Devlog 3/5/26 - Delays and Combat Improvements

​​Another late update, but with good reason: until last night, I didn't really have any progress to report. Now I do, and it's still this week so it's still a  weekly devlog.

​First...

​The big project I was working on came back to haunt me. I started this week feeling a little lost and with no real direction because I've been working for so many months on various urgent projects that it was weird to suddenly just have time for the game again. That changed midweek when the big project discovered one minor workflow that doesn't work. Unfortunately, we're using an existing service we have no access to for our project and with no documentation its been a long process of trial and error to get our system interfacing with the old one. At this point a complete system replacement would have taken less time, but they won't accept that as the first stage of the project.

It turns out this one workflow that affects maybe 1% of the work on the system is enough for them to refuse the project and withhold payment. This means I've been working 3 months without getting paid for the project. Typically, you'd do 50% upfront and 50% on completion. This was agreed and they just haven't because they'll only pay on completion.

Anyway, turns out this one workflow is impossible with the old system, so we're having to do a workaround that might work just to get paid, meaning this week has been a wash for gamedev.

​What has been done?

​Everything done this week has been on the combat system. It currently works for female player characters but males are broken due to missing animations still. However...

If the player attacked an enemy who was queueing up their own action, you'd get locked immediately into the enemy attack with no escape and sometimes interrupting your attack. The player now has a period of invincibility while carrying out actions. If an enemy tries anything, they get told to wait until the player becomes available again.

The lock-on system was too restrictive. As soon as you start combat, it would lock on to the closest enemy until you beat them up, cancelled it or manually switched. This could work, but it should be an optional thing, so it's been turned off when entering combat.

To compensate, when not locked on, if you attack it does a soft autolock to the closest enemy you are facing within a forward facing arc. This means you can turn the player to jump from one victim to the next without ever actually locking on.

A multi-attack ability has been added for players. Beatdown takes a single enemy out immediately, but multi-attack takes all enemies in the combat and randomises a list of 3 targets, then jumps between them delivering an attack to each.

Male characters have had their damage animations updated with knockback. Now any damage animation they do either features a pushback or a few steps back. Combined with the player doing a backwards dodge after actions like multi-attack means that the combat feels a bit more kinetic and you don't just walk up to someone and keep clicking until they fall over or grab you. Now, each attack gives a degree of distance between you.

​Finally...

​The damage animation thing is in progress for female characters, annoyingly at least one of them needs completely reanimated where the male ones were quick modifications.

The other thing that has been done is admin work. I've been through the Trello and looked at all the tasks, grouped them, reordered them and removed things that are not needed to tighten up the game requirements. We had a lot of things that were either duplicates or the same thing explained differently. Similarly, we had a lot of things like in one phase we'd be modifying a feature then 3 phases later modifying that feature for something else. Where possible those have been grouped so when a feature gets done it stays done. Some stuff has been reordered to reduce coming back to features as well. If you need to completely redo the HUD, you want to do it after you've built all the systems that use the HUD, otherwise you get our current HUD where we just add stuff as we build features.

Once I am clear of this work again, I should be able to get back in to working more on the game.