This week's Abomi Spotlight is on the adorable creature: Sushimo! This little Water/Plant-type is cute enough to eat.
Sushimo are born with only a flab of meat covering their soft backs. To keep it on tight, they develop seaweed-like belts that strap the meat in place. They have to constantly dip themselves in the ocean to prevent their meat from drying out and smelling fishy.
I'm very excited to use Sushimo to show off what I've been working on all week: Status Ailments! This has been on my to-do list for quite literally over two years, and it feels amazing to finally have this extra layer of depth added to my battle system.
Just to go the extra mile, I made one for each type besides Neutral! So you can become:
-Burned (Fire)
-Soaked (Water)
-Frozen (Ice)
-Poisoned (Plant)
-Shocked (Lightning)
-Dizzied (Air)
-Dirtied (Earth)
All types are immune to their own status (i.e., you can't freeze an Ice-type). Each status comes with its own unique effects -- by which I mean mechanically, but they also come with really neat particle effects that took me all week to make look nice across all Abomis. Please check out my Twitter if you want to see them all in action.
"But, Carl!" you shout, "I don't want to memorize all the effects that seven different conditions can do!"
Fear not, my little worrywart. Now, when you're inflicted with a status, its effects are clearly laid out when checking your Abomi in battle.
You may notice that your stat boosts and drops are also on this screen! While they are communicated in your little HUD to the left or right, I thought I'd use this space to communicate 1) how many stages your stats have dropped/raised, and 2) what that actually means. You can examine any Abomi on the field in this way, so it should always be clear how your moves are being affected.
Thanks for checking in this week! It's been a huge endeavour putting these new mechanics in, but I approach completion a little more each week. I'm feeling stoked about what's to come.
Catch you next week,
Carl