Last blogpost, I promised to detail the Battle System that’ll be used in Unsealed: Whispers of Wisdom. And here it is… (The Dev Diary will be posted later! is here!)
Now, before you pass judgement on a badly animated gif… That screen above is a mockup. It represents the “ideal” layout of the battle system.
We went through about 20 revisions before landing on that one (Which isn’t the final one, btw!).
With that out-of-the-way, I’ll explain the “Dude, did you just clone MegaMan Battle Network” battle screen. (And the answer is “No, not really”).
For starters, we’ve got the hero, on the left side of the screen. She can move around the red area using the WASD keys on the keyboard, or the giant d-pad on Android. The above picture represents the Android version. The desktop version will be pretty HUD-less.
There’s a Shield button, and an Attack button. Using the Shield makes you unable to move, while blocking. The Green bar on top represents the HP, and the blue circles below that represent the mana / energy you have available.
Using the Shield as well as the Attack will drain your mana / energy.
As for the hideous buttons on the right… They represent the skills you have available. The black dots represent how many mana spheres they need to use, so using the Fire Lion attack might need 4 energy spheres while using the Earth Spikes one would only need 2. As you can see, there’s a button that lets you to through different “pages” of spells. There’ll be a total of 9 spells you can assign to your player, though the game will hopefully have more than enough spells to allow for interesting challenges and variation.
On the right side of the screen, you can see enemies that will move around and try to hit you.
If this all seems familiar to MegaMan Battle Network players, it’s because it is quite inspired by it. I’ve meant to make “MegaMan Battle Network Online” since MMBN1 came out for the GBA, but kept on pushing it off. One of the things I never liked about MMBN was the Battle Chip Select / Pause Screen which made the adrenaline-pumping action pause to select your next moves.
This way, you don’t need to pause the screen at all. It also allows for multiplayer battles, without having to wait for everyone to select their chips / spells.
Finally, the above gif is a mockup, but here’s a preview on how it looks like:
Lastplacer helped make 7 fantastic Battle Stages which add variety to the game. The buttons and icons have been cleaned up as well.
I’d like to throw a shout out to Eccentric Happenstance and Lastplacer for helping me by revising the Battle System until we’ve got it to a point I’m finally comfortable with, and to Cookiez for making the fantastic Sprites we’re using (The Ghosts and the Female Character), as well as to Drawig for helping out develop the game.
