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.