#42: Windows and menus

This week I spent most of my time working on new windows and menus. They are still work in progress, but even now they look and work much better than before.

First, I changed the way you change food into “food”. Now you just sellect the right food and press enter. The way it works is still not the best, but much better than what it was before. It basicaly works just like ordinary crafting window, but I modified it so now it only shows the recipes you have resourcess for (ordinary crafting window shows all recipes. Unavailable recipes are grayed out). This also allows me to add some kind of secret recipes that will only show when you have enough items.

Next, I changed the equipment window. Now it shows your character and equipment. It still needs more work, but this addition makes it look definitely better.

Those are the main things I was working on. I also started working on farm animals and some other things, but these are in too early stages to talk about.

#41: Small things

This week I spent some time working on some things that should make players life a little bit easier.

Only few of those things are implemented. Most of those things are still on the drawing board. I don’t want to loose time adding something I will remove later.

First thing I added is the food counter that you can see when you press the menu button. Right above your money.

Next, I want to improve the hideout upgrading. Make a nice menu that will be showing all possible upgrades and show you all the resourcess you have. This will require quite a lot of work, but it is absolutely necessary.

I also want to change the way you change food into “food”. Right now, you have to go to your storeage chest, press shift, sellect the food you want to deposit and then select the amount. As you can see, this is very cumbersome. I will try to make it a little bit easier and more straight forward.

There are more things I want to do, but these are the most important things I want to do.

And the last thing is the addition of “legendary” equipment. These items will look identical to their normal counterpart, but be in some way different from the ordinary item.

Simple example. Ordinary AK-74 uses medium ammunition and uses 3 bullets per attack. Legendary version will use heavy ammunition and use 2 bullets per attack. Ordinary double barel shotgun uses 1 shell per attack. Legendary version uses two shells per attack and hits multiple enemies. Ordinary knife does nothing special, legendary version allows you to get more loot from dead animals and so on. Adding these weapons will take little to no time because their sprites will look identical to normal weapons and creating those sprites is the most time consuming thing about adding new weapons. Everything else can be done i a matter of minutes.

You will be able to get these weapons by completing difficult quests, finding them or by defeating strong enemies, so getting these will be quite a chalenge.

Thats all for this week

 

#40: Factions

I spent most of my time this week fixing some little errors and fleshing things out. There are now some plants that regrow every week. The hunter NPC can now tan your raw hides for a small fee. There will be more NPCs with this kind of services. You will be able to pay some money to logging company and next week you will get the wood you ordered. Getting wood (and in many other resourcess) this way is cheaper than buying it directly from a shop but it will take some time to prepare these resources (tanning hides takes one week). Another negative will be the random events that might distrupt the trade (Forest fire, cave in and so on). But as I said before, there will be ways to prevent / revert those disasters.

The main thing I want to talk about this week are factions. It is very unlikely that factions will make it into the demo, but they will be in the final game. I won’t tell you too much about them as to not spoil something.

As of now, I have four factions planed. They are basicaly the oposites of each other. Each faction will excel at something different.  So if you want to become the best warrior, you will have to join faction A, but if you want to become the best farmer, you will have to join faction B. This will make it almost impossible to be best at everyhing and will hopefuly increase replayability of the game.

First faction is not really a faction. This faction represents basicaly all the independent people. This will be the only faction you will interact with in the demo. If you decide to befriend this faction, you will be able to raise all your skills enough to learn all the basic stuff. If you want to learn more, you will have to befriend  different faction later down the line.

Second faction consists of people that basicaly live like in medieval ages. The excel at farming, smithing, survival, melee and crafting. You will be able to learn and use medieval styled weapons and armor, you will get acces to bigger farming fields and you will also learn how to make different furniture and crafts using wood and low quality metals.

Third faction is the obligatory high-tech one. Their main skills are science, machinery, ranged and cooking. They preffer modern day ranged weapons and armor. You will learn how to repair and produce complex machinery and prepare complex chemicals to enhance your combat and other skills.

Last faction focuses solely on combat and crafting. Everything they use is made by them selves. They are good at smithing, crafting, machinery, ranged and melee. They mainly use scrap metal and other raw resourcess to produce things they need.

Thats basicaly it. There will some other, minor factions, but these will be less important than the other ones. The entire system will be renown based. If you do something one faction likes, other factions will start liking you less, so it will be possible to join other faction if you start to dislike your curent one. This will be impossible if said faction really hates you though.

 

#39: Make it alive

This week I focused on adding some more details. The biggest addition is the character movement in manu and while talking. Now your character will move her mouth while talking and will blink ocasionaly. It makes the entire thing look much better.

I also want to talk about some features I talked about some time ago. Bear in mind that not all of those features will be in the demo. Like the ability to hire other people to work for. This feature will be in the game, but it will be locked. I want this to be mid-late game thing and it would make no sence for it to be available from the start.