Hi folks, today I've got a few updates, The following video shows everything off but I'll be explaining each update below:

One of the main goals I've had with Siphonogore's action system is to give the player the chance to make moves very powerful as they progress through a run. When I started, out this came in the  form of a series of character-wide upgrades that would apply to everyone -every move causes bleed, increase Fluids damage by 20, etc. As development continued I realized that doesn't allow for the moves the properly shine, so I implemented a per-character upgrade system that leaned into the RPG system a bit more - earning Experience and leveling up, which would allow for character specializations, new moves to be unlocked/added to the moveset, and upgrades to existing moves by increasing stats or adding effects to the move. Of course this into a roadblock.

The New Effects System:

The Effects system up till now had been very strict and rigid - Starting off only being able to apply effects to the target, and eventually adding in another effect to be applied to the self, the effect system's greatest pitfall was only allowing one effect to be applied at a time. This greatly limited design - A move that would, for instance, mutate a character could not gain any more utility aside from being its own target (a workaround I created for the Blockage move of The Warning Sign), and it couldn't be made more useful as time goes on. I simply could not have a move that did more than two things. I accidently came across this fix while working on a function that applies buffs at the start of the fight, which allowed me to apply a list of effects to a character. The end result is this: the ability to stuff half a dozen different effects into a move.

Of course, my design goals are going to lean more towards catering move effects/upgrades towards specialization so moves don't make other moves obsolete - If a body part is going to be hyper-specialized, so will the moves. Speaking of specialization:

The Level System:

A character will have a variety of upgrades applied to them that will change their stats and moves such that each run allows for different branching builds. I also plan on adding in powerful mutated versions of moves that will appear if the character is in a mutated state, and I want to loosely group these mutations and move specializations to give more combos to the player (Specialization 1 & mutated move 1, Specialization 1 & mutated move 2, Specialization 2 & mutated move 3,  etc.).

The level system uses a variable I call "biomass" as the EXP - it evenly divides the amount earned between all living characters, so the fewer characters you have the more power the surviving characters become. In the video I've also added a modifier to the head to give it extra biomass (an upgrade I'll be adding in later) to test being able to level up multiple times. I'm currently playing with ideas for getting additional biomass, maybe some kind of "Attack the corpse" kind of action on the UI that would waste a turn but gain more experience at the end of the fight. On the topic of UI:

The new Helpbox:

The Helpbox has been implemented to have a few views. First, the preview of all the upgrades applied to that character

If you mouse over an enemy, you'll get to see a preview of their moves and the type of move it is. I'm working on also listing off their effects

If you mouse over a UI element, a tooltip is displayed describing what it is, I plan to make these prettier and contain visuals as well

I also Added in a little bit of juice when moussing over a move, where it darkens and condenses down a bit - I want to add a move preview that displays what the move does in more detail.

Towards future planning I'm going to work on the Tooltips and UI a bit, and then I'll be working on integrating the non-combat COYA features into the loop - more on that when that update comes out.

Thanks for coming by, follow the project if this interests you.