Wow, two weeks just flew by. I got sick with fever, so there was a time period where I couldn't do much. But in total, I still managed to do quite a lot, mostly quality-of-life stuff.

Probably the biggest change was that you can now drag and drop lacrima in your inventory. Just feels so much better to be able to grab items manually like that. It already worked for the cards, so it needed to work for lacrima as well.

To be perfectly honest, this is officially a Hack™. The sprite is part of a UIButton, and it simply moves along with the cursor after a mouse-down event. But to map the cursor coordinates to a 3D space, I had to add an invisible 2D plane mesh, so that I can raycast the mouse cursor position down to where the sprite should appear.

But hey, it works!

I also added a new socket effect, which was inspired by the UI of God of War: Ragnarok. They added a little highlight when equipping enchantments, and I just had to steal that. I did add a particle effect as well, since the highlight alone wasn't cool enough.

Another notable change was that you can redraw the first time you draw five cards in a fight. It can happen that you have bad luck and not draw enough creatures to block all incoming damage. The redraw button costs money and the cost increases with each use, but it still allows for another option to mitigate bad luck. In Magic: The Gathering you're actually allowed to discard your first hand if you're not happy with it (mulligan). But I didn't want it to be free.

I also added new lacrima, namely Gust (Wind), Quake (Earth), Ray (Light) and Void (Dark), so now I have all elements that I wanted to add. The other ones are Incinerate (Fire), Water Cannon (... Water), and Thunder Strike (Lightning). They all have secondary effects, which makes them quite useful in certain situations.

The stats screen is also finished for now, meaning that the best card is shown alongside a handful of statistics:

(I fixed the wrapped text at "88 kills" already, don't worry :D)

This still needs better layouting, but for now it works as intended. Adding those kind of stats is always fun too, because it sort of also adds a bit of info here and there that's useful to know for me as the developer.

In total, I went through 32 items on my todo list, lots of bug fixes and, as I said earlier, QoL changes.  The game only gets better from here on out!

I also started working on the Save & Continue feature, which is very important. Basically, the whole game board gets "summarized" as a giant JSON file, which then can be rebuilt.

Apart from the obvious value for the player, this will also allow me to reconstruct debug situation with certain card combinations. For example, if an enemy has a specific lacrima and a status effect, and I hit it with a spell that has another specific lacrima, I can just edit the json file, load it, and very quickly debug the scene.

Where's The Demo, Sir?

It's coming! I'm happy with the UI for now (more work for later), but I still need to reskin the Turnament/CattyBatty pause/options menu. Shouldn't be too much work though.

Then maybe one or two more songs.

Then I'll upload it on itch.io, and continue building the game out in the open.

Oh by the way, I also added Yuki to the game! Just kidding. I mean, it would probably sell 100000 copies, right? :D

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...