Most challenging and important part of the indie development journey is managing yourself, it's easy to get crushed under the responsibilities, the ever increasing workload, new things popping up every week. To keep up, I was planning to switch to a strict work schedule, and on 28th of February, I managed to correct my sleep schedule and started working from 8am to 5pm on weekdays, and 8am to 12pm on weekends. So far so good.
Prettified the DOCS and completed the Character / Monster references, both "Available Functions" and the "Game Data" reference now render as a list, when they rendered as individual buttons, they were really hard to consume - Also each new page hide the ones before and they are re-shown when you close the page
Working on new content, Jayson prepared a new Pirate Ship, our freelancer Ellian prepared the new item images, first set will hopefully be live this week, it will be a scattered random drop, as requested by the community
Slacked a bit by working on new achievement, level up animations on Sunday and Monday, also re-visited Music and SFX, disabled directional SFX, it's stored at "options.directional_sfx" - Might add a way to disable all ambient SFX in the future, changed the Hit and Use sound selections, the new ones, in my opinion, are more serene and less intrusive, also lowered the default music level.
Discord was heated this week too, thanks to the feedback, I've decided to reduce the gold drops of easy monsters, and boost the XP rates of challenging monsters in the future. Adventure Land was "farm anything you want" by design, there's an internal system that ensures this, by adjusting the gold drops. I don't think the changes will be major ones, they'll likely be along the lines of 20%-30% of increases and reductions.
The major change this week is the increase in HP - Strength now gives 4 times more HP, while Vitality gives more than 2 times HP. Vitality is also now more effective at low character levels. Additionally, each point in Strength increases Armor by 1 now (previously 0.5). These changes are aimed to increase the duration of PVP fights and increase the PVE endurance of characters
Keep in mind that all game dynamics are subject to change and nothing is final
Early Heads Up:
I'll be traveling from 29th of March to 10th of April - Progress will be slow during these dates
Changelist:
- Boosted the party contribution of Priest's by 36%
- HP gain by Vitality formula changed
- HP gain by Strength formula changed
- Armor gain by Strength formula changed
- Item "hp" values are multiplied by 1.75
- leave_party() Code function
- New elixir crafting recipes (Trexnamedtom)
- options.directional_sfx
- Improved instances and teleporting monsters
- There's a new runner_compat.js - moved auto_reload() there
- Refactored G.itemsets to G.imagesets - As actual item sets are in G.sets, it was confusing
- Monster object now has more properties adopted from G.monsters, documented in DOCS
- Taunt cooldown fixed, refactored other hardcoded cooldowns to reference G.skills instead
- Monster ability definitions refactored and documented
- Improved the game_stringify function, which show_json relies on
- Arctic Bee pack is a starter pack now, has the "grow" attribute
- All monsters and characters have "in"(instance) and "map" attributes now
- Characters now have a "bg" layer, to render animations below the character sprite
- There's a new system called DTM, i.e. draw_timeout modifier, it's a multiplier, >1 if the animation event/timeout was delayed, to render animations easier for any fps level, currently the game is mostly hardcoded to 60fps, some animations have custom calculations but it's very impractical to implement such routines, at one point going to refactor all animation routines with this new practical logic
- Level 70+ level ups are now announced server-wide