More Skill-Tree Development

I've been pushing out effects and abilities for the skill-trees almost entirely still.

I've now done the last of the second skill-trees, which was the Archery Tree for the Rogue class.

It has a mix of passive buffs to make your ranged attacks much more potent, but also a number of damage-over-time and debuff options. They will all work with ranged attacks obviously, though some of the passive skills will make your character better at more than just archery itself.

So, with the final class now having two usable skill-trees I might look to implement some more specific and special functionality to use with effects and abilities. I'd like to do something along the lines of Fear and the like. I wanted to also do an effect that changed sides for a creature or character momentarily. Those sorts of things will need some extra code to be written up, but nothing too dramatic. Oh, and one more thing that came up... I have the ability for an ability to put effects on the character, or an enemy, or a location etc... But I wanted to make an ability that puts on effect on a target, and another different one on the character using the ability... so I think I'll need to work out what structure changes I'll need to make to enable that functionality. Again, I don't think it's too hard... but it'll be fiddly and need changes in a lot of little places.

Go-Live and Skill-Trees

So, the testing cycle to go live on the Google Play Store didn't go according to plan. I'd basically been roping in folks (friends, family and some other indie devs) to try to get me over the threshold for the number of testers required to get it published. I feel the app is good enough to be published, I've done a lot of testing and so on - but clearly not enough behind-the-scenes triggers were met for the testing purposes as it was knocked back with "more testing required" and a suggestion of not using friends and family. So, I'm paying a bunch of testers to do it online now. They are pretty confident in getting it approved, and I can see what's going on behind the scenes on the server - so it'll be interesting to see how it all goes.

Meanwhile, even though it's Christmas here and there's loads of friends and family stuff going on, progress is still happening on the game.

I've been working on more skill-trees, and also filling them up with abilities and the effects behind them, so this time round, I've not finished up the second Mage tree - Air and Earth.

They're all there, the skill titles basically give away the gist of what's happening in each one. Having said that, I think I will need to make some more "special" effect abilities, as I am feeling that a good bunch of these skills are starting to feel a bit same-samey. So I think there's going to be some code added in the not too distant future giving things new functionality, and I'll go back and apply them to the spells and abilities that I wanted them to be used in.

On that note, I also added a bunch of functionality around Ranged effects and ways to buff the character for those, as while I do have the Rogues skill-tree for archery set up, I've still to create the actual abilities in the game, so I think that'll be next up.

Paladin Skill Tree

I've wanted to go back and be able to add in at least a second skill tree in every class, so classes can lean into different builds, and the next one was the Paladin skill tree, in the Cleric class.

There's two unlock skills at the entry to both trees. Exclamations are small curses that the paladin utters, generally in combat, which help debuff enemies as an example. This opens up Smite, a powerful sweeping strike against potentially multiple targets, and also Purification, a stronger debuff combined with an attack. Exorcism is unlocked with Smite, and is a powerful attack ripping demons from the very body of the target. These will both unlock Holy Grace, an ability the paladin can use to replenish their mind, body and spirit in the time of need.

The other side of the skill tree starts with Absolutions, an unlock skill that grants small buffs to the paladin - generally asking for forgiveness will result in small favours being offered in return. This also unlocks the Glorified Remittance skill, allowing a paladin to pretty much bank some of these favours, and use them at the time of need, either on themselves or potentially on other party members with a higher level. Blessed Armor is a passive skill that adds divine protection to the paladin, as their armor is blessed and purified. Interdiction of Faith allows the paladin to simply refuse to allow their body to be befouled by wounds through sheer belief in their gods. Lastly, there is Materialized Faith, where a paladin is able to physically manifest their faith into their body, creating a layer of protection that cannot be removed.

Crusader Skill Tree and Publishing

Earlier in the week, I was focused on getting enough testers to meet the Play Store requirements to be able to finally publish the game for everyone. That involved making calls to friends and calling in favours, but I can happily say that in the end, I got the numbers needed - so that's progressing. I think I have a week and a bit left on that timeline before I can request to apply for production.

Now... with all that time up my sleeve, it was of course time to get wokring on something in the game again. I decided to start filling out the skill trees a bit more, as it doesn't take an eternity to do. It's not super super quick, but it's not too bad either.

The Crusader skill tree is the second one in the Fighter class. There's two branches initially to this tree, with Blessings and Curses, both either simple ways to buff yourself, or make your opponent weaker. Next up, Zealous Strike is a strong attack that you can use against an enemy. Righteous Protection is a passive skill, giving the character added defence and armor. Rousing Rally can be used to revive not only the Crusader, but also potentially their allies. The final skill on this side is Final Stand, which the character can use to grant divine protection, making them almost impervious to attacks.

That leaves the other side - Curses will give the crusader a slight advantage, making their opponents weaker or more vulnerable to attacks. Hateful Strike is a strong attack. Principled Ablation is a strong debuff that the Crusader can use against foes, while Energising Fury gives the Crusader and their companions a boost in battle when they need it. That leaves For Whom the Bell Tolls at the top of this branch, a wide debuff against the foes of the Crusader.

Lastly, I went through and fixed a few glitches and bugs - like a new menu allowing characters to learn abilities they didn't have the skills to support, or after I fixed that part, happily still deleting items from inventory even if you weren't able to use them, which I've also fixed. So, the right abilities and the right items. 

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.