Skill System!

We've continued work on the UI visualizations and iterating on vertical slice necessities. 

This time we've overhauled the Main Menu, the Skill System (which was previously all text, but I've since added some rudimentary first draft icons to establish a style), and our Outfit menu, where you can assemble a standardized clothing & weapon set and copy/paste it between characters. 

A lot of these features are things we've found helpful in other genre related games, especially as you play for hundreds of hours. 

When you select a character in the world now, you'll see their portrait and relevant stats & faction alignments appear on the bottom right, hopefully indicating that the hot-bar is now displaying *their* stats as opposed to your own. This was something folks found confusing on Discord, the idea that the hotbar shows who is selected and not just yourself,  so we needed a way to help differentiate that along with adding the selected character's portrait to the menus themselves. 

To get back to yourself, just click on any empty terrain tile and you'll be looking at yourself as default when the hotbar is selected. Because the menus show the world, doing this is easy since you can select any character when paused and these menus stay open until closed, or, the game is unpaused and your camera snaps back to your main character.

Finally this skill system is something we've really tried to work on and make special. The skill tree now serves as both a character's ability to build & craft specific items, as well as perform extra moves in the combat system. This means the "leveling-by-doing" system is still in effect, but instead of a boring linear system (and attached research menu) your characters themselves are the carrier of construction & crafting know-how for your faction, and  as you level up characters in your party you can get a tangible reward feeling by boosting their stats by your choice. 

This will really lend to making the game feel much more based on characters and their individual stories & investment. The building up of your towns will depend on skilled tradesmen being in your party or in your reservists at these home bases. The one guy from 2018 in your group who used to repair computers before coming to Morgana may have high-tech skills the dozens of folk from the medieval side of the Fragment may not have. 

To offset the "grinding" this would inevitably entail, especially late game as new recruits are essentially doomed to not have as much experience potential compared to your main characters surviving from the start, we'll have a Teaching ability that you can assign to party members as they stay back home, and they will boost the experience rate of anyone assigned under their tutelage. The great warrior who earned a name for himself in the early game can be assigned to teach through the mid and late game, quickly leveling up new recruits that enter your town.   This teaching ability is specialized for their skill tree assignments, and can also be leveled up. 

This building knowledge won't stop characters helping specialists construct things like wagons & boats. What matters is that the first guy to start building the specialist structure unlocks it and is assigned to guide the others (Leadership skill helps this go faster, as all the characters assigned to help are pulled up to 3 extra levels above their base by the leader!) This will also help characters learn faster in that skill line, and unlock bonus points while doing the job. 

This combined with the ability to travel the world with any party members you have reserved at home will eliminate most if not all of the grind. If you don't want to have to personally attack every villager in 300 miles to level up your swordsmen, just assign them to hang back at base with a teacher and train. 

Early game you'll still be grinding a little and harvesting your own food & tree branches manually. But that's in the zone where that task is still fun. As it starts to get boring and the scale reaches town and city levels, automating all that will be a life saver. 

If you don't want to assign skill points for every member of a 40 person town, just check the Auto-Level box and set a target set of skills to unlock! They'll start grinding for you while you're away on your epic trade mission or a war campaign to conquer Gehen.