Heart Realm Update #008

It's been a while... let's just leave it at that. Quite a bit has changed for Heart Realm since I've posted last; a change of location for one (in real life), change of job (had one, now I don't and I'm looking). Personal stuff aside, I've been working on this game on and off for the past few months so there's been a bit of change since I've last posted.

One major new thing is the inventory menu, it's very simple at the moment and don't want to go too complex with it at the moment.

The inventory can be accessed by simply clicking on the button that is permanently at the bottom of the screen, anchored in-fact. From the inventory screen you can click on an item to select it to display it's stats, (only have weapon stats displayed, and just descriptions for everything else). You can press "Enter" or double-click on an item to Use/Equip it.

Then there's the basic loot menu. When you kill an enemy a chest will be dropped (not sure if this delivery system will be in the final game) and upon interacting with said chest, it'll open up a little menu.

From that menu, simply hovering over an item will display its stats in the window to the right, clicking on it will add it to your inventory, as well as the "Take All" button which adds all the items present into your inventory. It's fairly straight forward.

Something that you can see in the previous screenshots but has yet to be mentioned is the player's health and mana bars being present in a HUD (Heads Up Display) at the top left of the screen.

Finally, I've reworked the combat system a little bit. I've created a time system where all your actions take x amount of time to complete and are affected by your character's speed attribute. Regular actions like using an item, moving, and interacting with an object in the world will have a set base time cost while things like casting spells and attacking with a weapon will be dependent on that spell/weapon. After the time cost of the action is calculated, the enemies in the world will then be given a number of action points based on the time elapsed from the player's actions. So for example if the player swings a heavy, slow weapon an enemy with a relatively high speed could potentially take multiply actions in the process of the player performing that attack.

Prior to this new system, enemies would make a single action or not based on their relative speed to yours, so if you were much faster than them, they had a decent chance of not acting. If they were faster, they would have a higher chance to make an action. With this new system, there is less randomness and is more dependent on the character's attributes and actions they take, making the game more tactical. With this new system I've been able to introduce a weight system for the equipment where the heavier the equipment you had on, the lower the player's speed. The player's speed is influenced by potential skill buffs, equipment weight, and their agility. This will now allow for deeper customization of character builds, instead of going for the highest damaging weapons and the strongest armor, there will now be trade offs for each weapon and armor type.

Aside from these few things, I'm sure there's other stuff since I last posted that I forgot to mention. So I'll end by also adding a few extra screenshots.

~ Rogue Templar