his is a very early screenshot of the battle system. Of particular note is the complete lack of enemies and the absolutely hidious placeholder art. Also, the characters are lined up in slots 2, 3 and 4 because any character in slot 1 will not be displayed in battle for some reason. Yet another bug to track down.

The top bar directly below the name is the Time Counter. Actions in combat deplete it, preventing characters from acting until it is full once more.

The red bar is Health Points (HP). This is obvious. HP=0, Character=dead. (Well, critically wounded at any rate.)

The blue bar is Magical Energy (ME) or Mana Points (MP), it depends on the character. All spells and magical attacks consume this bar, and while MPs are depleted with use, ME regenerates naturally, even in battle.

The yellow bar is Stamina. There are a great number of things which will deplete a character's stamina reserves, and only one that can restore it; rest. Don't push your characters too hard, or they might be left breathless in the middle of a deadly fight.

The "80" in the upper-left corner is part of a debugging display, pay it no mind.




n this updated screenshot you can see the battle system as it had progressed. I finally tracked down that bug, and it turned out to be a bug in VERGE itself that causes the wrong global arrays to be written to when several nested functions are running in a loop. Unfortunately, it has put a total halt to all work on the battle system, as every feature I add now breaks an existing one due to this bug...




ell, no new version of VERGE = no battle system progress. I did however redesign the combat display. It is now much easier to read, as all the statistics line up vertically in order with the characters. The Wild ARMs layout only seems to work with parties of three characters or less, so I went with this format. The background in this shot is also different. This is one of the actual combat backgrounds, only it's unfinished, and it looks extremely crappy in 8-bit color.




ell, new version of VERGE + lack of bug fixes = no battle system progress. Check out the background when it isn't being constrained by VERGE's pallete. It's still unfinished, but at least it looks better.