Yet another first Saturday has come, so let's take a look at the previous month!
Artificial Intelligence
The majority of the time was taken up by writing AI for the various kingdoms that the player doesn't control. I joked that when you find yourself writing pathfinding on an undirected graph for your text game, you've probably taken a wrong turn somewhere. Dei Gratia Rex is of course a map game as well, and the simulation aspects are important for that.
There's not a lot of terribly interesting screenshots for this either I'm afraid. However I did find the need to tweak one of the map modes:
One of the design principals in DGR has always been — and remains — to present a throne-level game as opposed to a bird's eye game. Information about the political situation one hundred miles away was not always easy to come by in the 12th century; information about the lay of the land thousands of miles away was utterly unattainable. I play and enjoy games that do offer that sort of view of the world of course, but those are different games to this one. That said, in testing I found it pretty annoying to not know which of my counties had been besieged by the enemy. Updated information in the final version is mostly likely going to require expenditure of resources (even something as simple as spending time scouting rather than another activity), but for gameplay reasons this information does need to be available in some fashion.
Most likely I will add one more map mode to graph the effects of raiding and pillage. I've been going back and forth as to whether or not that was a good fit for the game's vision, but even for a game like this gameplay must come first.
More font experiments
Last time I mentioned trying to do a few things just for screenshot purposes. Since I'm still on some boring, code-heavy work at the moment, I did the same this month. I happened across some paleographic fonts sourced directly from real manuscripts, so naturally I had to make a trial run.
I'm no academic to be sure, but I am perhaps ever so slightly more familiar with this sort of thing than an average gamer might be. However I can barely read this! Further, I have far too much respect for you all to inflict the long s on you. It looked like a bust. Digging a bit deeper however, I found that I could actually disable the ligatures at the code level. This resulted in somewhat more legible results for us modern readers.
I'm not really convinced of this either though. Still, the experiment was an interesting one! I did receive a suggestion on Twitter to make this an optional toggle (and also to consider further accessibility here, like dyslexic-friendly fonts). That sounds pretty optimal to me, but as always I'm definitely interested in more input!
Wrapping up
That's all for today. I'm going to try to get the AI finished in the next few days and move on to other work. Systems work has consumed much time lately, and I'm eager to create more content.