When it comes to game dev, an important thing to remember is that you want to create the most amount of interesting content via the least amount of work possible; especially when you're doing everything on your own. Adding Voice acting is a bad idea in general because your workload will balloon even more for very little pay off. Instead, you can just use the tried and true method of having using typing sound effects during dialogue and modify the pitch, tone, tempo, and even use different sound effects to fit a character and/or scene (Undertale unironically does a good job at this). Alternatively you could look up how the Animal Crossing Series does text to speech if you want something that sounds like actual speech.
some suggestions for npc combat: -add random knockback in random direction, that should increase the intensity -make so that npc can dash (or just roll) -make so that when an npc swing their sword (or shoot arrow), there's a chance that the target will run (or dash) behind -an npc that can heal teammates -an npc that can both shoot arrows and melee combat (which will change after a set of time or if they are too far from the target)
It would help with readability if you your allies/minions have like green health and enemies have red health bars. Then the player can tell at a glance which army is beating which army. Another way to make combat feel more varied and complex without just randomly moving around is to let your NPCs perform combo attacks and those combos could force the NPCs to move around without it being so arbitrary.
For a quest idea for seing if the player is worthy for soldiers to join them or even money (which you could use to let the player do bet on things etc) is to have a the player be invited to a duel or even 1v2 and if they win they get said soldiers
Also idk about having actual audio speech from npc's maybe having something like what happens in animal crossing when they speak except you could adjust the tone to what fits the npc (like for blacksmith it could be really deep like the dwarfs in LOTR)
In my opinion your game doesn't need voice acting, a game that reminds me of yours (for some reason) is CrossCode, which is still a beloved game without any voices.
Reminds me of the old suikoden rpgs. Would be cool if the characters you recruit have rarities and the more rarer maybe they have a small quest attached to obtaining them or something.
This game sounds awesome the sounds of recruiting allies with non repetative quests is a lot like my favorite rpg game ever. I dont really play rpgs idk never got into one but my favorite one is not a usual one its the google doodle game champion island its mostly just back and forth quests and a few small minigames but what I love about it is to 100% the game you have to do all the quests and all the quests are just funny sill ones with fun characters and funny chats I have played the game countless times and also have speed ran it too if this games turns out to be similar to that except more than just back and forth this would mostly likely become my favorite rpg game
You need to ask people if this core gameplay really fun? it looks like you are focusing on things around this where it is by far the most important aspect, animations and graphics dont matter if a game is dropped because its not fun.
Love the branding, and the concept of having all the quests go towards mustering troops for a battle! Fantastic. Also love the idea of voice acting, especially if you can do it yourself! I am also considering doing the same, at least as placeholder voices. Have you tried using filters on the voices? I was surprised how much Hades relied on filters for their voice acting... the Noclip documentary series did a great job showing this.
Using tutmo's tutorial you can definitely set it up to create prefabs that have different sprites assigned to them. You'd want to attach a script to the character so it can override the default sprite in the animation, and have a spritesheet assigned to that script to tell it which sprites to use instead. You could then just make that into a prefab if you'd like. The idea is that with sprite animation, inside your animation you're assigning specific sprite frames to display at specific times. All you really need to do is name those sprites the same, so like "Idle_1, Idle_2, Idle_3, Idle_4", etc. Then with the script you'd be running a loop through your override spritesheet to see which names match up exactly, and if it finds a match, it changes the sprite for that game loop to the override sprite instead of the default sprite in the animation. Make sure you're doing this in LateUpdate, btw. But that will give you the ability to just slap a different sprite sheet in there and have it just work.
Hey just to mention that timer could act as a penalty, so make a system which rewards players if does it within your task within time,, it won't frustrate the player moreover would provide engagement to your game
Your game is looking really good, you are a great artist!! If you are looking for anyone to make music for your game I can give you a good price! Let me know if you're interested...
Hahah I wish I was talented enough to make these sprites. The main artists I've been using is FinalBossBlues (finalbossblues.itch.io/). And thanks for the offer!
Regarding your animation problem, this sounds like somethhing you could fix yourself by making a custom unity tool that auto generates your needed prefabs. Probably cool aswell to get an insight into making a custom unity tool.
Leaving a comment for the algorithm. I have things to say but really since I'm catching up on your videos, my guess is that the game has change a lot from this video to the present. Basically, love the progress!
About the system with the NPC quests, what happens if the player fails the final fight? If they have to restart do they have to do all the same minigames again? I haven't watched the other videos tho, so I don't really know the core game loop or anything
I would suggest you to use the state design pattern. Your life will be much easier as hardcoding the different states in a switch - case as patrol / Meander, etc.
I think it'd be interesting to add a kind of "Fable"(game) mechanic to recruit more soldiers: you can seem to be threatening for people (bandits or small groups of people in a village) and make them join your army by small quests or be a "white knight" so people of the Kingdom(?) could join you "for the great of good". In Fable the mechanic is difficult and the whole game is built around it but you can just add a little bit of it and it'll add alot to versatility(for the instance: wearing a particular mask will make people be afraid of you and stuff like that). I haven't seen such mechanic/system in games for a while and i wish there was a pixel rpg like this. I think what makes games more interesting to play is mechanics that are important from the start to the end of your playthrough and make a game replayable. Probably, i'm not really good at English to convey my thoughts the way i want so sorry for possible mistakes and all that!
Great devlog I love the direction your game is going! What are your plans for the map is it temporary? as of right now it looks a little “strange” but yeah i love the direction your going :)
I hated your first few develogs because you used so much stolen assets. But if you are actually gonna make your own stuff I might change my mind. This video is a step in the right direction.
Ya I mean I paid the artist for the assets, so I wouldn’t consider them stolen. Sorta in the same sense as if I just hired someone to create assets. I have incredible respect for game devs who want to do it all themselves, but for my game I’d rather pay and support a pixel artist who’s job it is to create assets rather than make something hideous myself lol!
@@ByteOfMichael The more hideous assets you make yourself the less hideous they become over time. Practice and get good is the way to go. And then you can be proud of your art too.
