February Development Review – Embracing the end

What, the month is already over again? D:

Development wise it’s been a pretty slow month for me, as some irl things kept me busy – again. Besides that, most of the work done this month was writing the story for the end, which isn’t my strong suit either… But at least I got a chance to improve the dialogue system a bit, and I feel like my writing skills are also improved a little. :D

Endgame Content – Scaled Adventures

The biggest feature of the month probably was the introduction of /startRandomAdventure, which picks a random adventure and scales it up to your level. If I’m unable to create new adventures fast enough to keep up with your grinding speeds, at least I can offer more challenges that way. :’D Jokes aside, I’ll have to introduce some soft level limits in the next playtest – not halting leveling up completely, but slowing it down by increasing the amount of exp required by a big amount once someone reached said cap.

Story: The beginning of the end

So, right now we are in the middle of the end of the world, yay!

Creating this was a bit awkward – I already had the end planned out long ago, but how should I connect the dots to get there? I also made the fatal mistake of not writing down / preparing the ideas I had over the past couple months, so all of it had to be written at once over the past weeks, which in turn forced me to postpone quite a few ideas to the next playtest – additionally some things just didn’t make sense in the quick pace needed to actually end the world now, so Sel’Ria only managed to squeeze in a cameo this time, but at least I got to sprinkle some hints on future encounters and lore here and there. :P

Given that the final adventure just launched, players will have a week or two to complete them, afterwards I’ll just hit the nuke button and disable all other activities. Finishing the story might affect some aspects in the next playtest and unlock additional dialogue choices in the future, so you better do that. ^^

A look ahead

With the playtest coming to a close, what’s up for march? I’ll start into the new month by prioritizing the stuff I want to add for the following playtest. There’s quite a lot of things on the list, and I’m looking forward to adding all of them! Finally a break from writing stories, yay! Just not sure about the order yet. 🙃

Most notably, that would be a rework on how guild buildings work, but I also want to add in a way to support temporary npc party members for future story adventures, which might require some reworking (or, well, improving) on how parties are implemented.

An overhaul for my internal data editor is also planned to make creating adventures more fun… right now I link up things through a dropdown menu, which worked at first, but with the increasing amount of encounters, monsters, status effects etc. this occasionally feels a bit like playing “Where’s Waldo?” by now and is only bound to get worse over time.

Improvements to the dialogue system are also planned – NPCs will finally be able to address players by their names and use their selected pronouns in quests once this is done.

Furthermore, some people have asked me if there will be a wiki for the game – and yes, while I try to make the game as self-explanatory with /d and /help as possible, a wiki might be a good idea in the long run, so right now I’m evaluating the various options out there when it comes to hosting one.

With all the recent delays, late April or early May look like a good point in time for the next playtest – I’ll keep you updated on that here, and in the community chat.

That’s it for this month! I hope all of you enjoyed the final adventures in this playtest! :)