Progress Report: Boss Mystic Arte

Over last week, I've done streams to get work done on the Mystic Arte for the "evil spirit" you fight toward the end of the demo. You can find the other video on the same channel as this one, but let me break down what it is I've done so far.

The Setup

Like before, I'm using a mix of common events and action sequence plugins to pull off the ability. However, this arte isn't grouped with the others, as this is intended to play during a cutscene. As such, the move isn't actually being executed like normal, meaning I would have to do some workarounds. For instance, commands that would reference the "user" or "current target" don't work since the action can't be called without all other commands in the event running. "Force Action" is generally used to get abilities to work, but even if it gets called, it won't work until the rest of the event plays out. Therefore, I would need to call the common event that has all the attacks that can play during it, and it will actually execute all the commands it can before resuming the previous one. But this also means that I have to reference each battler by "actor index x" or "enemy index x" to get the animations and actions to work.

Now, this also means that damage numbers won't show up due to no actual action occurring. So I have to manually subtract from the target's HP to simulate some sort of damage being done.  I have no way to cause the numbers to pop up manually, Maybe one day I'll find some way to get that to work. Everything is a work in progress, after all. I did correct how near the end of the attack, the attacker flashed as if being hit, when it should have been Aki. I'm going to look into seeing if I can touch up the backdrop so that on top of the black void, there can be some flashy animation or parallax over it during some attacks. I think some good examples of this can be found here:

What Next?

By next stream, I should have what I need to work on touching up the Mystic Arte more. I'll even see if I can program the bit of story that plays after the arte is done. Or...I can change the last part of the arte to where the moment the fight would end happens, as it seems like a good place to make it happen. I'll, of course, keep a copy of the arte for in case I change my mind, but also so I can make a normal version of it for the eventual 'rematch'. But the first thing to do is apply a backdrop effect, so you aren't staring into the void the whole time.

I'm at least happy that I am now capable of producing such moves at all, even if they're just for a cutscene at this time.  It'll be good to experiment over time and improve all other abilities as well.