Hello and welcome to our devlog. Over the previous two months there have been some changes to the card battle system, these include: new attack animations, card designs and a general layout change of the whole battle scene. There is also a big backend overhaul in the works, that is however, far from being ready to show.
New card design
A new card design has been developed. We are already looking into simplifying it and getting it tested. Take a look at the illustrations below! The current card design is on the left, with the newer, simplified version on the right, which is still in development.
Battle scene layout changes and morale
As previously mentioned the whole battle scene layout has been changed, as can be seen in the following image.
With these changes we get a lot more space for the cards in your hand, from which we can increase their size, and thus make their elements easier to read.
Alongside this we also scrapped player lives, and implemented morale. Morale is a value that currently starts at 20, every time a player loose a unit they also loose one morale. If a unit reaches their opponent's front line (previously called safe zone), they attack the front line, and substracts 1 morale from the opponent. When a player reaches 0 morale, they lose.
Attack animations
We decided it was time for new attack animations, as we are looking to share a prototype soon, and the game was in heavy need of a new attack animation. You can see the new animation in the following video:
As can be seen, the attacker "tackles" the opponent, the opponent reacts by being pushed back and rotated slightly. The orientation of the rotation is selected at random.
This new animation works dynamically, which means the amount of damage that is dealt changes the amount at which the opponent unit reacts, so the more damage is dealt, the more the opponent will be pushed back and rotated.
Backend overhaul
There is a huge backend overhaul in the works, which we feel is necessary, to save time in future testing and development. We are currently working on separating the codebase a bit more from Unity, to test code separately, also through your typical debugging tool, which Unity does not easily allow you to use. This is so we can track bugs and functionality easier, and also to get a better structure in what is currently a messy codebase.
Next time we will take a look at some big new systems and fundamental changes coming up very soon. We will be covering: card traits, source analyzer, some new cards, removal of movement and initiative and more. We are very much looking forward to sharing all this information with you next time!
That concludes this devlog. We would love to hear what you think. Any kind of feedback is appreciated