Day 8 - Demo Corrections & Chapter 1 Progress
Some people gave my game a try and I got some feedback! Thank you to the people who did that, it was very valuable. Some silly mistakes were caught and now the game has been improved for the better. Let's explore what changes will be coming to the public demo and check in with the progress of chapter 1.
Demo Update - Live for YOU Later This Week (My Internet is Slow)
Here I address feedback & list the following changes:
- Bandit Leader no longer provides banter if he is already dead. That was a dumb mistake which I caught earlier today but I would like to thank hadecynn for pointing this out to me. If I had missed this in the final version I would have felt very silly indeed! If you find a bug, please let me know ASAP so I may correct it. I'll be keeping track of who helps me out and I'll give a proper thanks in-game.
- Speaking of hadecynn, it was suggested that I implement a feature to auto end-turn if all player characters have already moved (or if that's in the Option menu, make it ON by default). Well wish granted friend! I also tweaked some more setting while I was looking into this ;) Of course, players may change this stuff anytime in the game themselves too.
- SapphireScribe mentions a possible bug with the text cursor. I think I might know what this is (and if that's the case, it isn't a bug) but I'm not 100% sure what's going on. I asked for more information and waiting on a response. If there is a problem, this will be fixed ASAP though as it should be an easy solution.
- I noticed some really stupid spelling mistakes, like, "hero" instead of, "Hiro" once. Another one, "edn" as opposed to, "end" early in. Nothing that major but it looked very silly. Fixed all the ones I caught. SRPG Studio does not let me use my spell checking stuff so things simply go unnoticed longer than they should. I will toss everything into a Word document once I finish Chapter 1 and fix any others then.
- See last update regarding balance changes for those.
Chapter 1
Progress on chapter 1 has been intense. This is easily the most scripting I have ever done EVER! Just one event is over 400 lines of (admitably) visual code! Holy cow that is a lot O.o Right now my focus has been on the encounters you get as you travel to Válor. I have almost 1 encounter done and the other 3 in the pool are in progress. You'll only ever see 2 at any given time but I'm making a Vertical-Slice like the judges want so this feature is a MUST. Really thinking hard how I want to approach Válor's introduction and, "test" part. The intro is great but the test bit is kind of bland. I may just put a time-skip with some humor in there instead as a placeholder. It isn't that the test is bad per se, it just eats up playtime that could be better spent elsewhere is my thought. I have far more interesting encounters to show off with EVEN MORE player choices that impact the run.
Here is what I added for encounter 1:
- Forest encounter - Night: Rest or Gather Herbs (80% chance of occurring).
- Resting heals player to full & grants a bonus. This is necessary since you DO NOT heal between encounters.
- Gather Herbs grants the player 3x healing item that grants 15hp on use. They are worth a lot of $$$
- A press-your-luck mini game done like a choose-your-own-adventure with % based success or failure (hidden values). You may choose to stop at any time and receive a small heal that decreases in value over time. The idea is that you are spending the night searching for rare herbs so the longer you do that the less you sleep. This can eventually negatively impact the player. Otherwise, you may have a chance to discover more herbs or even something else.
- If you press-your-luck enough times and manage to dodge all the whammies (<1% chance) then a super special event will occur. Otherwise the player is punished for staying up too late! Hiro becomes exhausted and suffers -1 to movement & speed, which is not something you want at all.
The other encounters are still in the very early phases and not worth mentioning at the moment.
Thanks for reading and keep working hard!
-JS