Playing with Time

As always, this update is live now and can be played for free in browser at https://isochronalgames.itch.io/timelinegame. Updates like this will be coming out every week, so please follow if you're interested in seeing future updates!

Content added on all fronts this week:

-A couple visual bugs fixed

-Cards now move more smoothly, using interpolation. Try moving your mouse quickly while holding a card, it should feel a lot more fluid!

-Added a new enemy in the Dino series, the Thagodon. Based on the Stegosaurus, the Thagodon is a defensive powerhouse, with a lot of HP, a parry, and even a self heal.

However, that health can be chewed through pretty quick when it applies our new status to itself...

-Exposed! Exposed reduces for every tick that goes by, but while it's active any attacks will deal it's remaining duration in extra damage.

-There's only one player card at the moment that applies exposed, Make Opening. 

7 ticks might not seem like long, but if you can get a Flurry right after a Make Opening, you're looking at 12 extra damage. 

A pretty powerful combo, and since Exposed stacks you can always ramp it up more. Of course, you'd need to apply some more before the old stack ran out. That might get easier with our new shop option...

-Remove Tick! The first card upgrade option, this lets you remove any tick you want from a card. Here I'm removing a tick from Jab to give it an instant start, but you could also remove an interruptible tick to make a card harder to disrupt, or take the extra ticks off a dodge roll tick to give you a very powerful defense.

Adding the tick removal was actually pretty easy, as I built a lot of the groundwork when creating the cancelable cards (see a previous dev log, A Difficult Implementation, for more on that). I had known since the beginning that I wanted to add options to modify your cards, but as I played around with the tick removal I became very excited about adding more options.

I always want to take advantage of the options made possible by the timeline system. There are things I can do that aren't really possible in other card games, and I want to explore that space fully, so expect to see more options like this in the future. Maybe a way to duplicate a tick within a card, or transfer a tick from one card to another, or merge two cards into one!

Next up - Next week I'll be finishing up the Dino series of enemies with a third member. This is probably the most different fight I've added so far, so expect to see a few more mechanics and some more UX changes to make it easier to follow!

If you're interested and want to see what comes next, I'd love to have you follow along! You can also follow me at @isochronalgames on Twitter/X for daily updates on what I'm working on.

Gifs in this were created using ScreenToGif - thank you ScreenToGif!