So.... I guess it's time.... (Open Testing)

I've been building up to this for a long time. And I guess it's time to see whether the traffic here is really real folks, or really AI crawlers.

I'm looking for some folks to do an open-test of the game.

If you'd 1) like to give this a go, 2) and you have an android device, 3) and a gmail account, I'd love to give you access. I've set up a discord server for this purpose to get feedback and the like. If you met those three things above, please pop yourself over to this server and say hi. I'll ask you to DM me your email address so I can add it to the play store testing link. Do NOT post it publicly. And you'll get access! I am looking for no more than around fifteen folks I think. 

Expect things to break here and there. Or be a bit dumb. Or you know... stuff like that. I'd like to think I've done thorough testing, but testing works in funny ways at times.

What an Utterly (productive) Nightmare!

The last few days has been spent adding in spells, creating new animations for them, touching up content here and there. I also spent a good bit of time improving the interfaces to make (progressively smaller) tweaks and improvements - which is a really good thing, as it's showing that things are getting better.

So, for example, in your character screens, you can click on a button to use an ability. It also shows you usable items in your inventory. When you use something from that list, it asks for a target - as it should. Healing spell? Pick your target. As some items can be used on others in your party, it would show that target list each time. I wanted to change it, so that if you were using an item where it taught you a new ability - such as a spell - it would directly be used on your character.

So little things like that. Very small things, that make a good difference.

You can now drop things to delete them. Useful.

You now can't sell items with no value. That'll stop new players accidentally selling Guild Tokens they can useto buy some sweet starting equipment.

And of course creating the spells to fill out the first skill-tree for mages, which was the last one that was a bit lacking. As the mage skills are all unlocks rather than pure skills, I needed to have spells available for each unlocked skill at least. And that of course took longer than I wanted it to.

So, one last run about to make sure things were good. Crash. What? Okay, reload... run about.... Crash. What the hell? So, that started a six hour bug-hunt and then fix for what was going wrong. With fantastic unintended, but delightfully opportunistic results. 

It turns out that processing new terrain was causing huge spikes in memory usage. They were very short term, so in the fractions of a second - but if I happened to process a bunch of these at the same time, it apparently was enough for it to crash out. I then did some heavy memory optimization of how that part of the code works. Test fire. Run about. No crashes. One of the other delightful things was that I noticed that some processing was being done at too high a priority - so I knocked that down to a background task, and the framerate was no loner impacted during world-load background tasks. I mean, super technical update.... but I feel like I've achieved a lot in the last few days - and especially this marathon today.

Mainly Other things, but also Trade Purchase Animations

So, I've added a good bunch of starting content now, with some initial quests that open up new conversations and guide you to places you'll want to visit early on.

I've also gone in and added a good deal of conversation with some NPCs at the start, where you'll be able to get a bit of a better idea of where you're starting off, and who and what is about.

Then, I of course was running through these quests, making sure they all work well enough, that conversations pick up where they should etc. They seem to be good now.

One of the last things I wanted to fix up is the Apothecary in Floren Farmstead. The only effects she was selling was something for me to test the code working to sell them. So, I needed to give her a Resurrection, and at least one buff that lasts a good while. As I was testing them out, trying to look at it with fresh eyes, it really seemed that there wasn't enough feedback shown in that screen to show you that in fact, the transaction worked - and your character got the buff they'd just paid for. So I've also added some animation code that will make it really obvious that you did in fact purchase the selected buff, and that it was applied. I then reused that code to improve the way that vendors with normal items work, so you get that additional feedback there too.

One thing I'm not currently sure on... is how to stop tokens being sold by accident. Each of your characters will start with a guild token of their class for example - and you can use those to get a good quality starting item for them, much better than you can afford to purchase to start with. In other places, a quest reward might be a token you can exchange for a particular item. So... complete a quest, and you'll be able to PICK the reward you want, rather than say a mage getting some heavy hammer great for a fighter, but pretty useless for them. Now, the catch is... if you can't sell them, it seems a bit janky. But if you sell them by accident, you'll not be able to get the reward.

More thought on that before I implement something. I am currently leaning to blocking certain items being sold. You'll be able to destroy them in your inventory, but not sell them. It'll stop I think the vast majority of whoopsies, and won't be too much of an issue otherwise. And I can implement that with a value of zero perhaps, so the only things that appear to sell to a vendor have a non-zero value.

Single Player Start

I've been doing a combination of testing and trying to see things with fresh eyes, trying to look at it like someone seeing things for the first time. And boy oh boy, there was a lot to tidy up. Basic stuff.

I needed to greatly improve the party interface. Now that you start off with a single character and build from there, I needed to revisit the original party organisation screens. It was one of the earlier screen's I'd made, and it showed. It was also not really ever looked after too much as when you started with a full party, you really didn't need it. So I did a good bit there bringing it up to quality.

That led me to needing a bunch more NPCs in the starting areas - to allow things like... organising your party. So those have been added.

While I was fixing that up, I also looked at some of the way the game displayed lists and selections, and have gotten them a bit neater and better. Again, much of this is really early stuff I'd done, and probably not up to the quality it needed to be at. basically, it was working. Only just and poorly. It's a bunch better now.

There's some stuff that I still want to improve, but it's potentially annoyingly tedious to do - and I've not quite worked out how I want to do it. An example is when a healer casts a resurrect spell outside of combat. The game currently displays a list of characters in your party. I'd prefer it to show only characters that need resurrecting. But the code that does that, starts getting very "except when this... and only not when that...." very quickly. So, when you're casting a healing buff.... should it only be injured characters? What if you want to per-emptively buff someone? There's also some instances where the ability you use provides the special selection, but other times, the ability delivers an effect - which is the thing that should make the selection.... Anyhow, you can clearly see that I've not worked out yet the right way to do that, and it's not quite as important. This works, it's better than it was before.

That leaves me where I am currently. Going back in and adding super early content in Floren. See, when you started with a party, the early content was geared towards you having a party to deal with things. So the wolves that would provide a challenge, but not completely maul you... eat single starting characters for lunch. So, I'm going back and adding a bunch of content to get you up a level or two, and with a friend or two before you go picking on them... 

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.