I've gotten back into the nitty-gritty of coding and animating fights, so I've expanded the to-do list considerably to reflect that.
Battle screen with enhanced UI graphics (work in progress)
Battle stuff is the real reason this project has taken so long to do, because it's all surprisingly complex. Maybe I'd feel this way trying to recreate any RPG's battle system, but I really feel like it's easy to dismiss this game's fighting as "Dragon Quest with a gimmick" until you start thinking about how it all actually works.
And what makes that frustrating is that so many of these things are required for
anything to function! But the good news is:
You can now play out a battle with basic attacks and it'll hold together (usually).
Goku fighting a Kaiwareman; recreated battle animation with enhanced UI graphics (work in progress)
Melee animations for this part of the game have been recreated, sans sounds and probably missing a bit of polish, but adding my extra animation frames. I probably could have properly figured out how the original game ROM stores these and extracted them, but it probably would have taken more time than just having the game go frame-by-frame and recreating them by eye, which is what I did.
Next will be handling all-out attacks (if your character's school matches their card's school, they'll attack all enemies/get a power boost) and properly playing out special moves (I gotta stop myself from calling them "ki attacks", which they are but that terminology gets confusing for obscure reasons I'll get into another time). That's because those can be triggered entirely depending on what cards are drawn and played, which means 1) the player can do these and they won't work properly yet if you do, and 2) the enemy can do these and there's nothing you can do to prevent it.
The "attack everyone" part of all-out attacks originally just gives the user individual attacks against each opponent, all with the same basic "kick them away" animation. This is pretty boring and it can get quite tedious later in the game, so I've been working on some cool custom animations, but this is obviously a bunch of work. There's the animation element, and then there's doing the custom handling for damaging each individual enemy, when normally the many calculations required are just done once at the beginning of an attack.
Goku's special attack list
As for ki attacks... I mean special moves, the menu is already implemented but the rest isn't. So when you select a special move card, you get the menu to select which move you want and it's got the proper move list for each character and stuff... but then it plays out a normal attack anyway. This is a big one because of all the animations that need to be implemented, but fortunately I can save a lot of the special effects for the next milestone, since Goku, Piccolo and the enemies kinda just shoot various types of blasts at this point, plus Goku has Solar Flare.
