Massive Changes to Early Game

Close to two weeks ago, I said that the concept of making the game start as a single character experience and slowly grow into a multi-character game was making more sense. I've got a whole bunch of tabs here in my browser that I refresh each day to catch up on various things, and I saw that post each morning reminding me to get cracking.

And so, although it's been quiet here, I've been making stupid amounts of changes to the code, to the app, to the server, tweaking layouts, making so many updates I didn't think I needed to do - and fixing so many bugs that it introduced... but I think I am there. I just did a commit with 39 files, which is much more than it should be, but I didn't want to commit halfway through.

I'm really not wanting to go through all the changes that had to be made - and I've not even started on content itself, making sure that it is do-able with a lone character early in the game, but now that I think it all the code is working, I can start looking at that part now.

So, the plan tomorrow will be to clean out my account, give things a run through in some more detail. I've got all the main parts working how they should, and I did a bunch of testing along the way with each part, but I want to see more of the whole thing together. 

Fingers crossed. A day or two of testing, and it might be time. 

How the game plays - and starts... (and release!)

I've been getting ready for really opening the game up, as I feel it's in a good place from a technical app point of view. The things I've been chasing up of late are really make the gaps feel better and better. Things aren't crashing. Things are working. The UI is getting better and better.

That leaves.... the gameplay itself.

One common bit of feedback I'm getting is that there's a pretty high learning curve at the start in terms of combat and interface. And that all the different classes and characters are a bit overwhelming. Setting up your party at the start can also feel like a chore rather than a fun start.

So I've been really having a good think and trying to work out how to change it up. And I am thinking that starting off with a single character might be better, and getting companions along the way, like opening up a new character slot when you level up and so on. There's also a thought on perhaps having a quest or two that might let you open up a slot earlier if you complete it.

The more I am thinking about it, the better this approach is feeling from a number of angles. You'll get to learn your first class much better by only having that character to run. The way combat works will be more intuitive which will make more sense when you have multiple characters - and amusingly, you'll be leveling up quicker as the XP won't be shared between a party of six characters.

So, while I progress the Play Store stuff to get the app ready for production and release, I can work out how I'm going to do these changes and probably get them in within a reasonable amount of time (and hopefully before the app progresses all the way to a full Production release on the Play Store anyhow).

I'll also be opening up to some testing here, so if you're keen to get an early go (as well as helping me to be ready for a full release) keep up to date, as I should get that going in the next week or two - which is part of the process to list the app on the Play Store. 

More Quest Bugs Solved

So, one of the last (I swear, this has to end at some point) things that I wanted to check on was a bug that had been brought up in my last round of testing. I was told that a quest that should have been easily completed wasn't ticking off properly. I will admit, I was a bit skeptical - after all I'd tested these quests numerous times over, and things were working. Until I tested it.

Turns out there was a damned symphony of bugs that I hadn't picked up. I could go on and on about why they weren't picked up, and to my credit, they were quite topical and only sometimes happened - but that's neither here nor there.

So, conversations were buggy in that they would create events for your party even if they weren't supposed to show a conversation you were up to. They didn't show it, but they processed stuff as if they had. So that got fixed. Oopsie.

The other issue I had, I vaguely recall thinking about, but clearly I'd forgotten about it. Quest information was created when the quest was being presented to your party, and then processed again when you accepted it - which resulted in the quest sections doubling up until the app was closed - when it would reload them properly next time. So I went through and managed to solve for that happening. Oopsie again.

Anyhow. Now it all works nicely. Seems to reload and save everywhere as it should have, so I think I've squashed those bugs for good.

I'll have a poke about see if anything else is dumb-dumb-dumb and needs fixing. Hopefully not though.

Game Controlled Characters

Yesterday I hadn't quite finalised the interface for setting up how the game will run your characters (if you want it to) and today I got the last bits of the interface set up. You can give your characters up to five general commands such as "Attack Using Melee Weapons and Abilities" or "Debuff Enemies". This will result in the character trying in order to perform the commands you've given them in the fight. It should be enough I think to get the ball rolling, and although I suspect that I'll do more with this later, for now... it's good enough!

Game Controlled Characters and Logic

A while back, I posted that I'd done a bit of tweaking on game controlled settings and being able to set up characters to fight automatically using the same logic that monsters have - and I circled back to that, firstly by adding a toggle on the character screen to set each character to be game controlled (it was previously available in the game settings).

I also then updated the game server and database to be able to save that data, so if you set characters to be automatically controlled, they'll stay that way until you change them back.

With that done, I finally decided to sift through the code to work out why my healer was casting healing spells on the monsters I was fighting - while my other characters were doing their thing successfully. And that led me down a rabbit-hole of bugs and almost correct logic - as well as a bunch of abilities and effects that had slightly incomplete data. As I'd created a bunch of this data (and all the editor logic associated with them) a long time ago, I would generally add some functionality and then test it with the newest function available, or the monster that used it - that sort of thing.

So it turns out that some of the game abilities and effects didn't have quite all the information that they needed for my code to function. One of these was a flag "intended for enemies" which tells the character or monster if this particular ability should be used on its friends, or its foes. My editor defines that as a new field from the target selection values. But it was added after I'd already added a bunch of effects - like the healing spell my caster was throwing about.

So..... I've not gone back and updated all the effects and abilities in the game, and I think that added all the information that they needed, which then let me get into the code properly to see what was happening during the selection processes.

And wouldn't you know it, turns out there were some logic gaps there too. Not massive fall-through-the-cracks ones, but things were just wrong enough to look like they were working, when in fact they were doing the wrong things. Amusingly, in monsters, who generally only have one or two abilities, this was much less noticeable. Anyhow. I think they're all fixed nicely now - you know, until I find something else that's going wrong.

I think I'll add in a more detailed selection on how you'd like the game to play your characters - after all, I already have that logic built in for monsters, and it's just a few dropdown selectors away.
 

Android Cameras and Bevelled Corners

Another bit of feedback I got was that some buttons were hard to hit due to the physical device having a screen with rounded corners, so that if a button was right in the corner, some of it was cut off and difficult to hit.

Great feedback. Even on my on-screen emulator, that's the case, but I guess it's not as much of an issue as I can be super accurate with the mouse and press what I want to press.

Anyhow, I've gone through and fixed a whole bunch of those things, giving little padded areas around the edges of the screens, so that buttons aren't quite as pressed against the edges.

At the same time, I've gone through and totally removed some old item interface code where buttons were popping up ready to use. The new item interface caters for all those, so it was (very poorly) doubling up where it wasn't needed.

There's still a few things to fix up, but they're much less glaring than these were.

And it's still only morning! 

Interface Tweaks and Bug Fixes

I've been working through the list raised by my dev colleague in his first impressions test.

I'm splitting it into two main sections. First off, plain of crash bugs. There's things I wrote, tested, and then forgot about. And when someone else tests it, much much later, it turns out that there's some Ooopsie moments as all the changes over time cause crashes. Like trading in landscape mode. Which was looking for something that hasn't existed for ages - but as my emulator runs in portrait mode on the machine, I've never really picked it up. Anyhow. That's now fixed.

And the other section is again things I've noticed myself, but put on the back-burner in terms of development. Like assuming that the icons in the item menu system were intuitive enough (guess what, they weren't quite). So I sat there for a good while hacking away at the code and finally worked out how I can add a text description to the menu over and above the icon-only interface that it's meant to have - so no more guessing what icons translate to. While I was doing that, I also found there was another bug in that menu (the screen would vanish when it wasn't supposed to when trying to split a stacked item) which I have also now fixed.

So, there's a few more things to work through from the list I got, but it's looking very promising!