The month of June has ended, so it’s time for another Garb & Corncob devlog! Last month, I completed the game’s cutscene system. Proceeding as planned, I shifted my development focus to tweaking the game’s battle system. Up until this month, I had only shown off the game’s overworld system, but I actually developed the battle system before the overworld when development began back in January and I was following a series of tutorials by xOctoManx. As you’ll see below, I held off on revealing the battle system due to the hand-drawn graphics appearing far more incomplete than those of the pixel-art overworld. Gotta make a good first impression, after all!
The first thing I did when returning to work on the battle system was create icons for status conditions. As with most RPGs, status conditions exist to affect fighters’ performance in battle. Four status conditions are currently planned:
- Yucky fighters have weakened attack and defense stats.
- Burning fighters take damage each turn.
- Depressed fighters have a chance of failing when performing actions.
- Stunned fighters cannot perform any action.
I then realized that the game’s UI should have sound effects to give it some charm. I wanted to give players the freedom to set separate volumes for music and sound effects, but was unsure of the best method for doing so. A simple tutorial search led me to a great video by Brackeys that introduced me to Audio Mixers. This feature of Unity greatly simplified the process of incorporating custom audio settings. By allowing the player to set the Mixer volumes on the main menu, the volumes persist across all scenes, so long as I link my various Audio Sources to their respective Mixers.
Due to E3 viewing, TooManyGames planning, and other projects requiring my attention, development slowed down during the middle of the month. While I had not made any progress during the week of the 16th, I conveniently forgot to post these 2 indifferent emotes when I first drew them. These emotes are the first ones added in since the Steamed Hams parody, which included smiling, joyful, angry, shocked, and sad emotes for both Garb and Corncob. Not all of these initial emotes were visible in the video, but they are all available as emotes in my Discord server (there’s nothing wrong with shamelessly promoting yourself in your own server).
Corncob is lying here. I attended TooManyGames this weekend and had these screenshots planned in advance, but it completely slipped my mind to have him make a post until the final moments of Saturday. Anyways, here’s the long-awaited first look at the battle system! Inspired by the likes of Final Fantasy and Pokemon, players and enemies take turns performing actions, which include melee attacks, projectile attacks, and healing. Corncob will be the only controllable party member (although he will not be battling alone, wink-wink) and up to 3 enemies can be present in battle. As you can see, the battle system still uses placeholder art: a rough sketch of Corncob with varying colors, the Garb Streams background, and some circles. I’m still trying to decide on what sort of art style I’d like to use for battles, but for the sake of getting it up and running I’m sticking with placeholder art for now. You may also notice that Corncob is animated, with separate poses for attacking and taking damage. Certain boss enemies will also have these animated poses, but for basic, randomly-encountered enemies, I’ve decided to limit them to a single pose in order to cut down on production time.
Before the initial battle system reveal, I added some polish to how multiple enemies are handled: duplicate enemies are now labelled with A, B, or C, and enemy spawn positions now change based on the number of enemies in battle.
I had used prefabs for storing enemy data up until this point, but I decided to switch to scriptable objects, as they are better suited for storing data. I have already heavily incorporated scriptable objects for storing region, action, and projectile data, so setting up scriptable objects for enemy data was pretty simple. Corncob broke down how all of these scriptable objects work in the thread below.
Development on Garb & Corncob will slow down for the month of July, as I participate in Kentucky Fried Pixels. I’m hoping to use my experience from this game jam to make Garb & Corncob even better! Thanks for reading, and I can’t wait to see where the road ahead takes us!
Alex Garbus 