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...