The King is Dead. Long Live the King!

So that was the cry that went up in medieval England when a king died, to herald both the passing of the old monarch, and the crowning of a new heir. And it sort of feels like that.

I've taken a bit of time to process the fact that I've been made redundant from work, along with the team I was in (shoutout OpsDev!!) but things cannot be changed. I did spend some time looking for another role within the company that I am employed at, but this redundancy process has been underway for a good while, so there's not really a lot of ripe fruit on this tree so to speak.

So. I've purposefully taken a bit of time for myself, to work out what I want, and from my last post here (which I very much acknowledge was a long time ago) not much has changed. I don't really know what I want to do right now. I do know that I will take some time off to think it over. And I think part of that means I need to really get this beta over the line. To give it a fair go, and see what's what.

I have been doing a few smaller, UI and UX things on the app, which have been fantastic in terms of the way things play. 

So, First up, there's no more fat fingers in the middle of the screen. I've switched movement up, so there's not a little joystick at the bottom of the device, keeping fingers out of the way of where your character is moving, and making it much more visible where you are going.

Right after that, I've made the camera pan from one active character to the next, so that there's an obvious shift from where the action was, to where the action is. Small, but important - and annoying much more finicky to introduce than I thought it would be. 

Next up, I've changed the way text, both combat and general, is displayed on the screen. I'm using a fixed delay-and-fade rather than trying to do my own game-time-fade which is much more intuitive and just feels nicer and better.

Right after that, I changed the way that skills and hotkeys are displayed. Well, sort of. You can set your own hotkeys (with reagents if you wish) to any hotkey in combat for each character. But I've added a script in there, that when loading your characters, fills any un-used hotkeys with skills and abilities that aren't already hot-keyed. Sort of a way to make sure you're not missing anything.

Also. I've been setting up a new tileset for the next zone that I'm adding to the game; Quirkwood. Cause I really enjoy seeing new zones and the world coming together, and I felt that I mentally needed that. So, I'm slowly working on building that out in the editor. There's not a lot there to show yet, but little by little, it'll get there, and I can use it as a delightful interlude while I work on other things.

So, I guess.... I've had a whinge. I've had a sook, and I've had a f##ken cry about it. Time to harden the f##k up and get back to work. You also get a million and eleven internet points if you get this reference. And if you don't.... ( Rude Filter Warning!!! )

Some Big Life Changes

So, last week I got some news from work. The team I work in is being made redundant. So there's a lot to process for me there.

The good news is that at least there's some money in the severance package, so I have some time up my sleeves to get myself into another role. But I think I am going to take a little bit of a break from work and try to get to the bottom of what it is that I want to do - as I've not been overly happy with my job for a good few years.

So, what does that mean? Well, for one, it means that this game just went up in my priority list. Where my daily work took number one priority, and house, life, chores and game took lesser priorities, my day to day is going to be split between working out what I want to do properly, getting the game up to scratch for the beta finally and a long list of stuff about the house that's probably been passed over for way too long.

But I think it is also going to focus me a bit more. I'm on a financial clock now to sort stuff out, so there's no more safety blanket of "when it's ready..." and things just keep ticking along in perpetuity. I'm paying for cloud assets, so I really do need to get this show on the road once and for all. Even if it is a beta. It needs to happen. So yeah, priority went up. And time able to invest in it has gone up. By a lot.

As for non-game stuff (cause I'm using this blog half the time as "get things off my mind" service, I've been employed for two decades in the same company - though working in a very expansive variety of roles, giving me both great experience across many facets of the business, and also exposure to a good number of different work styles - and I have no idea what I want to do next. I've a long list of jobs I could do. But I really don't know what in that list I want to do. And I've had almost a week to think about it, though I was processing a lot at the time, but yeah. I don't feel any closer to a "yes, this is the thing..." moment. Early days I suppose.

So, next things to work on is still feedback on the interface. I need to polish up the camera slingshots between characters/monsters as they activate in combat and I need to implement a change to the way movement is interacted. Basically, the way the touch events are done on the phone currently, you end up blocking your view nicely with you finger/hand so that's rather annoying. I need to make that better. I think I know how and what, but I need to implement that.

