DD#161 Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night news - [Neolithic]To the End

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another week's developer's diary.

We have a major story development this week.
The Legend of An Elf King is now completed! The information you may get from this mission will not only just change everything you may have known but also link up many major events in all previous iterations of this game that happened in the past almost 20 years in real life. (During the story, you may even open the links to the "Back to Stone Age" and "Back to Stone Age 2" mods in the Steam Workshop with each mod providing hundreds of hours of gameplay content. Unfortunately, they are not localized to English.)
But, even without knowing those events happened before, it still will be a quite unique experience to find out the potential possible identity of your main character. Even though, who is telling the truth and who is lying is still based on your judgment and interpolation.

The whole story contains a lot of spoilers. Thus, only a few screenshots that will not leak too much information about the story are here.

This quote of the sun and stars shall bring back some old memories of Stone Age Online.

This theory of healing is a mock to many RPGs.

And, this is a quote from a famous poem by Dylan Thomas. And you may find out what it means to the story that it becomes the title of this week's developer's diary.

The story also contains content such as how modern-day AIs are trained, the infinite monkey theorem, and what happened after [NEOLITHIC]SAPC++ and before [NEOLITHIC]To the End to fill in the gaps between some stories. However, even though the story contains almost a hundred thousand of words, it's still far from an Epic of the past 20 years. Thus, sequels of this mission are very likely.
As the story has many branches, you may not even find all those in play through. But, that's one of the fun parts of this endless evolution game of endless replayability.

The rewards of this mission include all those powerful spell books you previously got, the rings of the 4 Knights of the Dark Elf King, an ultimate armor crafted by the dark elf for a human hero to face the upcoming doom. Those you can already get from previous versions. During this week's updates, you can further get a lot of Dust of History, even some attribution points, and the skill: The Dark Wound.
However, the truth may sometimes cost your sanity.

The idea is largely coming from Sanguinius of Warhammer 40k universe. Even this story itself may share some similarities with his fate.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Here is also a bonus part of the story.
You can now actually romance the Dark Elf King.

There may be some concerns similar to some characters in the "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End." As the story happens after an old adventure, we may also share a small amount of similarities.
But eventually, you can make it.

The Dark Elf King will also have his portrait changed a bit if you succeed.
The main thing is, I don't want you to wait another 20 years to see this happen. Maybe it should have happened 20 years ago. But, back then, there was no happy ending. "After this battle, I will marry you." is always a big death flag. Hopefully, it's not too late to make up for that.

Anyway, I will leave the story to you to explore.

With the development of this story, as the last part almost all happens in the Sealed Palace. Some improvements to the Sealed Palace also has been made. You will find more infrastructure in the Throne Room, including alchemy devices, spell fusion devices, and a magic circle that can directly teleport you out of the Sealed Palace. In addition to that, I also made the Sealed Palace much easier to traverse.

The fountain at the Qinuyi Underwater Checkpoint can now teleport you to any floors you have previously visited in the Sealed Palace. You no longer need Butterfly Wings to do that each time you enter the palace.

In addition to the story content, we also got:
1, Collision system rewrite thanks to 渺兔's bug reports.
Now the cars shall not collide with each other in Liu. It's also less likely for traffic jams to happen.
Oh, by the way, it also makes your traffic insurance fraud activities a bit easier. :)

2, A progress bar in the Ghost of Kyiv mini-game.

The goal is to clearly show players how close they are about to win the game.
However, a generic bar simply cannot satisfy my design. So, I got the idea to technically make two bars, one blue and one yellow, they progress at the same time to resemble the color of Ukraine. Plus some text above the bars to show what they mean.

3, Another pass of Traditional Chinese proofreading.
I received some criticisms and suggestions on Traditional Chinese texts this week. I welcome them as they all will make this game better. And honestly, although Traditional Chinese looks similar to Simplified Chinese, deep down there are a lot of differences. It's also my least-used language among all three officially supported languages. So, I got another pass of Traditional Chinese proofreading with the help of the latest Microsoft tools this time. Hopefully, that will not make Steam scream that's "AI-generated content!" :P

That's for this week.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The full update log of this week:
20240225
English
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[Passive Resource]Reduced the frequency of pets making poops and laying eggs.
[Pet]Dorabis can now lay eggs.
[Poop]New poops generated since this version can be converted to fertilizer from the item menu. (The fertilizer's quality is depending on the quality of the poop. And then, you can turn fertilizer to Nitrates->Gunpownder->Ammo or other explosions. The production chain shall be completed.)


