Weekly Wrap-up Highlights #2 news - Mischieviots

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Highlights taken from recently posted weekly wrap-up articles posted on the Mischieviots developer website.

Posted by NetprogsGames on Feb 28th, 2016

Weekly Wrap-up Highlights #2:

02/08/2016 - 02/28/2016

Hi everyone!

The last couple of weeks have been pretty fun as I've been working through a lot of the NPC interactions and getting them all setup within the game. There have been a few small issues, but were resolved pretty quickly along the way.

I'm still mostly focused on doing work on the tutorial/demo adventure and it now reaches to about 45 minutes of game-play if you go directly to each event location; much more if you wander around the forest.

As the tutorial has been progressing, I've also been adding a lot of polish to some area's that haven't been touched in a while. I also found (and fixed) several minor bugs along the way.

Bug Fixes and Updates

Some of the more major changes since last time:

Spent some time this week making the UI components for smaller screen's a bit larger. I was able to find a better "Standard" resolution to use for these screen's which allowed me to make the dialog's larger and provide more details.
Added scroll crafting! See article below for details.
Created support for chest looting. The generation of what is in each chest is also being driven by decision tree's to allow us to query what might be the best (or worse if we want) loot to offer the player at the time of looting.

Bugs & Minor Changes

[UPDATE] Updated conversation injector to include orbs & scrolls.
[UPDATE] Added event action to allow for updating player inventory.
[UPDATE] Decided to always show the select profile button even if there is only one profile. This way players can know about profile creation sooner.
[UPDATE] Added "click to finish" on progressive conversation windows for when you want it to finish sooner.
[UPDATE] Added "continue talking" button to end of conversations to allow the NPC to continue talking without the player actually giving them a response. This is exactly the same as "auto continue" except that we wait for the user to click the "continue" button instead.
[UPDATE] Updated the Earth Mage decision tree to use all the spells within her proper levels (up to level 12 for now).
[UPDATE] Made some adjustments to the targeting window to make (what I think) is a better target selection feel by auto-selecting groups/all using a better algorithm.
[BUG] Save/Load didn't keep track of current HP/MP.
[BUG] When reloading the same game save file, the data was being cleaned incorrectly causing loss of information.
[BUG] Made another attempt at removing the titles of dead monsters. This keeps sneaking back up, but I believe I've got it this time !
[UPDATE] Refactored some code in the movement area. There seemed to be multiples of the same calculations repeated; likely due to previous refactoring of code. Everything now seems to be cleaner now. It might have created some minor gain in performance as a result.
[UPDATE] Additional reorganization of the adventure/decision tree configurations to (again) better support the multiple adventure structure wanted.
[UPDATE] Added face direction upon loading into entry points within a map (yeah, didn't have that one, go figure)
[UPDATE] Added remove from map to NPC event action update.
[UPDATE] Added face direction to player event action update to allow us to change their facing direction through events on the map.
[UPDATE] Updated NPC path when camera is centered to reduce some flickering.
[BUG] Fixed a crashing problem when attempting to use color markers in text when editing in designer.
[UPDATE] Updated the adventure configuration to allow us to configure what characters each adventure will allow the player to choose from. This allows us to create adventures with any number of available characters from the start (or none)
[BUG] Apparently, at some point, I broke running away from combat. Poor little guys would run off the screen and never stop! (thus making combat stay open). All fixed now though :)
[UPDATE] Added quick-pick list for creature ID's in designer to make it easier to keep track of them since they're not being loaded into the designer directly.
[UPDATE] Added "ignore collision" for NPC paths. This way, should we want/need to, we can tell an NPC path building to ignore collision barriers when using the A* algorithm.
[UPDATE] Added left/right alignment of character captions on the maps.
[UPDATE] Added decision when completed triggers to caption.
[UPDATE] Updated the event management system to make some memory improvements and easier to access within additional game components.
[UPDATE] Numerous changes to the entire game to support the new tutorial adventure. Most in the area of NPC interactions and bug fixes during the process of building the adventure.

Scroll Crafting

Read all about our new Scroll Crafting here!
Indiedb.com

Fun Stuff !

Here's a couple screen shots of the secret cave that is hiding within the forest:

I made up this quick GIF to show our little Dwarf running around begging for help. This is being driven by the event/decision tree within the forest map. Seems to have worked out quite well in the end.

Chests and Loot Generation

The loot/chest system is driven entirely through decision tree's, similar to the rest of the game. This allows us to query against the current state of the characters and decide what kind of loot to give them at a the time. We can make adjustments to make the loot better (or worse) depending on what they've been doing recently !

Just for fun, when you open your first chest ever, the Narrator pokes their head in: