#84 Report n.7

This week report is here few days early. Simply because I won’t be at home for a few days. Everything will return to normal next week.

This week I spent most of my time doing christmas stuff. There are still some things I changed in the game though.

First, I changed the ingame menu a bit. It now allows you to see all the books you found and read them without searching for them in the inventory.

A minor change, but it will make reading much easier.

Next thing I worked on was the hidout “station” system. The placeholder system that was in the game up until now worked like this. There were four stations that you could put into your hideout. Drying rack, tanning rack, water tower and dynamo generator. There were predetermined spots for all those stations. Once you obtained one, it would appear in your hideout. Technicaly, there was nothing wrong with this. But it took away some control from the player. What if I want to have four taning racks? So I decided to solve this little problem and this is the result. When you begin the game, there are three “station” spots in your hideout. If you manage to obtain any station item, you can just walk to this spot, press shift, select the item and then you can use this station freely. This means you can use these spots for any station you want. You want to focus on leather taning and have your hideout full of tanning racks? Well now you can.

The number of those spots will increase if you upgrade your hideout. Another reason to do so. You can also remove existing station at any time and put it at the same (or different) spot later.

This is basicaly it for this week.

Quick message

Just a quick message for you guys. Happy holydays, christmas and all that stuff to everyone visiting this site. Hope you enjoy this time of year as much as posible.

I will write proper blog post next week since I have very little free time right now. So stay tuned and stay happy.

#83 Report n.6

This week I was playing around with the new character model and I was experimenting with making it look older / younger.

As you know, you will begin the game as a 10 year old girl. The time you can spend playing the game is set to 9 years. This means that your character will get visibly older and will mature over time. I want to add othe physical changes, like your character getting visibly stronger, hair getting longer over time, wounds, scars and so on.

Here is a picture showing the result of my little test. This is in no way final and it definitely needs more work, but it should give you the general idea.

Larger resolution HERE

Your age will not only affect your looks but also the way people treat you. Here is a little example.

You are 11 years old and you want to join the militia of the medieval faction. They will not accept you as a warrior because you are too young and therefore too weak. But you will still get work as a assistant (polishing weapons, collecting arrows from training targets, bringing food to recruits and so on). As you get older, you will be able to do increasingly more important tasks. At age 14 (first milestone where people start to trating you sortof like an adult) you will finaly be able to train as a sharpshooter using crossbows or bows. And depending on your stats, you will be able to joing the infantry shortly after.

This little example applies to basicaly every part of the game. Nobody is going to take a child seriously, unless you have really high stats. Being older makes a lot of things easier for you.

And thats it for this week.

#82 Report n.5

Again. This week I continued adding all the text into the game and doing all the skill checks. I also prepared the following images that will show you how crazy is this thing going to be. Some of these options will not be in the demo though. And theses are not even all the options I want to add. So hopefully now you will understand why it takes so long to finish this game.

As you can see, the amount of “skill checks” for this small conversation is pretty big. And there are even more I haven’shown. Next week I will probably add something new to the “game world” section.

#81 Report n.4

This week I spent most of my time improving the skill shop, adding more dialogue and again, generaly fixing and finishing everything. There is still months worth of work to do, but we are getting there.

Another thing I would like to talk about is most likely the last big feature I want to add to the demo. I want this game to have some kind of “codex” or something like that. You will select the codex button from the menu and you will be able to read about all things you discovered. Items, factions, quests, NPCs, monsters, locations and other things.This will require a lot of work and will have almost zero impact on the gameplay it self but it will be something for those people that like to collect things or read about the ingame world.

Data from this codex will carry into new game+ (I still haven’t decided how will this work) because it will be imposible to find everything on your first playthrough.

And thats basicaly it for this week. Next week I will try to talk about the actual dialogue branching I am using in the game.