soM v0.0.5 – Dev News #3

Planned release: 10/31/2025

Let’s start with the not-so-good news: I’ve decided to delay the release of v0.0.5 to the end of October, which means skipping September’s update. The fight engine, with all its complexity, is slowly turning into a game within the game, and I don’t want to compromise or rush it just to hit the original two-week deadline. Since I’ve only worked on the fight engine during this time, there’s no extra content I could release on the side — and honestly, I don’t see much point in throwing in a few new jobs, vendors, items, or districts just to pad out a rushed update. Of course, the weekly Dew News posts will continue, so you’ll still be able to follow my progress and share your feedback.

This week I finalized the script that runs each time you decide to fight an enemy on the battlemap. After clicking on your target, you first select your weapon. Once you’ve chosen, the selection box disappears and you are locked out of other interactions until the fight is resolved.

Here’s how the fight plays out: units strike each other in turns until one side is dead or both run out of strikes. The attacker always goes first. For example, if you have 5 strikes and the enemy has 2, the sequence will look like this: [You – Enemy – You – Enemy – You – You – You]. The number of strikes depends on your weapon, your hero’s skills, and any bonuses for soldiers. Later, when I introduce sounds to the game, this system will feel even better, since hits and misses won’t just be shown by numbers and health bars, but also by distinct sound effects.

If a unit runs out of health points, it dies. For now, a simple skull icon briefly appears for all fallen units, but in the future each unit will have its own unique “fallen” illustration crafted in DAZ.

Once the fight ends, your unit loses all remaining movement points and can’t fight again in the same turn. You then move on to your next unit. All movement and fight actions are restored after the opposing side has taken its turn.

I also added a small quality-of-life feature to save clicks. You no longer need to manually check your active unit’s terrain defense by clicking around hexes. Instead, simply hover your mouse over a hex to see its defense value in a tooltip. Enemy hit chance is calculated based on this defense — for example, if you have 75% defense in a castle, every enemy strike will only have a 25% chance to hit. This information also appears on the weapon choice menu.

Next week I’ll begin work on another big, though not very visible, project: the end-of-turn script including computer AI. I’ll prepare a first version in time for release, but later I’ll refine the strategies to (hopefully) make the AI much smarter.

Have a great weekend, and see you next week with another Dew News!