OFFICES IN PROGRESS
The spies were in progress last update. This update, it's the PROGRESSOR OF THE SPIES BEING IN PROGRESS. We just got our first Wizard Boy paycheck, and it has granted us a lovely space to continue our wizarding development! In this case, we're not talkin' one, but we're talkin' TWO rooms. One is hosting Evan and my desks. One is getting set up for. . . well, some stuff that I'm working on materializing for the future (hopefully more on that later).
Here's a picture of all the Squishmallows I put on Evan's desk since he's not in the office today and if he reads this announcement he'll be notified in advance. (They're to greet him back to work.)
Spy Missions
In this time, though, we've still been making progress on Wizard Boy proper. We've finished the baseline of the missions system and implemented a handful. That might sound like a small task, but included is things like getting the UI finished and implemented, figuring out the best way to keep what hopefully will be a nice long set of missions optimized as the system checks for their completion, figuring out what types of missions will be fun, etc. etc. All in all, I think we have a very good start, but as with everything in development, it may need to change based on how fun it ends up being.
(Oh BTW new inventory screen too. Not necessarily replacing the old one but acting as a corollary.)
Working on the Dungeon
We've also done the paper design and started white-boxing the dungeon! The dungeon itself is going to be a bit different in design mentality to the castle. The castle is very open-ended and needs to function both as a playspace AND a sandbox area. The dungeon really only needs to function as a playspace, and any sandbox that comes out of it will be icing on the cake. With that in mind, we're taking some liberties on how to design it that we didn't have designing the current version of the castle - mainly, being able to focus on the mechanical functionality of each room as much as the "explorative sandbox" aspect. Next update I'll have more to show on it.
Testing Branch Update
I've gone ahead and pushed up the current version of missions to the public testing branch for anyone to play with if they'd like. Fair warning - we did suffer a bit of data loss early last week from me forgetting to commit my git changes before pulling down code that needed to be reverted, which meant we lost the little test spider dungeon thing I made last update. But of course the ACTUAL spider dungeon will be being sent up for testing soon enough, so I hope that's not too disappointing. (Oh, and as far as we can tell ALL of the inventory icons should be in there now.)
As always, if you're interested in joining the public testing branch, there's a space on my Discord to share bugs and feedback you encounter. (Link below this post)
Hmmm, I've just found out I was recently in contact with lice. I'm gonna' go figure that one out. Until next time!
- John