Update #2b: Combat

It’s not quite ready to ship yet.. 😂

What you are seeing above is a NEW combat scene with all new GameObjects recreating basically what we have already: showing an enemy, casting a spell, etc.

There is entirely new damage calculations happening under the hood. Something Michel thought would take about a day and now has invested three. Why? Because it matters how and the order it is done. If you cast a spell doing 100 damage, and it crits for +50% damage, but the target has 75% resistance, is the +50% = +50 damage or +12.5 damage?

The combatrons that make this all work are separate little pieces of data to make this all clear to you through onscreen UI and the combat log.

I’m expecting we have our first data-driven spell working tomorrow or at least this week. Once that happens things will go faster.

This new data driven (as opposed to code driven) makes it possible to do mod support for spells. Am I saying we’re going to support mods? No. I’m saying we are not doing anything that precludes mods, if we want to go that way in the future.

Combat is James, Mark, Tyler, Michel, Josh, Jonathan, and Rubi. Rubi is back from her honeymoon and ready to start making VFX for your spells.

Update #3: Exploration

Had a great internal meeting with Design Lead Mark and Narrative Lead Nolan about the new way players will go about exploring and interacting with the map. The new fatigue system is way better than the current stamina system. Based on Kaylo7 and other’s feedback about big resource harvesting we are looking to have the player find an abandoned (and monster filled) mine, clear it out, and setup a foreman and workers to harvest the goods for you. No more living the fantasy of being a solitary mage running around with a pickaxe.*

It’s gonna be amazing, I’m super excited about it and think we are solving core problems that need solvin’.

(* Apparently no one actually has this fantasy)

Dynamic Quests: A Story Engine

Work continues on the dynamic quest system. We’ve argued through many points of what it is and isn’t and now the time is to stop talking and just make something terrible.

Yes, you read that right. The next step is to make a completely awful quest/story generator that is embarrassingly horrible. So that we can test and see what is so very horribly wrong and fix or redesign it. That’s how iterative creation goes.

I hope this test can be completed this week. Maybe i’ll even share the completely awful generation.

Thomas and Nolan are focused on this.

Priority Fixes

Taliensin recommended we remove completed dungeons from the map. We will, and add a tooltip to let you know what is remaining (rooms, # of monsters) if you got to the end but missed some stuff.
Allow the player to get extensions on quest time limits. This requires a persuasion check to negotiate more time to do your job!
When buying items that require a skill prereq (like weapons or armor) we will show the player skill next to it
We’re going to make the Innkeeper be able to provide a list of everyone in town who has an available quest, this will make it easier to see who to visit
Dock Travel sometimes causes a crash, or gets stuck, or is closed. It’s been dragging on for a long time and it’s time to finally make it work nice nice.

Zach and Thomas are heading up this effort.

Patch is coming out Thursday.