Hello everyone!
Yet another late Steam update due to busy period at work! Here's what has happened in the past 2.5 months (spoiler alert: it's GUI and GUI-facing things):
Calendar widget
A new calendar widget provides information about in-game time, date, and moon phases. This can impact certain gameplay elements, such as spell effects, enemy spawns, or quest availability and timing. Combined with existing "wait" functionality, makes it very easy to control time flow. The art is work in progress (as all art is), but the concept will remain.
(Calendar is a bit monstrous sized here, just to show it more clearly)
Enchantments & Equipment Overhaul
The enchantment system has undergone a big refactor for better and clearer support of absolute or percentage-based bonuses. E.g. do you deal 5 more damage, or 10% more damage? Also, is the bonus applied to the current weapon's values, or your total damage based on other equipment? Do you get bonuses if you wear the equipment or just by having the item in your inventory? Questions like this are answered more clearly now, both under the hood and to the player via the GUI. I'll expand on different item types enabled by this system in a future post, to be able to share a bit more content. Additionally, part of this work was to add dynamically generated names for enchanted equipment, like Diablo :)
Improved item description panel
After several iterations, the panel is quite a bit more informative in terms of what information is shared about each item. The major changes are the display of bonuses per item type. Weapons/armor show associated values, bombs/potions show their effects, enchanted equipment and charms show the effects, and all effects show if they're beneficial or not, if they're absolute or percentage-based, and if they are applied to the wearer/wielder or to the item itself, and if the enchantment is permanent or if the item is equipped. Oof, that was a mouthful. Icons and colors are used to communicate much of the above.
Improved accessibility
Disclaimer: the UI you see in every shared video will keep changing. The reason is that I'm always tinkering with text and background colors, for improving accessibility, clarity etc. As I'm learning more on the topic, things improve, but it's a continuous process. The game slowly gravitates towards darker background panels and light-colored text with appropriate contrast to adhere to accessibility guidelines.
New Leap ability
Trap in a narrow corridor in front of you. Oh no! What do you do? Well, plenty of choices already, like using a hook to glide over, use a teleport spell, throw an item at the trap to activate it, push an enemy to the trap to activate it, etc. Adding a new skill to the arsenal: jumping over it. The catch: you need to be agile and strong enough, and not carry too much weight, if you want to jump far.
It's a trap!
More work on traps, allowing new types of traps like push traps (if you step on a trap, you are pushed to a direction, same, opposite or custom), fireball traps, magic missile traps, etc. Also, as I'm always aiming for emergent gameplay, we can have things like a succession of push traps creating a chain movement effect, or fire traps also burning down the forest.
New audio track
A little bit of content on the audio side: an ambient track, for use in caverns or dungeons, evoking mystery and uncertainty
Next: Quest system
There's scaffoling work currently, towards the quest system. Not much to share now, but stay tuned for future updates! As usual, more frequent updates (a bit more developer focussed) on the various linked social media (reddit, bluesky, mastodon, youtube) and in the blog.
Until next time!