Hey guys,
So it’s been a while since my last official development update but I have been hard at work as usual working on the rebuild. Things might seem quiet but there’s been a lot of progress. If you’ve been following me on the forums then you’ll know that as of now I’ve created all the UI for the game, with the exception of combat UI. I created a lot of new UI for the new activities and also overhauled all of the older menus. Right now what I’m working on is implementing things like items, weapons, armor and traits, content that the UI would display as I can’t develop the UI any further without setting these things up. Let’s have a look at some of the new things that will be introduced in the rebuild.
When you start a new game, the first thing that will appear is a menu asking you to initialise all the settings. The old screen was a series of several smaller menus, I’ve know merged it all into one single screen. There are more difficulty parameters to customise now, such as the modifier for starting crowns, party or equipment along with more significant parameters like determining the experience multiplier or map movement speed. Also, while I haven’t implemented this yet, there will be additional content that is only accessible when playing on the hardest difficulty settings.
Next up is a “character customisation” sequence at the start of the game. So you will no longer start with a randomly generated character, you’ll now have a lot more control over your player character. There is a lot of placeholder content so please excuse that but I can show you in general, how all the menus will play out.
There will first be a general prologue sequence introducing the world and setting up the context, this is no different to the older build however I’ve overhauled all the UI art and I feel it looks a lot better now.
You will then be asked to select a portrait, there will also be female portraits too. Ideally I am aiming for all the portraits to match the character models, but that is still to be confirmed.
After that, you’ll be asked to select your traits/background. Each background will have different base stat modifiers and traits. For example, a farmer will have more base Strength than a scholar. It won’t just be stat modifiers either, some backgrounds will have traits that allow for increased Stamina recovery per turn in combat or playing as a "Former Paladin" that starts with 2 companions that don't have a daily wage. In total, there will be 24 backgrounds for the player to choose from. Excuse the placeholder text, but essentially the menu will look like this. Basically just several options but the text would be formatted better.
After you have selected your traits/background you’ll then be asked to pick a set of weapon proficiencies. This is something new so let’s talk about it now.
Weapon Proficiencies:
Currently the player/companions can choose to use any weapon without any restrictions which does allow for a greater sense of freedom but I also feel it reduces the experience in other areas. Exploration is important and with 5 vast regions to explore, each with unique cultural influences, I wanted there to be a multitude of reasons to visit each region and also factors that made each region feel unique. To that end, aside from the player (can you choose), the backgrounds of the companions that you hire will be locked to certain weapons. Those weapons will naturally be associated to the region they belong to, IE certain backgrounds in Yamatar (Chinese/Japanese inspired) would be able to use a “Katana” but a northerner from Vinmark is not going to be able to use a “Katana”. Some might argue that it is restrictive but I feel it now also makes backgrounds more unique. It all ties into giving the players more reasons and incentives to get out and explore. I guess to some extent too the backgrounds could now also be called “Classes”. For a long time, I was adamant in complete freedom for player progression but I truly believe with the size of the world that I am envisioning, there are more benefits to a more traditional “class” system to allow for a steady stream of “new things” to encounter as you explore the world.
Now we get to probably the most significant change of late, something like this was a big reason why I chose to rebuild, implementing this on top of the existing systems would have been too difficult. You can now configure your starting stats as opposed to having them randomly generated. Your traits/background will initialise your starting stats and from then on you’ll have 150 stat points to assign into the 7 stats. There are max/min caps to each stat in this menu so you can’t walk out with 100+ attack, but overall you have a lot more freedom now in building your character at the start. As a bonus, you can now also edit the names of every companion you hire. Just click the “scroll” button and a rename box will pop up, the button is in the top right corner of the portrait. Keen eyes might also have noticed that there is a new stat now, so I’ll explain below.
Vitality vs Strength:
Basically vitality is now health and strength is strength. In the current build your current “Strength” is both your health and also determines a portion of your damage. It was an interesting idea at the start but over time to me it felt like a gimmick. If I wanted to add a monster that felt “tanky” with high health it would then also have an extremely high damage output as well or if I wanted to create backgrounds that were more defense orientated, they would also benefit from having high damage output, there would be no way to separate the two things. So I guess in this regard I am also taking a step back to “traditional” RPG design. Strength is its own stat now and just like all other stats, it can be reduced in combat, so there is still a way to reduce the damage output of your enemies. The formula for damage output remains the same though, the player’s Strength + Damage bonus from the equipped weapon is the total amount of damage, which is then subtracted against the helmet/armor value of the enemy target. I suppose this is the second biggest change I’ve made to combat, the first one being removing having to manually reduce helmet/armor and integrating it directly into the basic attacks. Again, I feel like this is the correct step forward.
Moving on, I’d like to show some more updates I’ve made to the overhauled inventory screen. I’ve merged the equipment slot box with the model display box, looks a lot more polished now. I’ve also experimented with equipment icons, by adding a glow/color that is associated with the item’s rarity. I’ve tried a few different things from just coloring the border of the icon to the entire background. What you are seeing here might be a bit too excessive, I might only do glows for ancestral/masterwork items, right now still deciding but wanted to show it off anyway. It’s just another one of those small touches, I’m remaining committed to polishing the game as a whole and not leaving out the smaller details.
Activities & Skills:
A bit on this now. A lot of the UI work done was to accommodate to this. All the various activities need new UI for things such as gambling or going to a gathering site to mine iron. You can see the full list of skills in the menu below. I haven’t implemented them yet so I won’t be going over them, but as I’ve said in the past this is all to expand the world and to give the player more activities to do. You are no longer just a mercenary and you don’t start as one either.
Wrapping things up, let’s talk a bit about the armor sets. Currently you might have noticed that all armor sets do not show any skin at all, the body is fully covered. This was due to a technical limitation, essentially I had to cover up all of the body because there would be different skin tones and I had no way of handling that. When armor is worn in most cases the body underneath is culled out but if I want to have an armor set that is say a simple harness I then need to make that specific area not cull the body out and accommodate to different skin tones as it would be worn over an exposed chest. It took me a long time to overhaul the internal customisation system and while the results are essentially only visual, I think it is again another step up in terms of polish and increasing the believability of the world. In addition to that, I’ve been trying to think of smarter ways to utilise my existing art assets and internally I now have something called “modular tabbards”. It is essentially a model of a tabbard broken down into smaller sections in which I can then swap out the textures to create a vast amount of different tabbards or “shirts”. Some of these would serve as underlayers in which another unique 3D torso mesh would be applied on top or in cases of lighter armor it would serve as the main armor but still have unique elements like a belt on top. Here are some examples of what is now possible.
Lastly, I’d like to just thank everyone for their continued support, I was very apprehensive about doing a complete rebuild as that meant updates would have to stop and I was fearful of getting a negative response but I am very glad to know that everyone is supporting my decision. I believe the rebuild will truly be worth the wait! Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Cheers,
Kevin.