Talking a bit more about combat...
Our idea of how the player tackles combat is basically on two extremes, either the player will be able to skip it entirely (with the kill all move on cheat mode that
TheDevian mentioned ealier) or the player will feel engaged with it. Lots of things are susceptible to change but our goal is to make every choice meaningful, there won't be "standard" skills that the player will just
always use, each skill will have different characteristics, scale with different stats and different effects. We recently also added skill types, such as blunt, piercing, fire, etc. Each type will behave differently depending on the "race" of the target (such as human, lycanthrope, vampire, etc), some interactions will be somewhat obvious, but we will also provide that information through the Codex (which is already coded and done, we just have to put a bit more stuff there). No skill will be objectively better than another and we are also avoiding redundant/similar ones.
Combat will have a bit of RNG, but not a lot and i'm focusing on using it only where it is really necessary such as a
small part of the AI (i am making a custom one for each character and their decisions will be largely reactive with the state of the combat, the RNG part is for weightening those decisions, so character's actions make sense whilst not being completely deterministic).
The combat is somewhat turn-based, but still much different than your average RPGMaker game, there are turns
, but they are structured differently in the sense that you are able to "plan out" your turn (turns are not restricted to just one action, you have a number of AP which you can spend on that turn, or save for the next one - similar to Divinity Original Sin ) - which every character does at the same "phase", after the planning each character will play out his turn depending on how fast he is (with a bit of RNG, similar to how Darkest Dungeon picks the turn order). The player is also able to "predict" (the UI will give this information) what the enemies are going to do on their turn - provided certain conditions are met.
Combat will be completely animated, initially our plan is to make everything on it through 2D sprites that
TheDevian is making, however we
may (emphasis on may) switch to 3D models in the future to make it look more fluid.
As a last disclaimer, i am not a fan of VNs at all so that part is mostly handled by
TheDevian as he is very experienced and enjoys that genre. However i love mechanically focused games so i'm taking special care (props to
TheDevian for that as well as most ideas come from him) of making sure the combat feels fun, engaging and balanced.
As
TheDevian said earlier our release has been delayed due to a critical problem with the Addressables package of Unity, Unity's team were not able to figure it out so i am having to spend a few days switching to another Asset Management system.
We are still very close though, after that is done what's left is mostly soundwork and a few polishes.
