Developer's Log

[CraigStern]

Fixed: a bug where the game would fail to account for updated character numbering in the movement tiles after grabbing an item sack off the battlefield, resulting in the wrong character moving afterwards.
I've updated the demo and the alpha version online.

Also: this will likely be my last update until I return from PAX next Tuesday. See you all in about a week!

[CraigStern]

Surprise! It turns out that long, boring plane rides are great for finding and fixing bugs. New fixes:

- volume settings now “sticking” when changed in battle
- character detail pop-ups once again load properly
- character portraits once again load properly in deployment tiles
- shadowling portrait now displays for Hartlis in Kovit campaign
- pressing Escape while in battlefield looting mode now deselects the current character
- “Menu” pop-up now disappears when the “Menu” button is pressed in battle
updated the game icon
- “Left-click to speed up.” textfield once again appears in fullscreen mode during scrolling text cut scenes
- updated installer / game icons

I've updated the installers and the demo online.

[CraigStern]

Demo bug fixes:

--you now once again have Bartleby and Lakshmi in lieu of Alvin for the Ploutos Weapons Depot battle

General bug fixes:

--Lakshmi and Astrid now start equipped with their default weapons and can once again launch attacks
--you can now quit the game during battlefield loot collection using hotkeys
--attempting to push a character off the battlefield no longer crashes the game

The installers (both demo and early backer) have been updated.

[CraigStern]

I'm back! In fact, I got back last night, but was so busy / tired that I didn't get a chance to update this until today. (I'm still tired, actually, and a bit sick, but the show must go on!)

So, I made some changes based on feedback at PAX:

--the actions menu is now always visible alongside character movement tiles, resulting in far fewer clicks to get what you want done. You'll never see that "Actions" button again, and you'll seldom even see the Move button.
--the actions menu now stays onscreen after characters attack and after you hit Done.
--for those occasions where you don't want move tiles cluttering the screen, you can now right-click them to make them disappear.
--all of the action buttons with hotkeys now display their associated keyboard shortcuts on mouseover.

Also: there are now a bunch of new item graphics! A few are getting edited now, but most of them are done and ready for use. A few are for quest items (letter, package), a bunch are new weapons (rapier, main gauche, halberd, throwing knife, throwing axe), we've got decanters of wine, two varieties of boot graphics, and color variations on the gem graphic. Once edits are done, we'll have orb graphics available as well.

[CraigStern]

Working on fixing a particularly irritating bug.

In the meantime, why not look at some new character portraits? We now have the male red spriggat and bronze golem portraits!

[CraigStern]

OH THANK GOD, I FIXED IT.

The bug was super-dumb: basically, I rearranged the way that data was organized elsewhere in the code when adding in tile descriptions, and I forgot to make a commensurate change in the movement AI algorithm to determine whether a space was filled with water or lava. Really, really dumb.

Anyway! All you need to know is that the AI will now once again swim intelligently toward shore no matter how far away it is thrown into water or lava.

The installers have been updated.

[CraigStern]

Finally got around to writing and posting the monthly update for August on the site's front page.

Tested the latest version of the Dungeon tileset; sent off requests for a few final tiles to fill a perceived need. Added /  tweaked existing Dungeon destructible objects to the game. Here is how the tileset is looking right now; pretty darn good, I think!

[CraigStern]

Finished adding in the Dungeon tileset tile data. Spent some time giving artist feedback.

[CraigStern]

Two new script actions: SpawnFloatingText and SpawnFloatingTextAt, both of which create your own little text pop-ups on the screen:

SpawnFloatingText – adds a short-lived animated text pop-up above a specified character. There are four parameters: the text to use, the name of the character to add it above, the color of the text in hexidecimal format, and the number of frames to delay the text. (The third and fourth parameters are optional; if not added, the game will assume that the text is yellow and that there is no delay.)

SpawnFloatingTextAt – adds a short-lived animated text pop-up above a specified character. There are five parameters: the text to use, the Y coordinate, the X coordinate, the color of the text in hexidecimal format, and the number of frames to delay the text. (The fourth and fifth parameters are optional; if not added, the game will assume that the text is yellow and that there is no delay.)


Note: do not use commas in the first parameter or bad things will happen.

[CraigStern]

Remember how you could stick code within an item's tags in ItemClasses.xml to make it change an integer variable upon use? I've decided that it would be much more flexible to simply let it run a named script upon use (which can then change an integer value in addition to roughly a million other things).

I got that working yesterday, but it resulted in a bug: whenever the script changed a value such that it triggered a conversation via an OnVal trigger, the conversation would fail to open. I'm going to fix that today and get the build updated.

[CraigStern]

All right! I fixed that bug, plus one that made the game freeze when enemies tried to move after being thrown into a body of water / lava from which there is no escape (e.g. the one in Donut Tower).

I also made the Actions Menu spawn at the top of the screen by default and changed some of the tutorial dialog during the Kovit campaign to make things less confusing for new players. The installers have been updated.

[CraigStern]

Woo! I've received the final items graphics from Julia Buge. Among them are the orb graphics. Just look at these sexy things!

[CraigStern]

(We also have green, yellow and gray varieties.)

On my end, I've been working some more on random dungeon generation. Things are progressing well; hopefully I'll have it working in some basic way by Friday.

[CraigStern]

Work continues on procedural level generation. In the meantime, we now have a stone golem portrait.

[CraigStern]

As expected, procedural level generation continues to be a difficult slog. I just now got a level to both (1) generate and (2) actually load for the first time. As you can see from the screenshot below, there is still a lot of work left to do (both from a coding perspective and a design perspective), but this is a start.

Although progress on this feature has been painfully slow, I'm pleased to announce that we've now completed all of the basic 22 character class portraits, and have moved on to NPC portraits. From there, we'll begin doing character portraits for the campaign's unique characters.

The first NPC portrait is already complete: a portrait for the cavalier's giant mantis mount!