Right. Therapy session over.

Interface Things

So, I'm still working through a big interface update. I've made a massive number fo changes to how the various layout are based on the feedback I've gotten and posted about before.

On one hand, it's just interface, but on the other hand, it's completely the way that a player interacts with the game, and what they see in terms of what they are putting in. So it's really good changes.

I fixed a few more things in the combat interface tonight, but as I've been testing, there's still a bug from before that I need to solve for, as the camera sling-shotting about from character to character isn't quite where it needs to be - there's some bug where it's not rendering correctly all the world when moving in certain directions, so that's really poor. Hopefully (but unlikely to be) and easy fix.

Anyhow, still working is the super tl;dr version.

Massive Feedback Drop

Someone who is testing the app showed it to a few friends, and I managed to strike a bit of a feedback jackpot. So after work, I've been chipping away.

The high level feedback basically centers on user-interface and intuitiveness, especially for newer players. The good news is that it's not changing stuff for the most part, it's polishing stuff.

An example: the new folks weren't able to clearly distinguish that some NPC conversations had multiple replies that you could use, and how they were different. This was due to the way it was displayed. So I've tweaked the output to make it really obvious - and it really is just some borders, some layout stuff, and it wasn't overly difficult - but it's suddenly much more obvious.

There's a few more things like that I'll be working on with priority, as I have to admit, I'd sort of had most of these issues already floating in the back of my head as "nice to fix..." things, but not really looking at them as a priority - and this feedback really jolted me out of world-building and into polishing the basics more.

There's a bunch more things to fix, so that's going to be my focus for the near future over other fun stuff for a bit.

Testing and Bugs

I've been bug fixing things that I could have sworn black and blue were working, as well as having a friend do some solid testing.

So, token purchases work again. I could have sworn they'd gotten to a point where things did indeed work. Anyhow. That's indeed now working.

In testing, I've also found that I need to tweak some conversation, as I swear, my friend started and finished a quest that I am sure he shouldn't have been given yet - so there's a bit of that to check into. Just conversation triggers, so nothing too major.

Anyhow. Improvements! And it's also great to see the majority of the game working nicely, without the issues that were in it before.

Persistent Effects on Characters

One of the things I'd sort of half implemented so far, but not really fully gotten around to, was keeping the character state up to date on the server. I sort of just didn't really need it. I'd half implemented some aspects of it, much of the database was ready to handle it. But not quite there.

So over the last few evenings, I've made a point to tweak things, so that as characters stats are going up and down, the server is across it, so if you log out or need to come back in on a different device, it'll pick up where it left off. That means persistent buffs/defbuffs will be there. Characters that are dead will still be dead when you log back in and so on.

As I've been running about doing all this testing, my characters have been building up and up in terms of XP, and they've got decent gear as well, so I needed to head all the way up to Bridge's Tor where there's some rather nasty spawns - and sure enough, they picked on my party quick smart, knocking down Sparkie, my Mage, and shortly after I took the screenshot, Chester, my Cleric.

Luckily I have a few test items on vendors that can resurrect (or kill) characters so I used one of those for my Chester, and when he was a bit recovered, he brought Sparkie back to life as well - but it does remind me, that I probably need to code up an interface where Effects can be bought from a vendor - so if your healer dies, or doesn't have the skills to bring a party member back from the dead, there will be places to go to where a vendor can do it for a price. I'd need to do quite a bit of code and maybe some database stuff for that - so for now, it's going to be scrolls you can buy I think.

Oh, and in terms of bugs, I fixed up a few good ones - like letting "dead" characters take healing (not not resurrecting) spells, watching their stats rise, but still not being able to activate them etc. That's been fixed now. 

Quick Realm Update

Super quick one from me tonight: I've been doing some updates to bits of the world that weren't as finished as I thought - there were a few tunnels and beaches where the world was in a pretty "basic" form, in generally just the background layer. I finished up the bits that needed fixing on those areas, popped in some rocks, layers and made it look finished. I then went through and set the base lighting for all the realms to look hopefully where it needs to be. I'll give it a run-through tomorrow to make sure that the base lighting looks about right, then I can finish up the various quests that need final touches-up before we;re ready for beta!