Burnout and State of Mind

So, I've only had a few updates recently, and they've been much further apart than they normally are - and I completely acknowledge and own that.

I've had a bunch of stuff going on that's taken a toll mentally. Foremost, a member of my family has been diagnosed with cancer after a long period of remission/no-cancer. So that really, really sucks. Secondly, work hasn't been great. There's been more folks let go from leadership roles, and there's an additional target of 15% of the workforce to be "trimmed". That's pretty downright ordinary too. Even that aside, work isn't really all that inspiring or motivating al all. It's become a eight hour shift of doing work, that'll be rarely used, for folks that don't care about it, and really, I'd question the value that our team adds at all.

So. Where does that leave me.

Amusingly, chasing butterflies. Doing loads of things that aren't overly important.

Really, I'm in a pretty anxious state, which sort of feels hyperactive, but also useless at the same time. I want to do everything, but accomplish nothing. I'm feeling burnt out, but I don't want to walk away from anything. So, all in all, a bit of a right mess, you might say.

I'm very slowly plodding along, I've added some items, I've added some NPCs, I've added some quest stuff. It's all very meager, and not at all any grand updates or additions, but I'm trying to keep myself stepping forward to what I need for the beta. I think, there's also a really big feeling of pressure to go with that too. What if everyone that's been coming here once a week, or once a month to check on updates, downloads it once I open up t he beta... and what if it's not up to expectations? As I get nearer and nearer the moment when I do open the beta stage up, I get more and more apprehensive of it maybe not being good enough. What if folks get through all the content in a day? What if the skills aren't good enough? What if the animations and world aren't where you expect it to be?

And look, I've been in not-fantastic states of mind before in my life. I can recognize when I'm not looking at the world in full colour - and I'm admitting that right now, that's where I am at. I dare say, that I'll manage to right this ship sooner rather than later, to get my motivation up where it needs to be, and to find that confidence in what I do - and to take it back to my day-to-day existence. I'm hoping that it's not far off, as I'll be the first to voice my frustration with lack of progress currently, and with each day adding another day to the delay of the open beta I've been working towards.

So, to those of you that come to the site for regular updates, I both apologize and ask for a bit of a reprieve. I'm working through it, and I'll be at full speed soon again I very much hope. If you're here for the first time, Check out all my awesome updates below - they're generally much better than this.

Okay, so here's the scoop on the image. It's part of a quest starting out of Rust and Timber.

Content and Quests Continues

I got a good bit of work done yesterday evening, just progress on content. I brushed up a bit of conversation in the Farmhouse with Joe, I started making a quest, then got sidetracked fixing a bug (fixed it!) in the editor that was stopping one thing, that didn't then pass information onto another thing, which means that if I changed something quests wouldn't work in the game. So you know, as it turned out, one thing was called "event" when it should have been called "eventID" on line (I'm not even joking) 9995 of a javascript file in the editor... and quests didn't work.

Right, rant over.

So, as I thought before, it's a lot easier making quests and conversations for NPCs when the world is sort of built up. I can use stuff I've created to weave into the quest text or conversation dialogue "Careful, there's loads of brown bears in that area" or "past Finger's Retreat along the coast" and that sort of thing - then as the player travels, they'll come to the right area, get the game journal show they are entering the right area, and then brown bears pop up on screen.... you know you're in the right place.

I've also been setting up some infrastructure for a proper beta, so there will be a discord community set up, looking to capture good feedback and work through issues, as well as maintain some to-do lists and the like.

Rust and Timber Farmhouse

I had some fun today, filling out the Rust and Timber Farmhouse, which until now was mainly empty this evening. I also did some other bits, but thought this would make for a nice little update.

The farm offers all manner of food and drink, and might just start a quest or two off as well. Joe, as always hovering around the front desk ready to help anyone as needed, with Megan further in the shop making everything look easy.

World Building Progress

It's been quite a whirlwind at work recently, so not conducive to being in a great head-space after work and then getting into code or content building, but I have made some progress over the weekend nonetheless.

I've filled up all the Floren Islands with zone information, spawn locations and have been importing new assets. I've been creating items, loot tables and encounters to fill them with.

I think there's a bit more of this to do, but it's shrinking, then I will add in NPCs through the world I've created and give them conversations and quests.

In a recent post, I did outline a list of code things I need to get done, I've not really progressed on those, but for now, that's fine. I don't think any of those are show-stoppers.

