The Road To Making An RPG Is Drenched In Blood And Tears

Aesthetics

Now that I have some decent placeholders for status effects, I can start actually making the different skills the characters use. Or so I thought.

I looked at my skill notes and there's a skill called Crusher that says: Strong attack, inflicts stun

The logic is easy enough. Just use a different damage formula or something, and set the stun status on the enemy, maybe with a random chance of it not working.

The problem is that it has to have an animation.

I have a placeholder attack animation where the attacker and attackee kind of wiggle a bit and a damage number appears, just to make sure that animations work at all in my engine. I could just use that.

But it has to have a different animation than normal attacks or it's strange....

It probably makes sense to leave the animation for later. But I got mentally stuck here because I think it's important. It's not just a purely aesthetic thing, because if all the attacks have the same animation, it becomes harder to remember what attack you chose and whether you chose the correct one. I think it has a big impact on the feeling of playing the game.

So I'm at the point where I have to "implement skills". But it feels like most of the work of implementing skills is actually about coming up with and programming unique animations for them. I got into a mental block because I wasn't really planning to draw a bunch of sprites and effects and stuff tonight.

I think writing this post has helped me shift my mindset towards "maybe it's okay to just use the default attack animation for everything right now".

However, I've used up my energy on posting so I don't know if I will do anything else now.

Goodbye....