So a long hard look was taken, and I’ve decided to drop the majority of the list in favor of a goal of “get the game playable by year’s end”. I just want to test out how it’s coming along already. The list has been reduced to a mere 3 things with 3 weeks to do ’em. It consists largely of building necessary sample content, with a side dish of finishing required features. There’s only really one thing on the list that has been delayed that I regret having to delay since it’ll make the content a little harder to balance, but overall enough major features got done in time that it isn’t a huge deal. I always worry a little bit when producing these tests, because I’m never sure how much the lack of quality of life features affects tester feedback. Even from myself.

So this week was spent largely on planning and building new side quests. It’s also where some doubt began to creep in. It’s a little inevitable for that to happen when you make the tenth variation of the same basic things happening over and over again. Several months ago I talked about quest context mattering more than what you actually do on a quest. Part of the problem is I can’t shut off my game designer brain here that is annoyed that so many of these objectives are so similar. The other problem is my context really, genuinely isn’t that interesting yet. Most of these sample quests are going to end up thrown out anyway, but I’ve really got to work on my technique here. It’s rough trying to come up with a story to tell that takes place in the span of two text boxes.

Then when I start to actually put them in the game proper and the map starts populating with so many different things, I start to feel a little better about it as a whole. Maybe this really is going to work. Just maybe. Now to take a few more steps and find out.

This week saw 1 item done, calling in the triumphant return of being behind schedule again. Not terribly surprising given holidays and the like. One thing to note is that a pattern of “get 2 easy things done early in the week and then 1 hard thing at the end of the week” seems like it’s probably the ideal way to schedule- when you start with a hard thing it’s easy to let it take up the entire week. More than likely I’ll be pushing several items off the list to compensate for this.

Right now I’m mostly worried about rushing design things that really shouldn’t be rushed. I’m not entirely sure how to cope with that. Either I’ll change this year’s end goal to be to create a solid framework to start hanging sample content on next year, or I’ll move several more features down to low-priority to give me more time this year to work on sample content. It really depends on how many more features I deem required to start building on, and how long they take.

This week resumed the standard rate of 3 things done. To compensate for last week’s failure, two things were struck down to lower priority, allowing it to again be on schedule. To say that this was by “the skin of the teeth” would be an understatement given that I completed the last of the 3 tasks an hour or two before the weekly blog deadline.

I added the fundamental part of the new combat system this week. Not much real game testing or sample battles were performed beyond checking basic functionality, but if nothing else this new system seems to be much more immediately “readable” than the old attempts at penetration types and elemental affinities were, judging just from basic testing.

This week also saw the completion of the initial class list. The idea behind this sampling of classes was to basically have a kind of basic, not-too-complicated class list of basic archetypes to give an idea of how it all fits together. It also simply had to excluded some of the more complicated classes I have planned just to cut down on the work required for the deadline. We’re only here to see if the basic systems work well together, not necessarily putting the entire game together all at once.

And this week was… 1 completed item. So officially behind schedule now (by more than expected- though another item will be completed tonight or tomorrow). Getting back on schedule is going to be crazy difficult, but I have plans to try to manage it. Realistically, 2 items per week would have been a more doable schedule.

This week, outside of getting things functional, saw a lot of interface design time optimization. At first there was going be a dedicated “you won the battle!” screen detailing experience, gold, items, etc. Eventually gold/experience/levels gained got reduced to a relatively quick animation getting played on top of the player- reducing necessary player clicks by one.

There was also initially going to be two item gain screens- one to pick which item you want from the total pool available to the party, and then another where you picked what you wanted to do with it (sell/equip/take) as well as which specific item when given a “choose one from”. This was reduced to a single table screen with the item information and each action mapped to a button, reducing a worst case 3 clicks down to 1 click. This kind of minor quality of life stuff gets glossed over a lot, but in a game that’s trying to streamline the required play time as much as possible it’s absolutely critical (plus it’s just plain nicer to play with regardless).

With 9 weeks (including last week), and reducing the Things To Do Before Year End to 25 creates a desired schedule of doing roughly 3 things a week. I did 4 this week (close to 5!) so I am technically ahead of schedule. But when you factor in that I started with some of the easier goals and that I probably forgot things that also need to get done, I ain’t getting comfortable with this schedule yet. The list is composed entirely of changing existing systems rather than building new ones so I don’t expect any single item to take longer than one week. But 3 a week is still pretty ambitious. I’ll need to build up a bigger lead this week.

So I was sitting down to work on one of the items on the list, dividing it up into sub-tasks that needed to get done. And it was looking pretty gnarly, having to add significant new parts to make it work. Then one of the greatest pleasures occurred: I figured out an alternate way to do it that was both easier to build and significantly more interesting to play with. Words don’t really describe how good it felt. And I probably never would have thought of it if it weren’t for a deadline pressing in on me. Limitations, man, limitations.

I’ve been worrying about having stat bonuses/penalties with classes. Outside of classes players can have theoretically equivalent stats from buying the same equipment. Then, classes largely introduce new options and ideal directions to players rather than direct advantages. But having some classes sacrifice options for greater power in remaining options seems potentially too powerful since players have a total of 3 class choices- losing a few options with one or two of them isn’t a huge deal when your other classes can make up for it. Might have to stick to stat penalties. Or bonuses and penalties.

Design draft 2, as I’m calling it now, was finished this week. For readers at home, “draft 1” is the build that we had at the end of last year. I’ve reduced it to 30 things that need to get done to have it implemented. That leaves roughly two days per thing to get draft 2 playable this year. It’s going to be rough since several items on the list are almost certainly going to take more than two days. Please enjoy watching this blog document my drift towards going further and further off the schedule.

Looking over the finished product, it’s nice to observe how much of it is directly derived from tests of the first draft. Some small sense of validation that the unending tunnel of development was not a waste. The other thing that I like about it is that all of the pressing questions from the previous draft are answered in this. I had no idea what we were going to do with status effects last time, this one clearly outlines their purpose and how to deal with them. If it all works together well enough, we can finally start honing what is there instead of shooting wide and throwing most of it away.

On the programming side of things nothing terribly exciting happened. The location finder was updated to use the same method of finding a location as the node generator does to validate its generation constraints. Not strictly necessary, but it’s a logical place to re-use code and it allows the location finder to easily take advantage of new node features like tags. The distance finder is also a little smarter in this version, optimizing for furthest or nearest node as desired when a node isn’t within the range.

The final touches on nodes continues to roll along smoothly. The next week or two might be the last, the only major thing is to add quest actions/objectives for them. Though quite a bit still remains to be refined in the system. The process of adding new functionality to multiple pieces of older code was mercifully not that bad. Far from perfect. I have a lot to say about the flaws of the current code base and what I need to do to raise the quality. It’s mostly that certain pieces expect far too much work to be done on the end of who’s calling them, rather than themselves. But today isn’t the day for it.

What I’m really starting to think about these days is constructing the final design document. The design doc that brings the whole thing together, takes every component into account and ties it together as a proper game. The omega design doc. The more I think about it, the more it’s clear that this design doc won’t be made in a single sitting in a game-less vacuum. More than likely it will be constructed over several drafts. Each subsequent draft will be derived from the results of prototyping parts of the last. It won’t be long before the time to write the first draft is upon me. Starting with a simple but strong core will likely be the direction for it.