Programming

This is something I come across a lot: I rush into things.

I implemented a stupid system that will check if a character has a skill and I could print that skill, but the problem was I couldn't access the object of that skills because no skills had an implementation. I guess I jumped at the sight of how handy enums are in C# or something.

I really need to work on makeing sure my classes are "future proof". I always seem to forget something, and then I need to go into base classes and change it, and I really want to avoid that.

/rant

Graphics

Implementation of the sand shader was also quite cool. You see shader pop up once in a while. It basically will only place sand on the edges facing up. It's the best time saver ever when your quickly need to design levels.

Here's a screenshot of the shader in action: 

I've made some nice progress with my current battle scene. I wouldn't mind release a level with this quality as an indy developer. I can keep polishing it, but I'll loose way too much time. The textures still need some work, but that's not my job ;)

The scene now:

Before I could have spell and ability menus I needed to create those abilities,
and because all that stuff are gained by Jewels, I needed to create those first.

I found a nice way to store an Item Database in Unity, so that's good news.
Now we have a template Jewels and for a character to use it it get's copied and the values can level up accordingly.
It will be quite hard to code all the special modifiers, stat changes, spells and abilities.
But I know that a good class system is the basis of this and I got that done.

Sound effect guide: http://www.epicsound.com/sfx/

Things to do: Target selection, linking animations to actions, AI manager, spell list, item list.

The ordering of the characters in combat is done. Picking certain actions will be faster or slower like in FFX.
I've been thinking to do the same like ffx but with a cooldown of a few "turns" on powerfull abilities.

This will make sure really powerful abilities aren't spammed all the time, and it will be easier to balance everything out.
Also certain Jewels could potentially reduce the amount of turns of cooldown you would endure after casting a powerful spell.

Oh and it will also make sure that more than one spell is going to be used by the player.

Last week I experimented with the interface, now I made it customizable.
The interface text can be changed real-time.

Anyway, the interface has basic functionality, you can navigate the command list and the item list.
Now I just need to get the info from the party itself.

As we don't have a story at the time of writing, I started with the basics of our game; Combat.
I didn't want a stereotypical ugly interface bar at the bottom of the screen, so I tried to try to place it in the geometry of the map.

I'm also using a nice new way of programming and it making my job a little bit easier, I won't go to much into detail about code in this ... blog thing, but it's cool.

Using this new stuff, I can easily without much hassle add some polish to everything I create.
Nice moving camera angles, fading colors, fading menu's, this normally quite hard to make, but with this new approach this is way easier.

I had some nice ideas for the interface: