Hi everyone,
Reworking some of the backend has continued last week, and I’ve made some good progress.
As I’ve continued going through things that can be merged and improved, one of the things that actually stood out quite a bit were the most recent changes I made to the tutorial: Where the old tutorial was based entirely on the quest system (which is still not in use anywhere but for the tutorial), I took a lot of liberties with the improvement of the tutorial, creating little hacks to achieve all of the unique little things I wanted to do in the tutorial - which had of course also contributed to the problems I encountered.
In an attempt to reduce the bugs introduced in the tutorial, I now decided to upgrade those little hacks into more standardised quest steps, which are more flexible than any of the previous ones. In addition to the quest steps, I also added a new, more flexible loot item - which allows me to create new loot that has unique effects when found (rather than simply having inventory contents). I have no doubt that this will also come in handy for the research in 0.9 (e.g. finding research documents in a chest), and for 0.10 (being able to e.g. start a quest by finding some loot).
Again, this wasn’t strictly needed to be done ahead of releasing the tutorial or 0.8, but I feel that both will benefit from the more robust setup I have created.
Until next week!