New in this Update

New features

This is the part to get excited about.

• You can now disable and enable the card combat through plugin commands

Use DisableCardBattle and EnableCardBattle in a plugin command to disable and re-enable the card battle, respectively. When disabled, it will go back to the non-card combat system. This will allow folks to do things like put a card mini-game in their game or have both card battles and regular battles for different events.

But I realized disabling the card battle system would cause an issue with the Skills scene having been turned into a Cards scene so I added another feature:

• The Cards scene is now separate from the Skills scene

You can include both in your menu, or just one! You can use the plugin commands EnableCardLibrary and DisableCardLibrary to add and remove it from the menu, so it can be unlocked. You can also use the plugin command OpenCardLibrary to go straight from the map to the card scene!

This feature comes with a few extra plugin parameters to give you full control. You can read the help doc for v1.2.5 for more information.

Now, our final feature was developed by MythAtelier's designer Neel. Why would our designer get their hands dirty in the code? In order to find out what features are missing and make the best possible version of our plugins, we need to use them ourselves. And that means... well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

• You can now change the Base of a card through notetags

What does this mean? Card component terminology has plagued us throughout the development of this plugin. The Base of a card is the part we've formerly called the "design" - it's the card part of the card, before text and the card art has been added. There may be situations where you want a card to stand out, or you want to distinguish between different sets of cards, and changing the Base of the card is the exact way you want to accomplish this.

Just like the <Card Art: x> notetag, the <Card Base: x> notetag can be used for this purpose!

That's it for features for right now. But before we move on to what to look forward to, I want to address...

The Elephant in the Room

So, you'll notice this is not version 1.3.0, but instead 1.2.5. You may also notice that the promised Party Battle did not make it into this update. The short explanation is that programming is hard. This feature is not ready, though as of the time of writing the progress is looking promising. We discussed it internally and decided to release the features that are done so that you don't have to wait for those.

The truth is I overestimated the difficulty of implementing the ability to disable the card battle, and underestimated the difficulty of implementing Party Battle.

But don't worry! v1.3.0 is coming, and Party Battle is my sole focus for that update!

Showcase Time

Wanted to show off a game using this plugin that looks amazing so far.

Look at this! It's gorgeous! This was posted by MALGOOSIX, and according to them they're using HUD Maker to adjust the UI.

This was posted in the Game Showcase thread on our community page. I would love to see more people post there and show off what they're working on!

Final Thoughts

This has been a busy month for me and everyone else at MythAtelier. The nature of game development means I'm not allowed to talk about why we're so busy, but suffice to say we've got our fingers in more than one pie. If things go as planned, next month our time will be slightly more free, but we'll see; the plan wasn't initially to keep developing CardGameCombat after its v1.0.8 release but the response was so incredible that plans had to change. We look forward to supporting this plugin and the community working with it in the near future.

Hope to catch you all again next dev log!

- Isiah