This week we focused on improving encounter flow and encounter UI. We were also able to throw in one new feature outside of the encounter: character mulligan at the start of the game.
In parallel, we worked on the game design for a few crucial features: mood (which will replace such lasting effects as stress and euphoria), personal traits (such as 'jumpy', for example) and foraging, cooking and consuming cooked food (which covers the whole cycle from obtaining the food resources, such as 'locust buds', to preparing and consuming the resulting rations). These things are now ready for production, and we'll start putting them into the build in one of the following updates.
Detailed release notes are on the game's forum, as well as below.
CHARACTER MULLIGAN
When you start a new campaign in Spire of Sorcery, there's 2 things you'll have to do at the very beginning of the campaign: define your mage character (not in the game yet) and choose your initial party, which we call 'character mulligan'.
In this week's version 183, you see 10 characters and must select 5 to proceed to Prologue –
Rather than displaying all the stats for each character, we show the descriptive value of the strongest and the weakest stat of each person:
These are determined by seeing how much up or down the stats are, from the neutral value. And if several stats have the same modification (for example, the character has both Health and Digestive system that rolled "base -2"), we look at the potential of the stat (in the same example, if Health rolled +1 potential and Digestive system rolled +3, Health will be the "weakest" among the two).
Coming up in the following versions:
- ability to edit character names right on this screen
- information about the dreams of each of these characters (which is important for long-term play)
- information about the personal inventory that each may bring to the initial party
UPDATED STAT TOOLTIPS IN CHARACTER PROFILE
A small thing that's been bothering us in the previous builds, is how tooltips were shown for modified stats. These tooltips were updated to look like this:
- "Frail" – description of the current stat value
- 7 – potential (how far this stat can be improved)
- 5 – nominal value (what's the value of this stat right now)
- –1 (stress) – currently active modifiers
- 4 – current value, which is the result of nominal being offset by modifiers
One thing that's coming with the future updates is that we'll remove all the alchemic effects that temporarily increase any stats. Such effects are replaced by mood, and mood works in a different way, which makes managing character stats easier.
UPDATED USER INTERFACE FOR THE ENCOUNTER MODE
There's a number of updates in encounter UI.
Let's go through these step by step:
- Environmental and Biome effects have moved to the top of the screen (here, you can see Hail and Ruins icons)
- "Victory over a stronger opponent" icon got an upgrade (two trumpets on the left side)
- Instead of banners which displayed whose turn it is, within the round, we now use the same stone tablets that we use in the travel mode – at the top of the screen
- "Next round" button is now next to the turn indicators
- Turn counter is right next to it
- "Retreat the whole party" button is also there, in the same group
- "Force this party member to retreat" button moved to the other side of character portrait
- On the right side of each portrait, there's now a new device (not functional yet) which is responsible for personal achievements that will positively impact character's mood (e.g. someone is excited about casting fire spells, and someone else is excited about scoring awesome loot)
- In the line under the character portrait, we now can see the icons of lasting effects, injuries and diseases which we earlier already saw in the travel mode. Tooltips show all the details.
- Additionally, this element now also shows the equipment icon – when some item is equipped, this icon will light up and offer details of the effect (not functional yet)
- Concentration button became smaller, and when it's disabled, it's dimmed down and has the same "claws" locking it as all elements have, when you cannot move them
- "Discard hand" button became round, but stayed in the same place as before
- Spellbook's icon got upgraded. Current placement is not final, though – as we will change the way spell formulas look, and only then will integrate it there (we have some pretty crazy concept for this part!)
- Inventory and Show deck and discard buttons got the same round treatment as we use for all new windows opening up
- Finally, while we haven't updated the Loot icon yet, it got a round treatment
- "Morale boost" indicator did not get a proper icon yet, either, but at least it got a more fitting progress bar – on the left side
We hope that these updates will make completing encounters more convenient for you, and we'll continue to update this screen as we work on the consistency of all kinds of buttons, as well as the way we show spell formula and Spellbook.
ENCOUNTER FLOW
The most important thing for this week's update is the hardest to describe, because it's nearly invisible: it's the flow of the process itself.
First of all, each round and each turn are now announced with proper plaques in the middle of the screen:
Secondly, when a creature starts its turn, we now highlight it with a "ray of god" – but we removed the "red sun" device as too distracting:
Third, whenever your party members or opponents intend to attack someone, the initiator and the intended action are shown next to the target. Here's the intended consequences of a spell –
and here's the intended action of the opponent –
Next, we started to clearly display some of the mechanics of how tokens combine, and will continue making these more transparent in the next versions:
TRANSLATIONS
A number of texts are now available in the game in Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Korean. We're catching up, slowly but surely, on the localisation. Know issue: some line breaks are broken. We'll have a fix for this next week.
WHAT'S NEXT?
There's still work left to upgrade the UI of the encounter, as well as the Recipe Book and the Cauldron.
We also want to finish with the proof of concept for the animation of how specific tokens affect characters (shown over their faces).
Finally, we need to get started on the mood system, which will replace stress and euphoria, and which currently blocks the hunger mechanics. We don't know if we'll be able to ship it within the same week, but at least we'll do the best that we can.
See you next Friday!