Weekly Wrap-up Highlights #11:
08/29/2016 - 09/18/2016
These past couple of weeks I've been focusing again on polishing and bug fixes. There have been a few visual things changed that I'm going to share today.
Private alpha continues
Our first adventure, "The Gathering", is fully playable now with about 2 hours of game play available (more if you take your time and far less if you really rush it). The boss is now complete and you can now "finish" the adventure upon defeating the boss. There is enough equipment and spells available to take you up to level 12, but current testing seems to land you around level 8 by the time you reach the boss.
Updated monster encounters
My original implementation of monster encounters went with the old JRPG style where you have "random" (algorithm, not actually random) encounters which would immediately force you into battle with them.
This past week I decided to try out something a little different. I wanted to keep the same algorithm for encounters themselves, but instead of forcing the player directly into battle, I would spawn monsters on the map near by the player.
When spawned, these monsters will show up as little pink markers on the map showing their locations. This allows you to choose to walk up to and engage, or simply ignore them and continue onto whatever else you were doing. There could be up to 6 at any time, but might be less if they happen to spawn in places you can’t reach (lakes, mountains etc).
After a certain amount of time, which varies on per monster spawned, the monster markers will change to darker color indicating they’re about to wander off. A short period after that they’ll disappear off the map entirely and you’ll need to wait for a new batch to wander in again.
I’ve done some initial play testing with this new setup and the leveling still works out to be about the same; assuming you go attack things frequently and not ignore every time.
For those who like the immediate encounters, they can choose to turn them back on and not use the spawning. You can change this in the options area of the game.
Here’s a quick little GIF showing the monsters spawning in the forest and walking up to one:
Updated special attack for Bandit
Our Bandit friend started running into the same problem the Archer did a while back. Due to their weapons only ever having a single target option, they quite often ended up feeling a bit lacking in damage compared to the others.
To help compensate, I previously gave the Ice Archer a special attack that did party damage and made it available every 3 turns (kind of like a many-shot). Since the Bandit also ended up having this same problem, I decided to give him a similar attack called: Flurry of Knives.
The first version was pretty much a copy of Ice Archer’s, allowing him to hit multiple targets with a single attack, which I posted about last time we chatted. After some further consideration though, I then decided that this version took him too far away from his "single target" style of combat. The second version of his Flurry of Knives now hits a single target, but 5 times in a row!
Updated mobile navigation
As the mini map started to become more and more complex, using it as the source of touch-movement for mobile devices was becoming obstructive since your fingers were always in the way. I’ve decided to separate the map from the movement compass and make the map behave the same as it does for desktop (expand/close if not wanted).
The compass is left in the lower left as a static placement for now. I will return to it later to make it a bit more fancy and potentially allow players to move it somehow (thinking some kind of separate action so they don’t drag it when trying to walk around).
Although this may use up some additional space on really small screen’s, I think this is probably for the best overall. Here’s a screen shot taken from my phone just today:
Ambiance sound system
Starting this week I'm beginning work on the new ambiance sound system to be used for playing sounds while walking through the adventure maps. The general concept is based upon sound "waves" that expand outward from various points on the map.
These waves also allow for multiple sounds to be played within it and also at various predefined or random intervals along with being able to choose from a list of sounds to play upon looping instead of always looping the same sound over and over.
Below is a debug screen shot showing a sound wave attached to the chest (just made up). The blue circle represents the "start sound" point with the volume at a low setting. As the player draws closer to the red circle the volume slowly increases until it reaches the max level. As they pass out of the circles, the volume will again reduce as they draw further away from the center.
Then and now...
As I’m drawing closer and closer every day to my first "public" release, I wanted to share today a little screen shot showing how much Mischieviots has changed over the last couple of years.
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