Epoch: Unseen Devlog 3 - Filling the Combat Prototype

Touched a lot of visible combat pieces this round. Unit sprites, protagonist setup and visuals, combat animations, battle formulas — all in one pass. The combat prototype finally has a shape.

Unit Sprites

Went with SPUM. Not entirely my taste — I prefer retro pixel art — but convenience and productivity make it a reasonable pick. Popular among indie devs for good reason.

Used to require separate sheet work for optimization. Now it's a built-in feature. One click and it's done. That matters.

Tweaked the white-haired hero character slightly. Everything else is mostly default presets. Speed over polish at this stage.

Protagonist Setup

Revisited protagonist lore this round. Had an old setting from a mod called "Cheonha" that I'd shelved years ago. Instead of restoring it wholesale, I pulled only the surviving core.

Original flavor leaned Three Kingdoms. This time, fully pivoted to medieval fantasy. Almost no reference material survived — rebuilt mostly from memory fragments.

Drafted Erich and Lise visuals here. Illustrations generated with SDXL, picked usable results after a few rounds.

Combat Animations

Ate a lot of time. But after this pass, almost no legacy code remains. Chose to restructure rather than force-fit old code.

The animation editor is so convenient now. Between AI and asset tools, hard to imagine how I used to do everything manually.

Stat Types

Current base stats:

• HP
• MP
• ATK — physical attack
• DEF — physical defense
• MAG — magic attack
• RES — magic resistance
• SPD — hit rate, evasion, follow-up attacks
• LCK — critical rate

Roughly this direction. Names not fully locked.

Some SRPGs use two-tier stats — e.g., "Prowess → Attack Power." This project started that way but I scrapped it. Current form is more intuitive and simplifies growth formulas.

A "Command" stat might appear later if a commander system gets added. Still conceptual.

Battle Formulas

Battle formulas turned into data assets via GraphToolkit. Screenshot shows the magic hit-rate formula.

Physical damage, magic damage, physical hit rate, magic hit rate, crit chance — common formulas used across combat. Plus per-skill special formulas.

Formula count will grow fast.

Managing all of this in code alone becomes unmaintainable. Separating formulas into data assets was necessary. GraphToolkit won because formulas need to be human-readable and editable.