Hello! This is my last post before MOJO.

During this week I finally managed to fully incorporate the status ailments from my prototype along with a better damage system that also allows for enemies and other entities such as objects to be affected by certain ailments or react to being hit by certain types of damage. However, at the moment there aren't actually any player skills that afflict ailments or certain types of damage that would allow for these to be visible. So for example, movable logs exist in the game and making it so they combust when getting hit by fire damage is very easy, but the player does not actually have any attack that allows him to inflict this type of damage.

Regarding the ailments and their effects, I tweaked the overall values a bit based on the feedback we got and further nerfed every ailment a little anticipating that some players in MOJO could have a hard time with some enemies, which would risk overshadowing other aspects of the combat experience and the game in general. I conceptualized some more ailments, such as a blinding effect that would work similar to caves in pokémon games that require the HM/TM Flash, and a poisoning one which would be easily implemented as a DoT ailment with different values (number of ticks and damage per tick) than the burning one, as well as an added effect of choice if needed. In the end though, I decided not to add any more for now as this area of the game already has a pretty decent variety and I didn't want to overcrowd it too much.

I also included some more interesting visual indicators both for status ailments and the damage system in general, such as a small popup when getting damaged or afflicted by an ailment, and a list of icons by the player health bar which indicates how many and which ailments the player is currently afflicted with. On top of the popup, I might also add a flashing tint to the player whenever he contracts a new ailment as well as a popup when trying to attack while frightened or heal while burned (You can't attack/heal now!).

I started working on a more interesting animation and 3 hit combo for the protagonist's main attack, including a slam and/or uppercut on the second/third hit. The image above is a spreadsheet of how I visualized the "hits/slashes" to generally look. I will try to finish this over the weekend hopefully in time before MOJO. If it ends up working well we'll either replace it with the main punch attack or include it as an alternative obtainable skill for the normal attack.

Finally, about some of the cards on the devplan, there are some things such as "cutscenes" as well as the half done parallax background I've been working on which are kind of on hold for now as I felt like they weren't as important for the gameplay, as the combat experience, for instance. I'll include the parallax background as well this weekend if it ends up looking good, though it might look awkward while underwater if I don't account for that. Regarding the "cutscenes" the idea was to have some story in the game, but a save system and story progression in general would be something more relevant in the long run which is why we didn't put much effort on this in the end. Either way, I'll probably end up making a starting cutscene simply showcasing the protagonist and the mask fading in, with a short dialogue box explaining their background.

That's it for this week, see you at MOJO!