Apart from new dialogue for the last remaining NPCs, new version will also have some mechanical and QoL changes.
Description screens will now show you more details about guns.
Only few more dialogue options for George are left. Next update will also have new dialogue graphics for Arf and kobolds.
Next major update after the dialogue is done will focus on the German faction, which means there will be NPCs and texts in different language.
At the start of the game, Nika will speak english at 100% and russian at about 60. German and other languages will be at 0. You will be able to learn new languages over time.
In game, this will simply pick words from a dialogue box depending on your language skill and replace them with question marks.
This system will not be in the next version, but it will hopefuly make future versions more interesting and give individual NPCs and factions more personality.
Definitely. I categorize these as minor NPCs. and they will get their own sprites. The rest, like some of the people in Riverstone are generic NPCs and they will all use a set of sprites shared between them, like the brown haired guy with a beard sprite.
Seems cool! A suggestion that I have would be to maybe add a modifier for the language checks: for example, educated characters use more advanced vocabulary that the player can't follow so there could be a (60% - 10%) chance while a fellow kid could talk with more basic words giving a (60% + 5%) chance of understanding
Things are progressing well on next update.
The main reason for it taking so long is me remaking the way dialogue topics work. Up until now, topics were pretty much just items that were invisible in inventory and trading. This made things rather cumbersome. Now topics are just IDs in array. The system works, but there is always a posibility of something going wrong.
Here is a small preview of one of the cutscenes and new location.
Things are going fine. I don't have that much time free time these days, but that is only temporary thing. I'm slowly chipping away at the dialogue and cutscenes, but I also work on different, smaller things when I'm not in the mood to write dialogue or do cutscenes.
For example, I added a small counter to the main menu that shows how many times you beat the game and I altered the Mr. White fight, if you have certain item unlocked from previous playthroughs.
Some pictures from two of the new maps. Again, each of them will have something interesting in them and a reason to re-visit them later.
One of the new maps will have new mining spot, so I finaly got around to redesigning the resource extraction mechanic.
It is quite simple. The game automaticaly selects the best tool for the job. Depending on your total score, which is a total of tool quality and divided physical atributes, you will be able to gain certain types of resources. In the picture, you can see that at score level 0, you get only rocks. If you get a better tool, or increase your physical stats, you will be able to get some copper from this deposit at score level 10.
To increase the amount of resources you gain, you spend more endurance. Endurance spent is divided into 10 stages and goes from 10% to 100% of your max endurance stat. So if your max endurance is 100 and you go through some fighting, which leaves you with 80 endurance, you will only be able to use enough endurance for stage 8, which multiplies your gained resources by 8. Quite straight forward.
This new system will give more use to endurance and it will make resource gain more controlable. In previous versions, you could level your character a bit, mine once and get hundreds of resources, making you never use that system again.
I added wellness loss indicator to combat screen. And while I was at it, I also changed the fonts a little to make the numbers a little more visible.
PS.: I think I have done quite a few things for the upcoming version. I will do some more testing and make some last minute changes and additions. There is a good chance the next version will get released in the next 7 days.
Woodcutting has been reworked to use the new mining system.
I will try and add a foraging system, which will use the same framework and mining does, with some minor changes. On top of that, I’m working on next batch of maps.
And done.
On top of that, some resource gathering activities will now get bonus from certain trade skills, not just physical atributes.
Adding new trade skills to the game is not that easy, mainly because some of the systems I needed to edit were very old, convoluted and badly documented. But everything should work fine now.
Thievery is not coming any time soon, but I wanted to refresh my memory on some of those old systems and it worked. Now back to the new maps and the faction work.
One way to gain faction standing is going on missions. These will be small dungeons / encounters that can only be cleared with certain party members.
This means you won’t be able to take any of your friends with you. Instead, you will get a bunch of generic characters you can pick from and assemble you squad. I’m currently working on a screen that will let you do just that.
This is still obviously work in progress, but you get the idea. You have three character slots. You switch between these with left and right arrow keys. And you have a character roster. You select individual characters with up and down keys. You can see their names, roles and items in the square windows. I will also add their HP and SP. Once you are happy with your selection, you accept and get teleported to the mission start.
That’s pretty much it. I plan to add different systems that interact with this screen. For example, some of those soldiers will not join you if your rank is too low, if they got hurt in previous mission and so on.
Last of the systems that was in dire need of update is lockpicking. Here is a small preview.
The way it works is pretty simple. Locks differe in size and complexity. Size equals the number of rows you will have to solve, complexity gives penalties to your percentages (more about those below)
You press left and right to “probe” lock pins.Pressing the action button then pushes the pin back. If the pin was correct, it stays locked back and you advance to the next row. If the pin was incorect, there is a 90% chance you will break your pick.
Each pick has certain number of probe atempts. If you use all of them, the pick breaks. Each pick breakage has a 70% chance to push you back one row.
Each probing atempt has certain chance to mark the pin you are probing. There is 5% chance it gets marked in full color (green and red), which tells you with 100% certainty if that pin is correct or wrong. There is 30% chance the pin gets marked with two colors (yellow and red / green), which tells you there is 60% chance that pin is correct or wrong, depending on the color.
So you probe the pins and hope your character tells you which pins are correct. If you run low on probe atempts and you get no mark, you can try and guess. This strikes a nice balance between player and character skill. These percentages and numbers will get better the higher your skill gets, so you will be able to open more difficult locks with less broken picks. It means you can open pretty much any lock right from the start, but the amount of lockpicks you will need will be huge if you have no skill. If your skill is really high, you will get marked pins more often, your picks will last longer and the will not break all of the time if you pick wrong pins or run out of uses.
I’m currently working on multiple things.
One of those things is changing the graphics for the lockpicking minigame.
I’m also working on another new map. This should be the last map I make before I start working on the German camp.
Lastly, I’m also working on improving the world map screen. You can press the arrow keys to switch to different map segments. (There will be 9 in total. The game right now has only two.)
Thanks. I’m currently dealing with some health issues, so all progress pretty much stopped. I will post more once I get better, which should be in a week or two.
Preview of new location
This area will differ from other locations slightly. Mainly because you won’t really be able to enter it yet. You will have to join the German or Graveyard factions first and none of them are joinable yet. However, ther will still be a trader you can access and some alchemical plants.
Next update should be ready in a a day or two.
Small update.
I’m still working on the new faction. There were some minor setbacks but nothing major. The update should be finished before christmas.
One of the scenes required a modern tileset, which is what I started working on today. Here is a very early preview.
Again, this is very early stage and it will look much better once it’s fully finished. I’m also slowly working on the faction missions. I want the initial release to have atleast five of these. More info on those soon.
