As the title says, these last 2 weeks works I've continued working on assets. In particular, 6 frame walking animations have occupied a considerable amount of my free time. The results are far from perfect, but I think it adds a lot to the game and individual animations are not as noticeable when there are so many moving parts in the average battle anyways. 

Regardless of that, every enemy has some kind of animation while moving now, even for the portion that's not intended for the working demo.

Another aspect that has occupied a large portion of my time have been the visuals for the slideshow cinematics. At first I decided to upscale low resolution art because I wasn't confident that I could make a good looking game but now I'm trying to replace these with the final assets for the game. Even if I'm still not convinced it's the best it could be at least I can depict a bit more detail. 

Besides this I've also been making small improvements here and there. Now a little animation plays when a unit waits, perhaps this will make it more clear that waiting recharges MP. Now even enemies can teach this mechanic to the player. This is also a good opportunity to showcase some of the graphical changes.

Next, the stats screen now displays attribute and perk points separately since the latter are awarded more often. When a particular attribute is mentioned the text has the corresponding color to make it easier to read and there's a new label that displays the current average movement speed which should give the player an idea of how much they are getting in exchange for each point just like how HP, MP and damage values change when spending a stat point. 

Mechanically the speed curve is now not as steep as before so additional points of AGI grant comparatively less additional flat speed and low AGI characters should be a tad faster. The idea was to make AGI less of an auto-pick on level up and early battles a little faster. This change is unlikely to make AGI that much weaker regardless because speed is always really important in turn based games. Can you imagine if there was a variant of chess where you could make 3 moves for every 2 moves the opponent does? 

In case you are wondering the distance units have to walk back and forth to take a turn is around 20 meters. 

The respec button is not for show either, it's now implemented and I think it's a good compromise in the absence of grinding. The only problem is that I should probably attach some sort of cost or cooldown to it but I'm not sure what. 

Finally, I've been working on the sound mixing and fixing up the first hour of gameplay or so for the working demo. Here's an example of what I want to do. First of all, now tiles are no longer greyed out when they can't be accessed so it looks much more colorful and they don't stick out as much. Because of this I also got rid of the outlines, now there's only a highlight when you mouse over and if a tile is available or not is represented by an exclamation sign on top of it.

The picture is a comparison for level 1. I added an extra branch because even though it's sort of like a tutorial there's no need for it to be that simple regardless of that. I also changed the hill tiles quite significantly because hidden enemies is too mild of a handicap. Now they are characterized by poor man's iron deposits that grant bonus MP at semi-random intervals which should speed up gameplay. I don't like randomness too much, but that's why players have the option to fight 2, 1 or no battles on hills if they choose to.  Naturally, this affects other stages that contain hills as well.

That's everything I wanted to show for now. I've also been fixing minor issues here and there, but there's a reason why I don't do these as a list of patch notes. Today I finally got accepted into Steamworks so I gotta get to work on setting up a Steam page. Sadly, I haven't had time to finish any additional levels for this DD despite having a good 3-4 levels in progress, but the current content is over 4 hours long already so I'm too bothered about it. 

See you in 2 weeks for DD51.

Afterlife Gladiator on Steam! Woooh!