It was a pretty good week for working, and I think I got a lot done!
First off, the update. I admit I muffed it a little with the update number but it'll be fine. Everything seems to be working (more or less) because the bugs I discovered since then were mainly unrelated bits of code from longstanding bugs I managed to unearth while working on other things.
I have (finally) added the death screen, which has a headstone much like the original Rogue game from 1980. The score is related to experience points. Since you gain experience points for each place you discover and each monster you kill, the minimum score is 1 (from discovering the first town).
The "Death" panel
Otherwise, I made a few subtle changes to how quests worked, mainly in how they were displayed. Rather than a series of things to collect listed in the quest journal, there is now a single row with a number of how many were collected, since this just makes far more sense.
You'll be able to know how many monsters have to be killed in order to honestly fulfill the terms of the quest because of the X's in the quest journal on the right-hand side. However, you will be able to turn in the quest with any amount of completion. While this isn't perfect functionality, it will be operationally similar to how the mechanic will be in the future. In the future, you'll still be able to lie about finishing a quest, but the lie will have consequences, both physical and metaphysical. It will all fit in to my plan about not having an Eastern-style Karma system, but rather a Western-style sin-and-forgiveness system which is more morally sound and I think will lead to more interesting gameplay since penance is an important part of reconciliation.
For the remainder of the week I had been fixing up a few bugs which I will list off on the next update, but also adding a few more features. The first one is the concept of "learning" locations. When someone tells you about a certain location (i.e., that it's nearby) or when you see a location mentioned on a signpost, you "learn" about the location. If quests could take place in locations where you haven't learned about, the quest journal only shows question marks for that location. Once you learn about it or discover it, the location will appear properly in the journal. A few more things can be learned about quests and be written down in the journal, but these will mainly be records of things from the conversation.
Check some signposts to get a better idea of the area and where parts might be located.
Finally there will be some better "kill" quest functionality by adding timely monster attacks on towns. This will consist of a boss monster captain leading a small pack of regular monsters to attack the town, at a certain predictable time of day. Killing the boss monster will help you learn the source of the monsters outright, so it will be worth waiting around for.
Expect an update early next week with these small quality of life improvements to the "kill" quests, and I will begin work in earnest on the "recover" quests, which are quite similar to the "kill" quests but primarily involve recovering a lost shipment which was captured by monsters. Remember to email any questions, comments, and prayer requests you have to [email protected], or just leave them in the comments below.