Welcome back to people who read the first devlog, and Hello to people who haven't. I'm Figgity, and this is Motes!

Last devlog, I went over the trials and tribulations of basic opponent AI. Between now and then, fun stuff has happened!

But before we get into the thick of it, I wanted to introduce a new segment to the devlogs. The CARD SHOWCASE! Where I go over a fun card and some possible uses for it (Everything subject to change, of course)

Say hello to Cauterize.

Cauterize is an interesting card, doubling as a supportive tool, and an offensive weapon for anyone that picks it up. I'll also note that it can target yourself in addition to allies, making it a valuable tool for healing allies, yourself, or hurting enemies in a pinch.

Moving on to the new developments in development, I spent this time recuperating from life (I may have crunch time'd a bit to get the devlog  out by my personal deadline) while doing a litany of miscellaneous changes and additions.

As you saw from the card showcase above, I took the liberty of changing the layout of the cards, giving more space to the quickly identifiable parts of the card, the name and image, and added a few popup tabs that display relevant information for using the card. In the end, it looks like this in your hand.

(I know its grainy, I promise that's just from zooming in a ton and having it compressed 3 times)

I also added a 'Card Inspector'. That's what I'm using to see the cauterize card above. If you ever want a better look at the card, and a longer description then the shitty little ones at the bottom, you can just right click and look! I didn't have the time to implement this part right now, but I'm also going to add a way to see the card history & inspect them, so you can get a good idea of every card being used by your enemies.

If you were astute, you may have also noticed one of the bigger changes from the cauterize card. The capabilities of cards have been massively expanded. I won't go over the nitty-gritty, but cards can do so much more now! AOE attacks (that you can rotate), healing cards, status effects, and even some weirder untested effects like teleportation, drawing cards, and effecting your enemies hand and deck.

The other, smaller changes I added don't seem big, but they make a big impact on how it feels to play, even now before there's much to play. I tweaked the damage numbers, so you can see the elemental damage from the color as well as used that same system to popup that you've been inflicted with a status effect.

Speaking of status effects, the last thing I want to mention is the status menu. Eventually, this will double for things like inventory and character information. I couldn't figure out how to really implement this for a long time. It's simple to just say "Well Figgity, add some icons!!" but that leads to a hard question, where?

The best of both card games and tactics games have a common thing in their design, their communication to the player is extremely concise and well done. For a lot of games, you have to train yourself to see all the available information, and the developers work to decide what information the player should have and what not. The weird thing about tactics and (to a lesser extent) card games is that they have a lot of information available, so making sure your game isn't word-y or math-y or menu-y, displaying tons of information at once is important to making the game not feel overbearing to play.

I'm still on the fence about the status window, in an ideal world I could display status effects without adding a button to see them (if you have suggestions, please comment!!) but I settled with this.

It simply adds them all to a list, and displays their turn limit. As I said, I want to double this for inventory & character info, so I'm going to use all that blank space to the left for that important information.

Thanks for reading this far! I know it's been a minute, but I promise I'm hard at work on motes. I've been doing some big stuff for the next update (starts with an M) and am much further then I thought I would be in such a short period of time. I'm even thinking of extending what I want to call the "First Edition" to have a mini-campaign type thing. We'll have to see.

Expect the Unexpected,

Figgity <3