November News Update

With the recent patching and such it feels a little too soon to be writing something up again however, here we are. A day late of course because it nearly slipped my mind.

My attention lately has been focused on some of the more obvious bugs in Verdant Village. There are things that I’m told about and others that crop up naturally as I’m testing. Bug fixing aside I’ve noted down, and made a few changes to some minor elements of the game in the hopes of polishing it up in a few places. Little details usually don’t rank highly on my list of things to accomplish, but they are important none the less.

All that said, there is still more obvious development going on. I’m currently splitting my time between smaller additions and the combat system. As for smaller additions I’ve got two NPCs in the works. I was developing the schedules on them until I realized that I would need to create another section of a zone to fully add them. Currently I’m sidetracked on that.

Aside from them I have a small system I’d like to put in as it will allow me to readd one of the quests I made unavailable with the alchemy changes. Past those things I haven’t thought too hard about what smaller bits I want to add next. I have a seemingly endless list of things to do, maybe I should put all the ideas on a dart board and randomly choose. Being serious however, I think NPCs are going to be in my sights for the near future. There are quite a few missing and at this point in development I don’t think its acceptable to still have buildings in town you can’t enter so I’d like to clear that up.

As for combat I’ve been nailing down the finer points of the system. Lots of numbers and excel spreadsheets, you know, the kind of pulse pounding things you think of when you think combat. Most of my time has been dedicated to balancing various elements, determining abilities for both the player and enemies, progression, combat areas, dungeons, deciding on bosses, AI difficulty, etc. Basically, getting all my ducks in a row before I start truly coding things.

Ultimately, I’ve determined the combat will be turn based with a few twists to keep it interesting hopefully. I’ve toyed with some ideas, but I’ve settled on this one. While I wouldn’t mind coding some sort of top-down Zelda like combat the game isn’t made to have that sort of combat structure. A lot of that sort of gameplay is tied to the environments you are in when you encounter enemies and balancing several parts of the combat puzzle while fighting.

Verdant Village wouldn’t handle that well. It might work in a few places but it would definitely fall short. That’s not even commenting on the issues there would be just coding it in an efficient way as the game wasn’t designed with real time combat in mind. If I did real time combat it would probably end up being horribly basic due to the limitations, so better to avoid it, I think.

All that said I want to keep things snappy when designing combat. Quick animations and little down time so the fight keeps moving. Outside of actual combat itself I’m doing what I can to weave the system into the game itself. I don’t want combat to be that isolated system that you just have to interact with every so often. I plan for it to be part of the game with risks and rewards for fighting anything from a random enemy to a boss. On top of that I plan to tie a good deal of the progression to item gathering. By that I mean obtaining items from monsters, maybe some mining or foraging or alchemy. In short you won’t just be able to fight things to get stronger, in fact there is no planned level system really, you’ll have to do various things to improve yourself, some of which you will probably already be doing.

But that’s enough about combat for now. Outside of that, while I said NPCs will likely be my focus for a bit, I’ve also spoken about secrets somewhat in the past. They are still something that I’d like to address sooner rather than later. With any luck I’ll find some time to start scattering things around the world that you can uncover for rewards. I’ve mostly been hesitant on putting anything in because most of the ideas I have for secrets tie into either combat, which isn’t implemented, or a smaller system that will need to be put in.

If you’ve made it this far you can probably tell that there is a lot to do. You uh…you would be right. That’s nothing new of course and as usual I’ll keep working to fix what’s broken and get more things added. I can’t promise any sort of time frame on a new patch, but I have it in the back of my mind to keep the pacing of them somewhat steady so it probably won’t be terribly long. In any case, thanks for reading, hope you are enjoying the game, and with any luck I’ll have an update for the game soon.