Hey.
Been really hard at work on the next update, but I wanted to break the radio silence a bit.
It has been more than a month since the last update, but be assured, there is stuff cooking. The next update will bring a substantial amount of new content. As of now:
new items
new armor set — armor should now actually give stats and be useful
new area
new interior, possibly more than one
new NPCs
new quests
new potion — if the technical side gets solved, because this one is tricky, then it should be a very cool potion to use, not just for this update, but in the long run
dialogue polishing on some quests — I am not a writer, so this is taking much longer than expected, and not all quests will be fully polished yet
This one is taking quite a long time because, now that content is being properly added, quite a few things popped up that needed to be solved on the technical side, such as:
centralized locking systems, meaning that what is locked, what is not, and when, is now much easier to manage. Hopefully, this will reduce bugs in this area a lot in the long run.
built new tooling for quest flow
fixed an issue with quest tasks getting stuck by fully rebuilding the way speech/dialogue and its progression is handled
threw out most of the old NPC logic and replaced it with a much more manageable and robust “NPC presence system” that also has a bunch of tooling, so I can keep track of where all the NPCs need to be in a given quest storyline, time of day, etc. NPCs will not be walking around for the foreseeable future though. They will be where they need to be, but just not visibly walking about. That was a sacrifice I had to make so the update is not delayed by another month or more.
...and more and more that I will not bore you with today
TL;DR: Those have all been solved, and then some.
Now the actual fun part is happening: using the tools and systems that were built over all these years and finally making something with them.
And another bit of great news: the new changes bring one very fundamental adjustment, and it looks like the old save files have survived it flawlessly. At least, it worked on my machine.
This has been my personal biggest goal: to ensure a robust data management system so players, as much as possible, do not lose their game progress — ever. It looks very promising after the trial this data framework went through.
The next update is still about 2–3 weeks away. I will need to put the brakes on at some point, because new quests and items keep creeping into the update.