Devlog 5 - v0.19.0

Hello,

it's been a while! Much has changed and a lot of previous features are missing. Why? Because the whole project has been rebuilt from scratch due to multiple reasons, like:

• Godot 4.1.1 had a lot of flaws that got fixed once 4.4 came out. Some nice features were the physics interpolation and ubershaders. Two things that promise to get rid of frequent stutters
• Many things needed a rework to simplify maintenance and adding content
• A new perspective on the party/companion system made it necessary to get rid of significant portions of the code

Party

The new system for the party includes a whole new look of the UI. Earlier only the player character was controllable, while any companion had "stances" that would determine its AI behaviour. Since the latter was added later, there was still the orb based health and mana display for the player, while the rest of the party only had some cards to display their status. Making those cards was fun, but they proved to be bad for the usability.

The logical solution to this was to look at successful party based RPGs. Those mostly put a number of portraits at the bottom or the side of the screen that fill up with red color if a character is damaged. These portraits also serve as buttons to get to the characters stats/equipment and most importantly, to take over control. Dungeon Siege had a very nice party system back in 2002, in which you can set your party members behaviour easily but still specifically via a set of radio buttons. This seemed way better than two stances, so i replicated this.

Skills

In earlier versions, this game featured either books to learn spells or skill trees that were predetermined per character. This had the consequence of some spells being exclusive to AI behaviour usage and restricted the ways you could build your party composition. Want a party full of necromancers to flood the dungeons with skeletons? Too bad, only one necromancer in game!

Instead, skill trees are now packaged as generic "masteries" and can be learned just like classes in the good, old Titan Quest. This way, the player can tailor his party to his needs and experiment as he likes.

Other

This is just the first prototype for the new iteration using the updated engine, so there is not much more to say. Technically things have moved from prefabbed scenes for creatures/items/levels to just data objects. Factory scripts then construct the actual object from that data, eliminating a lot of overhead when editing some components.

The inventory has been simplified too. It's now just a party wide grid serving as the backpack. Equipped items are all managed by each companion in his character window. Items in the backpack can now be rotated as well. Maybe this can lead to a future charm mechanic, arranging patterns with multiple items?

Future plans

• Bugfixes
• QoL (especially inventory improvements)
• Finish the starting area
• Some kind of introduction when starting a new game
• More levels
• More enemies
• More skill trees
• More companions
• More items