Quirkwood Progress and Play-Testing something else!

I've been mainly working on the tileset assets for Quirkwood, getting them all imported into the editor and set up as needed to work on the next larger zone - and that's coming along great. I've got the files imported now, all the brushes made up for the complex decorations and so on. and so I can have fun building out the new zone - at least in terms of map.

The other thing I've been doing is some beta testing for a friend on his game. It's also an RPG, but there are a number of differences. It's an MMO for a start, so he has a single player and it is all real time.... Anyhow, the important thing is that while I was testing his game, I think a lot of the feedback I gave him was actually the same, or similar that's been given to me in a there-or-there-abouts way. It was great to be able to test something that's also been developed by a single indie dev (he's also written his engine from the ground up!) and seeing all the technical stuff working, but as a player, also seeing some of the "How do I....." and "Tell me more about the world...." type stuff.

And, as funny as it sounds, doing a few days of play testing, and focusing on that rather than Torn Realms, has actually helped me so much in terms of giving me the ability to see my own things anew, but also from a different perspective. There's a few things I'll want to do in short order to make the start especially, more player-friendly. Once again, as I've been told, it's all about the polish, making things "just right" and leaving the player in as little confusion as possible. There were a few things that as I was playing, sort of made sense, or I was guessing at - but not knowing and being sure of what I was doing was quite frustrating. I also saw, again, just how important it is to as a player, feel agency to accomplish what I was trying to do, and know when I was doing it right, versus when the game was expecting something else - and I didn't know it.

So loads of good learnings and experience there.

Oh. This is how Quirkwood is coming along. 

App Loading Times

So, such success, much speed.

I did manage to get all my code bits written up. When the app starts up, it's passed info from the server on dates and times of asset files. It checks what you've already got cached, and sees if it needs to update anything. No? Sweet. Lets move on. Yes? I'll just grab the files I need.

So, just a quick update, I'm sort of getting ahead of what I had planned in my dev pipeline, which always gets me funny. I think tomorrow, I'll add in a better loading screen, so that there's something to view, aside from just seeing the numbers count things it's done.

I also just remembered that I also need to change the way quests complete, so that it dings it off nicely, even if the reward is just a bit of XP or something. It should pop back up to a nice "Hey, you've completed this thing..." instead of potentially silently finishing things up. 

I've also spent a little teeny tiny bit of time and imported some new assets to use in Quirkwood, to till out the zone and make it more interesting. I am currently not spending a lot of time in the editor as it's not really in my priority list, though it's fun, and I can do it in very short bursts of effort.

Character Skill Tree Interface Improved

A while back, when I was on a quick call with a mate, as he was testing something out, I came across a small-ish bug that happened more on a device, rather than the emulator I normally test on. 

Namely, when you want to level up a skill, well, there's a button to do it with. And on the emulator, when I click, it clicks. Once is once. But a device.... yes.... the touch event. a finger press may be multiple click events. So, my mate Jon clicked the skill-up button, and went from zero to 3 points in a skill as the touch event fired off a bunch of the same thing.

Namely, part two. The UX (really, the UI is the problem, but it leads to a poor UX) for skills just wasn't quite good enough. The skill trees have nice big skills, but although you could click on them, and it did show up in the top of the screen what it was... and you could scroll if it had a long description - that's also where the skill-up button was. It just wasn't "there" there.

So, now, when you click on a skill in the tree, it brings up a lovely new overlay, giving a much clearer view of the skill, how it works, the full text description, and there's the skill-up button there, so when you click it, while it fires off the request to the server, it also puts you back to the main skill-tree view - so you can't unknowingly chain-click the button.

So, that's a really long way to say "I made a screen less crappy!"

Tomorrow, the plan is to make the app load quicker hopefully - though I need to make a good few changes to different parts of the code, so not entirely sure I'll be able to get it all done tomorrow. But that's the plan.