's coming next
Next on the road map for us is going to be to define a battle scene in which both player party configuration is loaded and enemy party configuration is initialized. This will lay the groundwork for the battle scene, in which our core gameplay experience will be defined.
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