Well, howdy all!
Project Status
The project has taken some big strides over the past month. I'm presently moving apartments, caring for my partner as they recover from surgery, and managing my workhours for a few game-dev related contracts (go check out Astral Ascension on Steam if you're a big fan of sci-fi romance and Visual Novels!). Shortly: there hasn't been as many hours a week as I'd like to have been putting in to TAE this last month.
Even so: things have been quite busy over in The City! To briefly summarize the last month's work:
- You can explore (and configure the decks of ala Hand-of-Fate) dungeons
- You can now fight monsters in deck-based combat
- Battle cards can target multiple squares
- Made it so that if you hit a blank square in combat you either hit the opponent on the other side of the table or, if there isn't one, hit a random enemy on the board. No damage gets wasted!
- Made it possible to gain items, clues, experience, and funds from combat (provided you survive it)
- Finished the frameworks to complete mysteries and gain Clues about your Adversary
- Finished the prototype to support Research of the Adversary in Downtime
- Got Madness and Mutation when defeated in (as well as whether you'd spend time and money to fully heal or face an instant dungeon to crawl back to life)
- Framework for Final Confrontations to Reveal and Fight your Adversary and (maybe) Banish them is now in.
- Investigators now have an Inventory to contain and use/equip items, and a Journal which lets you manage everything you need to while you're 'away from home'.
- The framework for Shops is now in; places where you can buy a rotating selection of Goods (changes every mystery) or Sell stuff you pick up to shopkeepers.
- Greatly expanded the number of visitable locations in The City and enforced their Danger Levels.
- Constructed the framework for your Homebase outside of The City; eventually it'll do all manner of thing but at start it'll just be a place where you can Rest and Recover (gaining Stamina/Will in trade for precious time).
- Supported 'random outcomes' for choices in Events to support things such as 'who is on stage when attending one of Madama Belleforte's parties'.
I also took the time to upgrade from Godot's 4.2 branch to the experimental 4.3d2 branch and so far it's running like a dream -- well, more like a nightmare given surrounding context, I suppose.
First Look
So I figure unless I show some video footage y'all may get the impression the game's just a series of pictures you download when you buy it. Everything's still WIP and prototype-y so toss some salt at the screen before you view the following Quickstarted (also a new feature introduced over the last month where you pick a random investigator, world, and mystery to start with) game where I hurl myself into a Dungeon with dukes up so y'all can get a quick peek at what TAE currently looks and feels like.
In future, I'm hopeful to showcase TAE through videos like this one. I'm stabbing for a 2024 release, though I expect it's going to be close to the end of the year given how much more content and features are between me and my vision of a '1.0' for the game (and maybe a '2.0' if y'all can help me get the word out on this game and it does well in sales).
Anywho, I know this wasn't a whole lot of meat for a monthly devpost, but with everything going on in my life presently I don't have the time as a solo-act to do much more than this at the moment.
That said, I am interested to know what you are interested to know about TAE. If you've got a particular thing about or in the game you're curious about, lemme know down in the comments below -- I just may take your advice and put it into my next news post.
For now it's farewell! Don't forget to wishlist the game if you haven't yet; every one of those helps!