20240225B
English
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[Liu]All the vehicle drivers now learned to take caution and not to collide with other cars. Thus, it's less likely to have a traffic jam unless you intend to make that happen. (Thanks to 渺兔's feedback.)
[Liu]The town simulation now checks whether the vehicle spawn location is clear or not. If the spawn location has something that may collide with a vehicle, the vehicle will not spawn.
#######System##################
Optimized the function: has_event_here? (It now checks against getLocalEventList(x,y) instead of going through all events on the map.)
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[Traffic Insurance Fraud]Fixed a bug that causes the player character unable to move after hitting a car. (Thanks to 渺兔's bug report.)


20240226
English
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[Ghost of Kyiv]When enemy jets are inbound, an air alarm will now play. It's a real-life air raid alarm sound in Kyiv during the war. A friend in Kyiv recorded it for me.
[Ghost of Kyiv]Enemy missile amount will now be based on the difficulty level.
[Ghost of Kyiv]Added a victory progress bar on top left.
[Steam Store]Replaced the old Ghost of Kyiv Screenshot with a new one.
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[Vehicle]Added a new function to initialize cars. All cars in Liu now use this new function instead of the previous generic spawn function.
[Event]Added a bool on events @fixedCharacterNameOnRefresh. When it's true, the event's character graphics shall not change when a game switch related to them changes a variable.
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[Prefix]Fixed a bug that "illuminating" was using "lightless" localization text. (Thanks to 渺兔's streaming. The fix will not apply to already generated items.)
[Traffic Insurance Fraud]Cars will no longer change color when the player casts this skill. (Thanks to 渺兔's bug report.)
[Traditional Chinese]Fixed missing localization in the story of Marinas Hosptial. (Thanks to 渺兔's feedback)
[Traditional Chinese]Word changed 【發夾】->【髮夾】(Thanks to Iosef's feedback)
[Traditional Chinese]Word changed 【墻】 -> 【牆】(Thanks to Iosef's feedback)
[Traditional Chinese]Word changed 【涂】-> 【塗】(Thanks to Iosef's feedback)
[Traditional Chinese]Word changed 【干】->【幹】in some cases(Thanks to Iosef's feedback)
[Traditional Chinese]Word changed 【干】->【乾】in some other cases. (Thanks to Iosef's feedback)
[Traditional Chinese]Hudred thousands of other words auto-processed by Microsoft tools. (Some changes happened likely because of the technical development between 2022 and 2024.)


20240228
English
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[The Sealed Palace]When unlocking the chest of the Armor of Ultimate Soul, there is now an old chanting.
[The Legend of an Elf King]Added an image from 20 years ago as a flashback when the Dark Elf King asks you to go into the Sealed Palace.
[The Sealed Palace]The right side of the Throne room is now accessible.
[The Sealed Palace]Added a one-way teleport circle that allows you to teleport out of the Sealed Palace.
[The Sealed Palace]Added cooking/alchemy devices on the right side of the Throne room.
[The Sealed Palace]Added an Alter of Book on the right side of the Throne room.
[Skill]New Skill: Localized Earthquake
[The Sealed Palace]Added a spellbook of Localized Earthquake on the right side of the Throne room.
[The Sealed Palace]The fountain at the Qinuyi Underwater Checkpoint can now teleport you to any floors you have visited in the Sealed Palace.


20240229
English
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[The Sealed Palace]The center area of the Throne Room is now accessible. But the story is still working in progress.
[The Sealed Palace]Added a Mystic Old Man in the Throne Room. If you have met another Mystic Old Man, then there will be an additional dialog option.
[Burning Ashes and Masks]The Possessed Security Guards in the airport may now drop sulfur.
[Burning Ashes and Masks]The plastic bag that carries the explosives shall now disappear after its second explosion.
############Debug################
[The Sealed Palace]Fixed the magic circle in the library may sometimes not appear.
[The Sealed Palace]Fixed the localization issues of the bookshelves in traditional Chinese.


20240301
English
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[The Legend of An Elf King]The story content has been worked on. It's currently still inaccessible as 35k words (in three languages) later the last part of the story in the Sealed Palace is still not finished.

20240302
English
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[The Legend of An Elf King]Mission Complete! (There will likely be sequels)
[The Legend of An Elf King]Skill: Dark Wound can now be acquired.
[The Legend of An Elf King]The Dark Elf King can now be romanced. (No gender limitations.)
[Relationship]When the relationship with the Dark Elf King becomes lovers, his image on the relationship UI will change a bit.
[Wiki]Updated the information about The Legend of An Elf King: Neolithia.fandom.com(Quest) [Wiki]Added a section about how to unlock the romance with the Dark Elf King.
[Wiki]Added a romance section on the character page.