Crop and Claw 2

[pyral]

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Crop and Claw 2 follows up a decade after Crop and Claw, and a year after the events of the work-in-progress novella temporarily titled Serial of Wend.

It supports numerous advancements over Crop and Claw 1. More advanced scenarios and scripting, multiple party members (both story-specific and custom mercenaries), and multiple aspect ratios for different screen sizes. It also supports ARM64 Linux handhelds through Portmaster.

TODO: actually type stuff. Reserved for when I'm not lazy.

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[pyral]

I've finally stopped being lazy and pushed the first commit for some time to fix a dumb interaction bug that somehow slipped in. Last night's stream got hijacked by Dragon Dragon Fire Fire and I still need to finish that since I would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I'll be dipping in notes as I try getting momentum again. Most important being this morning, I'd finally made a guide for adding skill animations in Gorbash so that Argil would be able to do some additions while I take care of fixing and figuring things out.

[pyral]

The content grind starting to kick up. Mostly database entries and placeholders. Later on came doing some maps in their most basic form. I think I've stitched most the warps together, but will have to check again. I think the town's going to need some work too since it's fairly large. Argil has interior tilesets I'll be yoinking and throwing in. Maybe next stream will just be setting up the town. Low stakes thing to stream and gives some groundwork for what items and services are available. Plus there'll be eventually moving the merc creator into a service NPC as opposed to starting the game.

[pyral]

The past two streams were a lot of implementing my dumb joke scripting system as a real thing in Crop and Claw 2. It's laughable that it works. I may write a custom editor to pop up for writing things with, but am not sure. Autocorrect isn't really easy and it doesn't show what works, but it's funny this works. Makes scripting cutscenes or complex character movement a bit easier, as the system's relatively simple. Doesn't branch out of the box, though.

Might have to pick the pace up soon, since I want to be very close to launching a demo by the end of February, but it may end up being March unless we suddenly make huge strides.

CnC2 Cutscene script sample

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[pyral]

All this time I was like "man my sorting algorithm for turns isn't great and unoptimized so I may have to write some C++ to speed it up on handhelds" with regards to CTB calculations when changing actions and predictions taking a quarter of a second to run on handhelds.

Changes to turn sorting code

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Turns out what was actually happening was I'd left in brute force calculating every turn entry before sorting so agility was being calculated per combatant every single sorting attempt, of which it feeds in somewhere between 8 and 16 turns PER combatant (can't remember exactly how much) of which much of it is culled, as it's there to fill in space when few combatants are around. AND it calculated every stat (which it's still doing as I haven't optimized stat calculations yet when you only want one stat.) So instead I calculate agility before sorting into a cached table and feed that into the agility sorting so every turn is comparing a precalculated float instead of the entire god damn stat block formula.Now it runs near instant on handhelds and menus feel more snappy. I can still feel a tiny lag, but it's way way more acceptable and doesn't interfere with playing.

calc_turns_fast.mp4

Handheld fast turn swapping.

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That was a massive issue since while some stuff is eating frametime due to slow code and brute forcing some drawing or element refreshing, everything is pretty playable. But trying to flick over menus was halting actions for fractions of seconds at a time which was way not acceptable. Much better now and that's before optimizing the stats to allow single stat recalculations.

[pyral]

Some progress over the past week or two. Primarily showable is a few things. Lots of animations added for skills, which is a grind. Immunity and absorption for elements is there, at least on a species level. Numerous bug fixes, can't remember what all. Might be entering balance soon. Weapon skills now branch a bit where each weapon strike applies a bonus based on the weapon's power scaling. I do need to remember to apply crit effects which is probably my next test bit.

07naw4T.mp4

Crop and Claw 2 skill animations

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[Goldquiver]

That system is looking really versatile. It's a lot of info at first but even watching the video, it it very easy to understand (but that may come from gamer expectations as well).

I can see how having different text speeds for things like effects and combat messages would be pretty useful, if they go too fast you can miss info, but if they're too slow then you can get bored in longer combat situations. Maybe a way to affect the text scroll speed within a combat somehow?

The turn order looking really smooth too, especially with abilities that affect it, where you can see how much is adding or being taken away from a bar. Do you intend to keep the numeric count visible in the game? Or change the graphics to make it a little more guesswork when it comes to affecting the upcoming turn order?

[pyral]

That system is looking really versatile. It's a lot of info at first but even watching the video, it it very easy to understand (but that may come from gamer expectations as well).

The nice thing is CTB doesn't require knowing all the deep specific details. It's not infallible depending on implementation and presentation, but it's good enough to make plans over. I used Dansg08's video essay that explained the actual math and specifics behind how FFX's CTB system works. (Found at https://youtu.be/B5XKiqRPHlg) This guy explains everything and points to charts and tables which we took as a base. Our formulas are different, and there's some improvements in CnC (you see delay infliction, unlike FFX where it's quietly done and is confusing if you see like, BFS stunlocking you with AoE delay) or tick modification like haste/slow have more options than just those two statuses. But there's a lot of overlap and similar implementation where understanding FFX's CTB is a huge advantage in Gorbash-based CnC.

I can see how having different text speeds for things like effects and combat messages would be pretty useful, if they go too fast you can miss info, but if they're too slow then you can get bored in longer combat situations. Maybe a way to affect the text scroll speed within a combat somehow?

I probably could have options for that. I hate videogames. I'd like to adjust things so there's an option to do bulk messaging instead of one-by-one, but that requires some very deep boilerplate to be rewired and added. Arguably doable as I technically already do something like that for multi-target attacks with animations. The animations will flag as finished partway through the animation itself, so that it feels more fluid than "one-by-one" like Breath attacks show.

The turn order looking really smooth too, especially with abilities that affect it, where you can see how much is adding or being taken away from a bar. Do you intend to keep the numeric count visible in the game? Or change the graphics to make it a little more guesswork when it comes to affecting the upcoming turn order?

I'm not sure if numbers would be visible. They are hidden in FFX, but they don't look terrible here. They were primarily for debugging purposes so I could see how the ticks were being assigned or recalculated to notice something being wrong. Every pixel in the menu is a tick (20 ticks, 20 pixel bars) and then the second brighter bar is another 20 pixels. Once you're past 40 pixels, you can't really show more. Again, another snagging of FFX's implementation.

[pyral]

Small funny thing. Ended up caving in and getting an Anbernic RG DS since now there's some better custom firmware (Gamma OS has public builds dropping next week which I'll flash over soon.) Thought I'd do some science based on an extension from https://github.com/flametime/Godot-Android-DS-plugin that someone made. Bare basic test works, and I've got a second viewport pushing a general screen. Might push player information or something to the bottom screen for a DS player to get more breathing space on the top screen. It may require some modification to the Kernel and viewport hierarchy but I structure everything relative to the kernel. Might be doable.

RG DS CnC2

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EDIT to add some new screenshots after streaming and touching up the implementation.

RG DS CnC2 Town Showoff

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RG DS CnC2 Combat Showoff

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RG DS CnC2 Cave Showoff

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[Argil]

It wasn't until now that I noticed I forgot Glist's ears. At least I can fix them before release