Hi everyone,
First of all, I have continued with work on the pirates, and especially with our decision to aim for 0.8 to be focused around RTS strategy, I have somewhat expanded the scope of my rework to accommodate that.
Secondly, we have been trying to update the Tutorial to explain the game in simpler and more understandable terms. After moving the Tutorial to its own tab (and giving it its own island), we wanted to add a better explanation of how to make money, some combat mechanics, and some exploration. Unfortunately, the current form of the Tutorial was created in a 3 day sprint just ahead of release, and as such, the scalability is lacking. We decided to not add any more tech debt to this, and create a better underlying system for the Tutorial, which will also be helpful as a first iteration of a more generic quest system we want to introduce in a future version.
As a result, I have been working on this new system for much of the last week, and while we were at it, we decided to ready the game for eventual localisation into other languages. While I had created most of the system for that quite some time ago, we were still lacking language banks to draw from, and so the game was defaulting to the text we had manually put in - something we wanted to move away from. John has already started work on creating an english language bank, which will hold all the text in the same place, making editing easier in general. We will continue to update future text (on the Tutorial and otherwise) under this new system.
Finally, we have started preparing the rocks for the eventual update to the stonecutter/stone mason. While the current rocks have only primitive colliders on them, we have wanted to make them feel a little more organic, so John has been working on creating better LOD’s and custom colliders for this purpose.
Until next week!