Fight playout iteration
2026-04-17
The fight playout — the part where you watch the round unfold after locking in moves — got a full rework this week. Instead of stepping through text results, the game now plays a comic-style banner sequence with character images, stat bars, and panel transitions. Each step zooms into the action: attackers and defenders show up with health and energy bars animating in real time, and energy recovery gets its own panel at the end of each turn so the flow actually reads.
If you're wondering where the vibe comes from, there are two games I keep going back to. The tactical side is heavily inspired by Enchanted Arms — a 2006 FromSoftware RPG for Xbox 360 and PS3. Grid-based, turn-based, four characters on the field. It wasn't a massive hit, but I absolutely loved it. Fights felt like little puzzles where positioning and turn order mattered, and that's the energy I'm chasing here.
The visual side pulls from Dragalia Lost — Cygames and Nintendo's mobile action RPG that ran from 2018 until it shut down in 2022. The manga-style art, the adorable chibi characters, the way everything felt like a playable comic strip. That game nailed the cozy-but-epic tone I want Larithea to have, and the new playout panels are my love letter to that aesthetic.
Auto-skip is in too, so you can let the whole sequence run hands-free or tap through manually. Enemy images now use proper standardized art instead of placeholders, and character orientation stays consistent across panels.
Right now the art is all static PNGs. No attack swings, no hit reactions, no spell effects — just images sliding into panels. I want to create proper character animations, probably with Kling, and I know the result would be unbelievably cool. But that's a massive time sink — days and days of generation, iteration, and integration per character. As much as I want to see these characters actually move, I have to delay it until the rest of the game is further along. Too many systems still need building before I can justify disappearing into animation land. It'll happen, just not yet.