General Update - Initial End Goal Reached

While this image is outdated for minor reasons, it is also the one thing I can post (without spoiling much else on the story itself) where I can say that I have reached the initial end goal I had for the story demo! Now, by that, I mean the story event has been written and played out to the best that I am able (which I can always touch up on later). The only thing missing is the last story boss fight, which I'm going to commission soon. I also need to balance out the boss fight before this, to ensure it has some challenge and fairness to it. But speaking of which...

Back to Dragonbones I Go For Attack Animations

Naturally, I chose to start with the golem, since it is the second to last fight in this dungeon and one with the most physical attacks at the moment. Before, when I started doing the Dragonbones stuff, I was convinced that I had to limit animations to what were considered standard or operable on RPG Maker MZ.

Essentially, I was going by the default motions that were also available to the engine's standard battlers. And I swore that even when I attempt to forcibly call an animation that wasn't listed by any of these motions, it wouldn't actually play. Either that, or I misunderstood what I was doing when working on both the plugin commands and the files in Dragonbones.

The command I needed was to force the user to perform a motion that is listed in the Golem's respective file, which has it perform a backhand attack. Once I confirmed it worked, it was a matter of getting it to move correctly toward its target so it wasn't too off from where the party was, so try and maintain the illusion of them all being on the ground as is. This will be different for many of the enemies, and eventually I'll have to consider adding other animations when they attack since I might not be able to add 'everything' to Dragonbones.

But of course, the one thing that's going to be a pain to get right is the timing. When I was using Effekseer for attacks, I knew what frame to set the commands for effects to take place. Because the timing is different with Dragonbones, there's a bit more to work out since they may appear slower than what is happening otherwise. The number of frames in motion don't reflect the number of frames being counted in engine. Like, this same attack animation takes 10 frames in Dragonbones, with the FPS set to 10 as well. Yet, as shown here, it takes at least 23 frames to make the attack connect, which by my estimates, the point of contact would be on frame 5 of the Golem attack. If I can take that into consideration, I might be able to handle the other enemies as well.

Going Forward

I'm fairly confident that with the number of enemies I have, I can migrate all of their attacks into Dragonbones and get them working right that I won't need to use Effekseer as much. This means less guess work on how big to make the images, I can also use them as a template for any color variations, like in case they use the same exact attacks. Like ultimately, this is to help reduce space. The attack animations tend to take up room in the game folders, so if I can reduce it down to just the Dragonbones stuff for the enemies (and hopefully the party members), that would be a lifesaver. Once they're done, I'll work on Aki, Piper, and William, since they're the only playable characters I have for any demo I have up at this time.

Once that is done, I will move on and extend the story demo with additional story stuff, get that squared away, and then add additional quests and other things. Once I get the last boss commissioned, that will be done asap, since it's part of the demo.

Wrap-Up

I'm looking to have this demo done before the year is over, and released at that point or at the start of January. The updated Arena Demo will be included as well, but at the moment, I'm fairly certain I can make this happen. Priorities shift constantly the moment I see how efficient it is to do them, so I hope you look forward to what I do next.