When you Can't Go Up, Go Down

So, I've sort of finished up the Western Island to a point where I'm quite happy with it, and so I've kept at the cave system under the island. I have loaded up some more assets into my editor, and there's additional  cavey-stuff now for me to use which is great, just adds that little spot of difference.

I'm still getting into a good groove designing the areas, but I am getting more and more comfortable with the process I currently have, namely sketch out a basic layout in a base texture, get the flow and layout roughed out, then build up path blockers - in the cave, that means cave walls, above ground, that might be level differences, water etc, get those done, then do two or three passes of adding in flourishes, decorations and things to break up the plain-ness of it all. I am get to really work out the right place in the process to do the lighting and interactive elements.

I do also wish that it was easier to get the raw assets into the editor for use. Currently there's a LOT of chopping and saving of files in an image editor. Not sure on that one, and it's not a priority yet. The more I have built up in the library, the easier it is, but once I get to proper world building, not test area, it's going to get moved up the priority list quickly I think.

I'd love the world building process to be quicker too, but even the few weeks here and there that I've been properly building I've been speeding up, and I am very much finding the output quite satisfying, so maybe there's no quick way to get to the quality I want. There'll be plenty of time to work it all out.

Yeah, so it's been a rough week

So, I got some utterly devastating news about a friend recently, which has basically been heart-wrenching. That's thrown a wet blanket on anything I've been doing in a most horrid way, but I've been using some world-building as a way to distract myself form the really ordinary news. So, the east Island of Floren is pretty much done. I might do a few more tweaks, but it should be there for alpha testing at least. There's enough there in a few distinct areas to make for a few different zones in terms of creatures and the like.

I did decide to make an effort today and add in some new app functionality, so when your app starts, it can see if the versions of files it has are the newest ones, or it what's online is newer - and if so, download and cache those. I'll need to extend that to all aspects of resources, but having it function for the main rendering assets is a great start.

This screenshot is of one section of West Floren Island, towards West Bridge.

Floren Islands Coming Together

I spent a good bit of time on the weekend working through some various bugs, mainly with good success. Nothing major, just little bits here and there. I made some editor tweaks (adding a sort of colour picker that I can use to select terrain from the map directly to use) and annoyingly, some issue came up with the website here with a certificate becoming buggy.

The big news however, is that I've been spending a little time finally playing properly in the editor, crafting the world slowly. I'm getting the hang of things in the tools I've built, and I'm also working out my processes better, which is speeding things up nicely.

So here's a few nice images of West Floren Island coming to life in the day/night cycle and also the dark caves on the island. Luckily my party has been spending hard earned goblin loot on some torches which provide a good light source. I may or may not have also needed them for testing out some lighting functionality, but lets not let that spoil the narrative!

Quests feel.... completed?

It's been a few days of bug-and-not-quite-right whack-a-mole over the last few days with how things have worked. When I tweaked the conversation interface in the editor, it let me set up more complicated conversations. That in turn then let me set up a few test quests in a more complicated manner. Something that involves different sections, and different goals and the like. And overall it wasn't quite right in terms of how it was working. I've solved issues with picking up quests between logging off the game, and coming back in later, keeping track of requirements that have completely different things to do. Kill some specific amount of creatures, find and hand in a certain amount of items and the rest. Each of them holds a specific state of completion and it's been quite challenging to keep the server up to date with all those things as they happen and let you pick back up at the right place when you load the game back up again.

I've picked up a few new bugs along the way that haven't been fixed yet, but a lot of other things also works amazingly well. Quest items were dropping in the right loot at the right part of the quest when needed, then stopped again later. They're actually dropping a bit too often, so I've got some code in the loot tables to trawl through, but that's small fries I hope.

The plan is again, keep building out the world a bit more, using all the features as much as I can, and testing that functionality as I go, both in terms of pure function and in terms of does it look good enough for the app itself.