#136: More stat tracking

This week I had very little free time so I haven’t worked on the game that much. But I added more different gameplay stats the game keeps track of.

Game now distinguishes who killed the enemy in combat, who hurt him and who didn’t even touched him. Mood will now be lowered depending on these stats. If you kill someone, your mood will drop a lot (untill you get used to killing). Hurting someone, but not finishing him off will lower your mood less and just being in a fight and never touching anyone will lower your mood only a bit.

These stats will also change some dialogue with other NPCs.

#135: Mutations, repeatable quests

This week I still spent most of the time rewriting dialogue, but I also did some planing for future updates.

First are the repeatable quests. Every NPC in the demo will have certain number of unique quests. When player finishes them all, NPCs will start giving him simple fetch quests. These will have some variations but will be really simple and they will repeat every week.

As for the mutations, I started working on the system more in depth. Mutations will be large part of the game and will have large impact on the way you play the game.

There is a bar that increases if you use certain items / do certain things. And it decreases if you rest or use certain items. If you let it climb above certain value, you mutate and get to choose one minor mutation out of five options. These mutations are minor and NPCs will not react to these in any way. If you get two minor mutations, the third time you mutate you will have to choose one major mutation instead. These will change your apearance too so NPCs will start reacting to you differently.

There are five mutation stages. This means you get to chose five major and ten minor mutations. These will have impact on all parts of the game. Some will allow you to use shortcuts, some will give you new dialogue options or they will simply make you fight better.

Next week, I might have something more to show you.

#134: Nothing interesting

Nothing interesting to show this week. I spent most of the time rewriting all text in the game to the new system. Next week I might do something more interesting to look at.

#133: New way of handling text

This week I finished the new text handling system.  Up until now, I used the default textx box for showing dialogue text. It works fine enough if you use default window properties but I don’t use those so it doesn’t look very good.

Default text box breaks lines automaticaly and there is no way to turn that feature off. This results in large amount of empty space on the right side of the box. Another problem is the 3 lines of text limit. The engine allows you to use four lines of text, but the box itself is bugged. And since it is hardcoded into the editor itself, there is no way to fix it. There are some workarounds, but none of them are perfect. This is why I decided to change the way I display text.

Now I can use four lines of text and break the line whenever I want to. Since this is a manual process, it takes a little more time to write the text, but not much longer.

I also spent large amount of time rewriting old text into the new system and since all the text was and is still placeholder, this process is much faster than you might think.

The last thing I focused on was improved stat window. Stats now show in two colums.

Green numbers are your pure stats. Numbers on the right side are your bonuses you gain from your equipment.

That is all for this week.