Update 2b: Combat Rewrite

Continuing my misdirection by showing random internet battle art, I’ve always liked this from the DragonLance 1985 Calendar by Clyde Caldwell

Last week was a good week in combat. The team is liking Mark’s leadership and feeling good, so we’ll continue this way. Combat Rewrite continues to be the primary development focus involving: Jessi, James, Tyler, Michel, Josh, Jonathan, Mark, Zach, and Rubi.

Zach is working on the new Buff/Status system which allows for stacking buffs as seen in many games. For example, fire school builds up ‘Embers’ which can then be utilized in special ways.
We’re going to release a new monster race with this combat update! How can we not?! Longtime supports have been staring at the same 4 races for a very long time. The new system, and reason for rewrite, allows this to be done (hopefully) easily. James is working on stats for a new race. What is the new race? Not saying yet until we get the artwork animated.

Finally, here is another new spell VFX being worked on. It’s a WIP for Ground Spike. The Earth spells in the current build are under represented, so this is part of making them a fully featured equal to the other schools.

Dynamic Quest Generation

I continue to publish weekly deep dives on the proc-gen quests. I’ll begin publishing these on Fridays, meaning one today about making sensible tasks, and one on Friday of this week.

Summary is we zeroed in on making NPC goals more specific so we can generate meaningful tasks and dialogue text based upon them.

The first version of the dynamic quests will come in Update #3 Exploration.

Priority Tasks

Last week’s patch contained some good quality of life improvements thanks to fan feedback. We also fixed a dungeon room with no doors problem, something that has plagued us for 6 months and thanks to a recent bug report we managed to see the problem and solve it!

This week we’re continuing with more improvements.

We’re going to make the NPCs a little smarter where they tell you the next step of the quest rather than requiring you to ask “Tell me about [Resource] or [Town]” to find out where it is.
Based on a discussion on the forums weeks ago, we’re going to make tracking tracks at night: Light spell +2 , torch +1 against -4 at night