In this entry: Finishing work on Luma and resuming work on story quest chain.
February 3
At the end of January, I was participating in Global Game Jam. After it was over, I took a few days to rest, and today I was back to development.
I have implemented Luma city guards and merchants.
February 4
Made little progress today - began implementing the rest of the needed NPCs.
February 5
NPCs, new matter kilns, and a way to gain Luma's reputation have been implemented!
All's that left for this part of development is to fix bugs and make some minor engine improvements.
February 6
Today is the day! I have made a bunch of screenshots of the final Luma looks:
More screenshots are available on my Twitter.
I spent the rest of the day fixing bugs.
February 7
Today I fixed a few issues and then spent 3+ hours playing/testing the game.
And, well...
When making a game, I build it from a loose idea in my head. I have faith in that idea and I work very hard to make it real. For a large portion of the development that's all I have - the game is too incomplete to match the idea.
But at some point game becomes complete enough - and then I see that what I was working on is real, not just something in my head. It's a huge relief and a milestone for the development.
So today's test did that to me, and I'm very happy =]
February 8
Today I have fixed the bugs I've found during testing and uploaded the new version to my Discord server.
Going to take it easy for a day or two - rest and celebrate the release of such an important version.
To summarize, it contains the city of Luma with all its new merchants and crafting stations, Tier 3 and Tier 4 equipment, and new events for Eir Meadows.
February 11
Today I have started working on new quests. Spend the day writing dialogues.
In other news: Light of the Locked World has entered Independent Games Festival!
There are a lot of great games in there and it's a huge honor to have my game among them.
February 12
Done writing the dialogue. Can't wait to introduce the players to the new characters and exciting new parts of the plot!
February 13
Maintenance day: Cleaning up before the end of a workweek, updating stuff, charging wireless devices, etc. I've also spent too much time writing LOTLW description - it's a constant struggle for me to describe the game...
February 14
...luckily today I've managed to put together something I'm okay with. I went ahead and updated the description in all sites the game is in.
With that done, I've gone to take another look at the dialogue I've written for the quest earlier.
The secret to good writing is to rewrite the thing you're writing a dozen times. Probably.
February 15
All I did today was give the Immigrant Guild immigrant members appropriate looks.
February 18
18th already?! Gah!
Haven't been productive lately, mostly because I've started a side project. I'm not happy with losing time, so tomorrow I'm going to put an end to it.
Anyway, I still managed to do a bit of work - added icons for items required by the quests, polished quest script, added new quest UI icons, implemented a new music track, added Luma teleport spells which - a surprise for me - weren't implemented before.
February 21
21st?! Help!
I'm fully back to LOTLW though and made some good progress today.
I have moved new dialogue strings - containing 2000 words! - to the game's files and began piecing together the quest.
Feels good to be back =]
February 22
I've done quite a bit today, but I can't write about it, because it's story content.
Because of that, I'm going to stop writing entries until I'm done with the current batch of story content.
So in a week or two - when I'll start working on Western Kayos content: Western Trilith mini-area, Siw mini-area, and Silver Fields overworld area - exciting stuff.
I'm going to end this with a small teaser:
What you see above is the Foreign Aid Bureau of the Immigrant Guild.
It's an immigrant organization and a "self-deployed intervention force".
The Bureau is working to protect the young democracy of Kayos, accelerate the world's development, to "Make Kayos into a place people would want to immigrate to if there was an option".
The Bureau's leader is an immigrated knight of Order Tempest.
Which is basically UN with more teeth - their motto is "Peace or storm".
Thanks for reading! <3