Day: Well...Idk anymore lol. - Back in the Battle Loop!!!

I don’t have screenshots to share today. Most of the battle system currently lives in debug printouts, and you’ve already seen enough cubes to last a lifetime.

The good news is that the battle foundation is working.

Party members now spawn correctly with their placeholder cubes, and everyone is positioned using a formation system built around a 3×3 grid on both sides of the field. That part is finally behaving like it should.

For testing, my party has been repeatedly fighting the same enemy group, which led to one of my favorite bugs so far.

I have an enemy called the Daeva Legionnaire, essentially an Iron Giant-style unit with a massive shield bash. I didn’t immediately notice anything wrong… until I realized he was using Shield Bash on his own allies, absolutely mashing them to a fine paste while I was busy attacking, completely unaware.

The culprit turned out not to be code, but the skill’s .tres file. That file controls things like targeting rules, and the Legionnaire’s Shield Bash was accidentally set to target allies.

I’m happy to report that the Legionnaire has since chosen violence correctly.

Unfortunately, this revelation came at the expense of Gradnir, my bird-kin shaman debuffer. He’s currently the squishiest party member and not yet protected by the full formation logic I plan to add later. Watching a Legionnaire ignore the front row and deal 546 damage straight to him was… educational.

The real tragedy, though, was Gradnir panic-healing himself for 10 HP, only to be immediately slapped for 196 damage by a random Thrall. That might be the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in a debug log.

There’s still plenty of balancing work ahead, but overall the system is coming together nicely. It’s still early, but once the battle mechanics are solid, I can move on to modeling and event scripting… and then it’ll finally look like I’ve actually done something.

For now, I’m just really happy to be working on this again.

RIP Gradnir, you will be missed…