Blighted Isle and Floren Isles Being Filled

It's been much longer between posts than usual, and part of that is that I've taken a few days off from development - in part to recharge, in part because work was quite demanding and lastly, in part as I had a lot of stuff to get done around the house.

Having started with that, I can get into the fun stuff.

I've been building out the world quite nicely. Much of the Western Isle is now done in terms of regions, spawns and so on. The Western isle ranged from wildlife to bandits, orcs and even some trolls. I'm currently working on the Blighted Isle, which is full of skeletons and I'll round out the Eastern Isle probably today with some wildlife in general. That will leave me the cave system to fill out - which will be a mix of goblins and others.

As I'm going, I'm building out the items and loot-tables for all these which is quite fun, but takes a good bit of time. Even giving various creatures abilities to use and setting them up take a bit of effort.

Once that's done today or tomorrow, I'll be going in with NPCs to pop them in, and creating conversations, quests and generally content. I've got a teeny bit of world still to create, I found a bit of unfinished cave system as I was adding in spawns earlier, and I have to finish up the interior of one of the trading houses - but that's not a lot of work.

In terms of code, there's a few things on my to-do list:
There's a bug that sometimes makes things in combat wait way too long before they can activate again. Not quite sure what that is, but I hope it should be quick when I investigate it.
I would like to have items be able to initiate quests. There's going to be a bit of work there in terms of UI changes and some structure changes.
I would like items to be able to proc effects, so a weapon that has a chance of applying it's own debuff to the target. Perhaps armor that has a chance of applying a buff to the wearer when they are hit. Again a bit of work, but I will tie that in with the quest thing.
I have found a bug when a ranged skill is selected to use, but then cancelled, the screen doesn't fully go back to the right mode. Probably an easy fix once I find the right bit.
And the last thing I need to add in is some functionality around spawns. While I already have the functionality to spawn something based on events - ie, if you're on a quest to go clobber a certain critter, it will be added to the normal spawns there, what I'd like is to be able to have a particular thing spawn in an exact spot if you're up to a quest part.
Sorry. Last, last thing. I'd like to add in some events for the day/night cycle, the weather cycle and probably the Ebb cycle and over time, have certain things triggered by those - ie, bandits come out at night. Something else happens only when it's raining and so on.

Loads of Little Things

I've been chipping away nicely at a whole assorted chocolate-box of various tweaks, fixes and additions to the code.

In no particular order:

I've added long-needed functionality to my animation editor, that lets me import creature animations that face left, and mirror them in the editor so that there's a copy that faces right as well. It's been very low on my to-do list for a very very long time, but my recent additions of models that only have a left/right facing (and only come in one of those from the artists) has made it an utter necessity. I did do some manual image-editing-software left/right copies to test out how the models looked and performed in-game, and they're worth it.

I've also been working on importing a lot of new assets into the engine, as well as just spending some money on purchasing a bunch more from a particular artist. His stuff sadly is only two directional (left and right) but they look good, there's a lot of variety and the app loads them up basically instantly which is great.

I've also been working on adding a bunch of items into the game. Which reminds, me, I actually made some big changes to the editor setup where I create loot tables, making a very basic and placeholder interface much much better. The image shown is my editor interface for one particular drop type, in this case the sort of gear that many goblins will drop. I've got tools to filter any possible items at the bottom, can click on them to show me the stats, to make sure it's the right item, and can click on them to add them to the possible list of items - as well as setting up changes of drops, how many come out, whether events are required for the item, or block the item coming out at all. In other words, it's all finally clean, neat and easy to use. Just in time for me get cracking on the world!

Edit: Oh, I also realized, I'd missed an item functionality, that I can't believe I missed. There's nothing in there currently that lets certain items have a chance of a particular effect coming out. So, say a heavy hammer item might have a two percent chance of adding a debuff on a successful hit, and so on. That will need to be fixed somehow, and I've got a few ideas on how I might make that even better, so it's not purely just the weapons, but that's another day problem to solve.

User Preferences Framework Setup

One of the things that's been half enabled, but not really implemented was dynamic changes in the app. I half unlocked it before, fixing a zoom-in and zoom-out when combat started/ended but I took it a step further over the last few evenings as well as setting up a proper android-based user preferences setup.

So, you can now set your own preferences for combat and normal terrain views as well as text sizes for characters/creatures. It happily saves them to your device and the game boots up with those retained next time you log in.

While it's currently only those two, there's a whole entire list of things I'd like to set up preferences for, so with the framework set up now, it should be much easier to chip away at a feature here or there.