Update 2b: Combat Rewrite

I can’t get combat done any faster, but I can steal cool looking art off the internet! Not our art.

Combat Rewrite is the primary focus of the company. It’s almost all hands on deck, certainly our best people working on it: Jessi, James, Tyler, Michel, Josh, Jonathan, Mark, Zach, and Rubi.

Combat has been dragging on and on for months and I’ve had a realization as to why: Leadership.

It’s a big complicated mission critical task and because of this it requires not just resources to get the features done, but Leadership to unify the vision and keep things from being neither over nor under-engineered. Michel was providing this, but got burnt out. The task is bigger and harder than his experience. You know how in a game the monster level is shown as a skull or ?? because it is 10 levels higher than the player, ya that’s the situation here.

I solved this by putting Jonathan in charge. He’s got 10+ years senior dev experience. And it was going well… until he decided to move continents and he’s been (rightfully) focused on that. The move ends this week.

So, last week Mark, with 15+ years experience, has taken the reins and we’re staying focused and making progress.

If I ever make a game about Game Dev, leadership will be a key stat!

Last week we onboarded Zach to the current state of combat. He is now going to write/rewrite the Buff system as many combat spells and effects rely on stacking buffs.

Here is a sample of the vfx for a new spell Lightning Bolt.

Dynamic Quest Generation

Last week I posted a progress update and we had some good feedback from you on it, so thanks!

I’ll continue to do detailed weekly updates for those who are interested.

In summary, we got to the point where we can generate multiple plot lines based on disagreement between main actor goals. We then threw in some tasks, based on goal, and started some basic quest task chains.

Priority Tasks

We’re going to make the Innkeeper a central hub of quests and able to tell you all the people in the town who need something done.
We’re fixing some dungeon issues worked on last week.