Hope everyone had a good weekend! We ended up staying home Friday instead of being social. Though, we did decide to play some co-op Goat Simulator together. I don't know that the game will have a lot of replayability for us, but it was worth the $6 for an evening of goofy laughs.
Today, I fired up the new encounter, and started testing the various paths through it. I found and fixed quite a few minor bugs in short order. And when I got to the meat of the encounter, I noticed a big problem: it was too easy to die.
I managed to finish the encounter retrofitting today. I had to do some rewriting of conversations to make things fit, and some sneaky trigger work, but I think it's setup such that only appropriate branches are available when they should be.
I've finished adding the necessary choice items at each juncture, conditions/flags, and treasure IDs. Next step is to start testing!
Most of today was spent working on finale stuff. A mix of retrofitting work and new stuff.
The retrofitting involves rewiring encounter nodes for existing encounters to sneak in references to the finale. A few early-game things now hint at it, or even point to it directly. I also means slightly changing some old, well-worn paths. So veteran players may see some changes in their next playthrough.
I created a new faction today, to support the content in the finale. There's a group the player can interact with at least once, and I wanted their choices to have some consequence in the map in general. Plus, conversations with this faction are a chance to unload a bit more lore.
Fortunately, they were pretty easy to put together. I may add an extra conversation or two for variety, and I have a semi-uniform clothing piece in mind for them, but they're essentially done.
I finished the most complex part of the finale today. There was a section with a wide range of possible choices, some of which had sub-choices. And many of them were conditional based on player choices earlier on, or things the player learned. There's one section left, with only a handful of nodes.
Still plugging away at the finale. This time, I finished up one of the two remaining branches of the new location, and started work on the other. This last branch is by far the largest in terms of nodes, but maybe less complex than the other two branches, so we'll see if it takes the same amount of time as the others.
Since it's been a while, I figured I'd share a bit of new artwork. These are some new items related to the finale:
Today was a pretty productive day for encounter work. I nearly spent every minute hooking game data up. I had to create a new encounter item "Move Back" as a counter to "Down Hall/Move Forward" in one case, but the rest of the work was attaching items to encounters and making new conditions.
Work continued today on the finale-related items mentioned yesterday. I finished artwork for four new items in their various states, then created their stats. I also created recipes for said items, and was able to test them to make sure they work.
So far, so good. Now that they're integrated into the game and loot tables, I think I can finally start to wire-in all the game data to the final encounter. No doubt, there will be new loot tables and conditions needed. But most of the big prep work should be done.
I decided to do some revising and pruning on the ending today. There was one point where the player was offered a choice, and the majority of outcomes were death. Now, that might be okay if the player had any idea what they were choosing, but in this case, I felt it was too random. It was basically a crap-shoot for no reason, so I axed it. Instead, now all players pass that choice alive.
Leading up to that point, however, still offers plenty of chances to die :)
Hope everyone had a good weekend! Mine was good. I ended up playing a lot of "Warlock" after picking it up for free via Humble Bundle last week. Scratches that "Civ" itch while having new toys/setting to play with. That, and I also decided to pick up White Wolf's "World of Darkness" core book. I've been in the mood for more dark storytelling and X-Files-y stuff, and that seems to be reviewed well. I'm particularly interested in their storytelling tips. You know. "Research" for work :)
Today was a mixed bag of work, including stuff for both the ending and general fixes.
One of the main things today was figuring out how I want the ending to work. I know roughly where the game will end, geographically. And I know the situation in which the player will be left. Some details surrounding it are still being developed, though.
Today, I did some thinking about a possible alternate ending to the game, and started drafting some notes on that. I've got one ending mostly mapped-out in the editor, awaiting stats. And this other ending is something I'll approach as bonus material if I have time.
In the same vein, I spent some time outlining other DMC/Sprawl services that players have been requesting. (E.g. hotels, storage of items, fast food, etc.) A lot of these would involve some new features, so those will also depend on time left after plot requirements are fulfilled.
Hey Folks! Just a heads-up, I have an appointment in town tomorrow, so I'll be bringing my work on the road. As such, I may be offline until later in the afternoon. I'll try to catch-up on messages then!
Right, so what did I do today? A lot of it was bug-fixing, actually.
Hey folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. I've decided to extend mine a bit by taking tomorrow off, since I worked last Monday (which was Labor Day). Hence, I'll be out of the office Tuesday. I'll be back Wednesday morning, though.
I moved forward on adding the condition overflow mentioned yesterday. I decided to call it "thresholds" instead, since the desired effect is to add or remove new conditions once certain thresholds are reached.
As of now, the user will be able to specify a stack amount and one or more conditions to add or remove. Once the condition increases to that stack amount, the threshold conditions are applied. If the condition is being unstacked, the threshold conditions will be removed at the stack count immediately below the threshold.
Today, the encounter editor broke the 2000 node mark! More specifically, it's sitting at 2040 right now. This means that there are over two thousand encounter panels in the game. Pretty impressive!
Unsurprisingly, this was the result of continued work on the latest encounter. I added 50-60 more nodes today, easily. It's not quite as large as Saginaw yet, but I still have a few dozen nodes to add. I'm estimating that it'll be up there in terms of complexity. Maybe larger.
That, and it'll have some tie-ins to some old friends in the game :)
It turns out that there were some issues with yesterday's Mac builds. I'm not sure what changed, but suddenly, my usual process for making Mac builds was failing. Stranger yet, it only failed after uploading and re-downloading the files. They worked normally on my machine.
In the past, this was usually due to OSX's Gatekeeper disallowing downloaded apps. However, with my (and another user's) settings allowing apps from "Anywhere", it still wasn't working. Either the file was bugged, or Gatekeeper wasn't cooperating.
NEO Scavenger is now officially updated to v0.9937b! Since the test builds have been relatively stable, I've just finished updating the default builds to 0.9937b on all sites. The "test" links are no longer necessary, and have been removed for now.
