The Phalanx marches as one

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!

We've got the penultimate fight (for the initial build) this week. This particular fight comes with some new controls for enemies, and a bug fix.

-There was a bug in the web version where there was a pause between every tick being processed - that has been fixed now (thank you EternalSandsM for pointing it out!)

-The Phalanx is the new fight - the first thing you'll notice is that it's wider than any other - there are some adjustments to made there in the future I'm sure, but I'm happy with it for now

-The Phalanx only has three moves, but two of them have different versions for different health levels, and the third (reinforce) cannot be used when on full health

-The Phalanx's cards get weaker as they lose members, and there's a visual cue too - their image will change as they take damage

Enemy moves and images can now be determined by their hp, which I plan to use for things like bosses that get new attacks when low on health. I actually already enabled it for the Thagodon, so now it won't heal itself unless it's actually damaged.

One thing that I've been mulling over is due to the structure enemies pick their cards before they play them so you can actually see them laid out ahead of time. That means that an enemy that gets damaged or healed may then use a move that they technically shouldn't be able to, because it was 'drawn' before their HP changed.

I could make it so that cards update to their different version when a damage threshold is reached, but I worry that that will confuse players as at the moment once a card is played it cannot change. That's a rule I'd like to stick to as much as possible, so players can predict outcomes consistently.

If you have any ideas, leave them in the comments below!

In development - Next week is the final fight, the reworked warlord! Then we get started with polish, rebalancing, restructuring, all that fun stuff on the road to a complete demo build.

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