Adding Trinket Art and Thoughts on Previews

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!

A smaller update this week. I couldn't finished the preview system I was working on due to some personal reasons, so instead we're just adding some art to the trinkets this week.

I'm still working on the preview system, and it's been a very interesting puzzle to solve.

The current system is very simple - each tick is evaluated as if it's the current one to see who would be targeted by each effect, and then a marker is placed on the target's timeline to indicate they are the target. It was easy to make, but it's also naive and can mislead the player.

Each tick is evaluated independently, so it doesn't know if a battler is going to die, or move, or be summoned before it's reached. That means the preview might not be accurate. It also means it can't do anything like predict a battler's death, or whether an effect will not happen because a battler is stunned. Those are both things I want to be able to show the player.

I could make a custom program that goes through the timeline and figures everything out, keeping track of battler HP, statuses, etc. That would probably be easiest, but presents its own problems for the future. Any effect I add in the future I would need to also account for in the predictor program. That's a big reduction in maintainability. It would also mean that any difference in the predictor and the actual combat evaluator would lead to previews being inaccurate, which is something I really want to avoid.

The way I'm actually going to try to do it is to reuse the combat evaluation code I already have, but with a 'preview' flag that changes the way they work. If the preview flag is enabled, damage doesn't actually reduce HP but instead reduces a 'preview_hp' variable on the battler. In fact, almost everything will need a 'preview' version, statuses, battler order, summons - It's a lot to handle, but once I set it up it should be able to handle any new effects pretty easily.

I do anticipate a lot of bugs though - preventing bleed between preview effects and the actual active stats of the battlers is something I'm already struggling with. If you notice anything after the update next week, please let me know!

In development - The preview system - hopeful I'll have it done for next week!

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