Greetings! Welcome back to another weekly dev log where this week I spent a lot of time working on stealth!
As I'm sure many of you have experienced, stealth in Lands of Crown is currently... lacking, to say the least. There aren't really any ways to sneak into buildings, and there really are no stealth items or abilities (besides perhaps the Ghost's ability). This was not intentional, but rather a byproduct of working and developing the game. While other systems and mechanics got more and more work put in, stealth was not really considered or accounted for.
Therefore, as part of a larger plan that I'll talk about later, I made it a focus this week to work on stealth and see what could be done to make it more fun and worthwhile. However, instead of adding some new item or ability to act as a temporary fix, I wanted to fix some of the root issues regarding stealth.
Stealth, even with non-stealthy characters, was very difficult because it was often very unclear where exactly an NPC was looking. I had originally designed the system so that NPCs could be looking in any direction while the NPC's sprites were confined to allow for four different outcomes. This meant that an NPC could be looking anywhere in one of the four quadrants and they would not change sprites or show any indicator as to where they were exactly looking.
I have rectified this system and expanded it so that characters can once again look in any direction, but now there are eight different sprite combinations as opposed to the four previously talked about. This should greatly improve a player's ability to determine where exactly a character is looking and therefore be able to account and plan out stealth operations.
Another big part of why stealth was near impossible was that there was usually only one entrance to a building, that being the door. Unless you came prepared with a bomb, which is unsurprisingly very not stealthy, the only way into and out of a building was through the door. That needed to change.
Now, buildings can have windows that will allow you to knock on them, calling over a property owner, or pick them or break them, allowing you to enter through them. I also plan to have different types of windows, such as prison bars or a crack in the wall that may only allow small characters through them. I want these to open the door to new playstyles and allow the player the freedom to play how they want.
As always, I'm still ironing out these features and will continue to update you on my progress, but in the meantime take care and let me know what you think!
Until next time,
aGoldenFly