It's all About Questing

It's been a fun few evenings of late. I've really been getting stuck into quests and conversations, and while I'd love to say it's purely that, as I am play-testing these things, I'm finding loads of various bugs - but I'm also fixing them at the same time, so that's an upside too.

 I've done loads of tweaks with the conversations code, getting the app to do everything that it was supposed to do. I've slightly expanded some of the possibilities that conversations have from what I originally meant them to do - as in things can "happen" when the NPC says something as well as when your reply with something and just little bug fixes so that the app knows what display in what event... and sometimes that's just going back and forth in the app and editor, talking to the NPC, seeing something I shouldn't see, going back to the editor, fixing that part of the conversation, and back again.... same for quests.

But. It's been a whole heap of fun running about and finally getting through a big quest series - I mean big for what I've made SO FAR (feel free to imagine that Simpsons Meme template for that statement). But, my party has some cool new gear, oh, and I fixed the map up in a bunch of places where it needed a little correction to let me get through where I should be able to get through. And I found a bit of the map that isn't finished. Oopsie.

Quests and Conversations

I've had a lot of fun today writing dialogue and putting quests into place. I'm yet to release it all on the alpha testers, but I've found myself getting into a good development routine in the way that I make these. I've got tabs open creating placeholder quests - well, the actual quests, but just making it completely bare-bones and making sure the dialogue around it works the way it should. I can then go back and make sure that each quest has all the details and is set up in all the ways it needs to be later. This is giving me a much better frame of mind to get all the right connections in place, and set up the series nicely.

Anyhow. It's been grand. Today has been all about Fondenroth, son of Fondenroil, son of Thrombendrol of the mighty Hala Thrombrin! There's some cool stuff in that quest series that slowly starts to open up into the greater myth and lore of the world. I've been doing a bunch of nice, but also fluff quests, but this one starts to really get into the true stuff of the game.

Questing and Conversationing

Just a quick update tonight, I've been writing a good bunch of conversations, quests and testing them out to make sure they work just the way they're supposed to. For the most part, it's getting better, though I am still working out the best sort of conversation structures to have when having multiple quests given by the same NPC and how to set it up properly in the editor. I think I'm getting better, but going back to slightly older conversations still gets me confused as I try to add more stuff in.

Oh, and I've been doing a lot of play-testing to make sure that these quests work properly. There's a few bugs and things that I can improve, which will hopefully be pretty easy fixes. One that stood out was when handing in items to an NPC for a quest, the "Deliver Items" button turned them in one by one, so I either need to put a label on it, or change it to hand in ALL the items at once at that vendor. Either way will work, though the second one is probably better.

The Pies of Floren Islands

I got some great work done this evening, mainly on some quests and conversations, building on the work I've done recently with the conversation editor, and also just building out some items and updating some item drops.

There's more than one quest where various vendors on the Islands really want to make sure that they have the best pies around, and therefore get the business. There's money to be made in helping them out.

That's as much as I'm giving away, but really, it's been rather fun putting together these quests, tying them into the right parts of the conversation trees for each NPC and slowly letting this story unfold. I'm also going through and testing each one out with my party, so I'm also seeing how long these take to get done, and how they should be balanced.

On a bugfix and tweak aspect, I think I solved the "spawns right after exiting combat" thing, but I'll test it some more to be certain.

Rumor Mill: This is Joe. He used to have the best pies in the Floren Islands. Will he have them again, or has he been bested?

Questing, Conversations, Bugs and Editor Fixes

There's been a lot happening in the evenings of late. I've not been keeping up to date with posting things as I should, so this is a bit of a combined update.

Boring stuff first. I tweaked a few bugs in the game and got them working properly. The biggest one was quest items sometimes dropping when they weren't supposed to, depending on how they were set up. Solved.

I also had to invest a bit of time giving the conversation editor I have written some extra interface features for myself. It's just been a bit too hard to get everything working the way it's supposed to without seeing this extra information in the interface I have to write the scripts, connect things to events, quests and so on. So that's done too.

Now the fun stuff. I've been writing a series of quests from the Knights guarding the bridge to Blighted Isle, and play testing them as I go. I've had to do a lot of tweaking to the conversations themselves (hence the need to upgrade my conversation editor) but I think I am slowly getting the hang of what and how to do to get the end experience I want for players.

So, in terms of quests, there's not a huge amount there, but I do think, slowly over time, I am getting to a half decent bunch that is enough to start progressing the party up a few levels nicely.

I do have a bunch of new to-do's from my last few evenings though, I need to delay new spawns for a brief moment after exiting combat, as the game is quite happily dropping something fresh on me split seconds after I finish up one combat, and I am getting locked into others too quickly. I do also feel that I need to tweak some creatures. Some are just too easy to kill for what and where they are, and others just don't do nearly enough damage to really threaten in the way they spawn.