Tower Map and Keyboard Love

So, the story goes, after you fend off the attack on your village, you head to the nearby ruins to take out the remaining threat there. So I made a "tower  in the forest" map for that fight. The procedurally generated forest is feeling a lot better, and I'm getting faster at putting these map algorithms together.

The mission strongly reminds me of a UFO crash in X-COM: searching through the woods for a circular structure, and then breaching it and clearing it out room by room. I'm using a Voronoi algorithm for the tower interior, so it gives very different maps each times.

 I still need to fill in the tower interior.. What do people get up to in towers, anyway? I guess I need to think that through some more.

In addition, I did a bunch of work on UI, camera, and usability, including keyboard shortcuts. We have a pretty flexible shortcut system now that's driven by a json file that the user can (in theory) edit. As we go I'll cover all of the game actions with accelerators. Below you can see the shortcuts are listed on the ability buttons. There's much more of that kind of detail work remaining, I think it's very important. Also below, now when it's not your turn the edges of the screen are darkened.

Actually I really like that look, I wonder if I should use a (less severe) edge effect all the time? Or is it annoying? Maybe I just like that this map has lighting, unlike the tower map, which is just using ambient light..

Better daylight is on my short list, but first some more usability improvements. We need better tooltips, better health bars, and... in-world combat text to show damage as it happens! I think those improvement will make the combat much more approachable and allow me to focus more on the underlying system itself, which still needs to be nailed down.

Choices, and a Better Introduction

I got some awesome feedback about the current state of the game, and I made a little pivot to address it. Aside from some ui details like camera controls which I addressed, the major ask was to have more of a hook, something to get you invested in your party and to help you understand what the game's about. So I built out a little intro scenario that we've been kicking around for a while, where your village gets attacked and you need to decide what to do about it.

I'm really liking the idea of choices as core mechanism for jobs... I think it's in keeping with our story-driven approach, and it's a good way to engage the player: once you've made a choice, you want to see how it will turn out, whether you chose well or not. So expect to see more choices in future jobs. Many choices will be about tactics. For example, when your scout finds an enemy camp, she has the choice to try to sabotage it, risking capture (and a rescue mission) or to sit tight and wait for the party to arrive. That choice will play directly into how the combat goes; if you scouted, you might start with the map revealed, and/or have a few "traps" that you can deploy against the enemies, for example.

In this case we're going to split the party before heading toward the disturbance at the center of town, so the party select screen allows us to assign people to groups A and B.

Next, I built a mission map for the battle, and that forced me to break a good bit of new ground. A lot of this art is my terrible placeholder art, so when we have a real art pass it will look a lot better.

Bam, take out those gorgon deer.

Hey we have doors now! I'm excited about doors because they open up (so to speak) all sorts of design space for missions. Mainly, they're a mechanism that allows the player to control the pace of the battle, but in addition to that, they can be locked, and unlocking them can lead to all sorts of other objectives, like lighting beacons, finding keys, or really who knows. One of the best/scariest moments in XCOM or Descent, is when you're ready to open the next door. Should we open it this turn because we need to hurry, or wait for next turn so everyone can charge in together?

So from here I have a bit more mission work and a bit more campaign work, and then we should be racing towards a playtest, so usability, compatibility, and reporting will be top.

I Made Myself a Toy

I've finished most of my UI checklist, and in the process build myself a nifty debug tool. It's an entity browser that can display any game object and all its data, client or server. It's going to do double duty as an in-game dialog, for checking the status of parties, jobs, characters, pretty much anything you wanna check on. Many of these game objects link to eachother, and the entity browser lets you browse those links.

Here you can see the party as it travels to Wintre Outlook. All the gold text are clickable links, and the breadcrumbs at the top show you where you are. From here you can see the Job, the Post, or any of the people who make up the party. You can also disband the party. The little "+" signs at the bottom expand to show the raw data for this object. Useful for me, but I will probably not ship that to players.

Here's what you get when you click on one of your heroes. You can see that all relevant relationships form links that you can click on, such as items, hometown, and current party.

This is what the directory looks like. It's a huge list of every game object being tracked, and I can use it to find out nearly anything I might want to know about game state in the course of debugging.

Now that you can inspect heroes and disband parties, it's time to add a bit of action. I'm going to add some missions that pop up randomly. I want to take the opportunity to start making the missions feel like actual missions too, instead of like debug arenas. That might take a while, and might send me on a few side quests.

Campaign Resource Allocation

The Legacy campaign wants to be a resource allocation game. Your resource is your heroes and their time. Other resources include things like ores and clues. That resource allocation gameplay is now possible, in miniature. When you complete a job, it can lead to other jobs.

Jobs can give out history lines, class promotions, and gear as rewards, in addition to resources.

Jobs can require resources in order to complete. Jobs can have slots that restrict who can participate, and allow the player to control outcomes (such as promotion). Slots also could have some interesting implications for combat missions.

By the way, also notice your two promoted warriors, with their new gear.

You can have multiple jobs in progress at once. Your heroes line up next to the job they are doing. Idle heroes no-longer stack up on top of eachother, so now you can always see who's working on what (and who isn't).

In total, it's now possible to play through a little tutorial-ish set of jobs where you clean out a tower, restore the forge, outfit the stables, and investigate an old book you found in the cellar. All of this leads to two of your farmers promoting to warriors, one to a hunter, and one to a mystic.

It's quiet though. Too quiet. So I gotta add some combat missions, maybe one at the start and some that pop up here and there as you go. That might get slightly complicated. There are some other UI niceties that need to happen too, like inspecting heroes on the map and disbanding parties.

Then it might be time for a playtest.