Wellspring: Altar of Roots is a dark and plot-heavy tactical RPG that merges old-school, turn-based strategy with modern, fast-paced combat. Featuring gridless battles, roaming enemy encounters, complex character customization and a vast and open world map, Wellspring offers a fresh look at a time-honored genre.
So this probably isn't the most glamorous feature ever, but we've recently fine-tuned our combat "Inspection Mode!" This is essentially a way to 'pause' combat and cycle through all of the combatants to view detailed information such as movement range, the currently-queued up skill and its targets, as well as any active buffs or debuffs.. and probably some other junk too when I get around to adding it.
This mode has existed since the early days of Wellspring, but we noticed that players would sometimes enter this mode and not realize it--this update serves to make it a little more obvious that the player is 'inspecting' the characters and that the normal flow of combat is 'paused.'
Implementation-wise, we threw in another post-processing volume (gotta love these things) as well as the flashing "Inspection Mode" text controlled by a simple Tween. We also 'froze' all of the combatant animations, which was a little trickier than I thought. Enabling/disabling the animator component doesn't quite work, since certain values get reset, so I ended up just setting the animation speed to zero and reverting it afterwards. Not too shabby for an afternoon's worth of work!
Like always, we'd love to hear your thoughts about it and/or ways that we can improve it. Haikus are also welcome.
I think this is a pretty interesting mechanic. You could certainly make it more useful/interesting by having certain enemies that need to be inspected to show weaknesses or maybe have inspection mode use some mana but also give that character a small damage boost. I think it would be nice to make it feel like more than a pause screen.