#118: More visualised items

This week I again played through game. Fixed some bugs and did the obvious stuff but I also did some work on the item type visualisation.

This is probably not the right name for this kind of thing. Your hideout will change depending on the amount of items you collect. I talked about this quite some time ago. If you collect 5 wood, then a small pile of wood will appear in your hideout. If you collect 40 wood, this pile will get bigger. You get the idea. I will add more things like this. This week I finished rock pile and weapon collection. These will have no inpact on the gameplay and will be cosmetic only. I personaly like small details like this.

Next week, I will try to fix more bugs and I might even add one more clothing piece.

#117: Progress continues

This week I spent huge amount of time just playing through the game and fixing bugs, finishing unfinished content or just generaly balancing the game. This was probably one of the more productive weeks for me since I spent quite a lot of time working on this game this week.

I found plenty of bugs in the lighting and time change department, NPC routine, some quest problems and many other things. I fixed them all. I also found a lot of speling mistakes in dialogue but I didn’t really bother fixing those since I will be redoing all the dialogue in the future anyway.

I don’t really have any picture to post this week so instead I decided to show you most of the weapons I have modeled. Some of them are missing and some of them are unfinished.

Next week I will continue playing through the game and fixing / finishing things.

#116: Weather and time of day

This week I was working on the weather system and I also did some changes to the time change.

First, let’s talk about the time change again. It is much darker now so you can see the light system at work. As I said before, the time change is cosmetic only. People will be at the same places you found them in the morning and so on. The only difference will be some minor dialogue changes.

Next thing I worked on was the weather system. It is pretty simple. At the begining of each free day, the game picks a random number and changes the weather depending on the number. Right now, there are three weather types, but I will add more. Again, this change is purely cosmetic. NPCs will coment on the weather sometimes, but that will be it.

And that should be it for this week.

#115: Work and parttime jobs

This week I focused on the minor work / parttime job system.

I talked about this before. Basicaly, your character will be able to do multiple time consuming things besides just working, training or resting. But some of these activities wouldn’t really make sence if they took one week to do. So I made the minor work window some months ago. This window is used for things like mining, woodcutting or lockpicking. While lockpicking takes (in the game) no time whatsoever, mining should take some time, but not really seven days.

So I decided to do the following. Every free day you, you have one “point” you can use on one of those activities. This means that after working, training or resting, you are free to walk around and explore, visit people and so on. But apart from deciding what your character is going to do for the entire next week, you can also decide what your character is going to do for a few hours on the free day.

At first, I wanted to add another line of text into the menu screen that would show you if you used you “work point”, but then I got a much better idea. I will simply advance time, make the screen darker, put some light sources into the game and make the thing much more natural. This is how it looks right now.

Again, this is just work in progress, but the foundation is solid and everything works as intended for now.

Notice the torch in the lower part of the screen. It isn’t lit and emits no light in the first screenshot, but emits faint light and gets lit in the last screenshot. This is just a minor thing but it makes the world seem more alive.

Bear in mind that changes brought by this kind of time advancement will be only cosmetic. NPCs will be at the same place they were at the morning. Only things that change will be the lighting, lights and the introductory dialogue of some NPCs.

Another thing I want to add are parttime jobs. These will take only few hours, will require no food and  reward you with money or some items depending on the job. They will not raise your stats though.

I will most likely be talking about these more in depth the next week.