Development News: In Search of a Hidden Treasure
Hi everyone,
Last two weeks I continued working on the “Lore Update”. As I explained before, after we acquire the treasure map, we will be able to check the map with a right click for whereabouts of the treasure. As the game creates the treasure map, it also creates a small 1x1 treasure island at the open seas. But this island is hidden. It doesn’t show on the world so hero needs to come to one square near it with the help of the treasure map.
As our hero goes near the island, it becomes visible and stays visible even after the hero lives its vicinity. After that, the treasure map in the inventory is marked with a check mark showing that this map location is found. Hero can delete or sell it. He can still go to the treasure island since it is already found. Note that vendors don’t give much gold for treasure maps, because they can’t be sure if there is any treasure there.
These small treasure islands are dangerous places. There is a treasure chest with lots of gold and a valuable unique item in there, but they are heavily guarded.
Treasure island battlemaps are somewhat tricky. The treasure is at the center of the map and there are impassable deep water tiles everywhere to slow down the hero. But hero can use levitation, teleportation or invisibility to take the treasure and run. He doesn’t need to kill any enemy to open the chest.
I also changed the Lore page design to show the read books better. It now can show the book cover and the writer of the book too.
Another improvement is something I was thinking to do for some time. It is about potion crafting and ingredients. There are simply a lot of ingredients and it makes potion crafting somewhat hard. Some of them also look similiar. For example, there is a bat blood and a snake blood. There are lots of vials like vial of pearl dust, vial of gold dust etc.
There are 79 ingredients for potion crafting. And this number was even bigger before. I already simplified some of them. For example there were different insect legs for all insects, like giant cockroach legs, centipede legs and giant mite legs. Now they are all insect legs. And there is still a bat wing and an albino bat wing.
In the older versions of the game, there was no potion crafting and these ingredients were used as a loot to be sold to the Alchemist Tower. So, for years, I added and added these things without being able to estimate what will happen once I add the potion crafting mechanism.
This inflation of ingredients diminishes the value of ingredients and makes potion crafting more complicated than it should be. It is also hard for inventory management.
In the current version of the game, every ingredient is used for one or two recipes. I want to change that so every ingredient is used for 3-4 recipes. So I needed to cut out some similar or less interesting ingredients. Some of them I didn’t want to cut out but I did it anyway.
Less ingredients mean gathering the necessary ingredients easier and smoother inventory management which is always a plus. Long story short, I came to the shocking realization that the game might be better off without Rat Whiskers.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading. May the tides bring you triumph!
Last two weeks I continued working on the “Lore Update”. As I explained before, after we acquire the treasure map, we will be able to check the map with a right click for whereabouts of the treasure. As the game creates the treasure map, it also creates a small 1x1 treasure island at the open seas. But this island is hidden. It doesn’t show on the world so hero needs to come to one square near it with the help of the treasure map.
As our hero goes near the island, it becomes visible and stays visible even after the hero lives its vicinity. After that, the treasure map in the inventory is marked with a check mark showing that this map location is found. Hero can delete or sell it. He can still go to the treasure island since it is already found. Note that vendors don’t give much gold for treasure maps, because they can’t be sure if there is any treasure there.
These small treasure islands are dangerous places. There is a treasure chest with lots of gold and a valuable unique item in there, but they are heavily guarded.
Treasure island battlemaps are somewhat tricky. The treasure is at the center of the map and there are impassable deep water tiles everywhere to slow down the hero. But hero can use levitation, teleportation or invisibility to take the treasure and run. He doesn’t need to kill any enemy to open the chest.
I also changed the Lore page design to show the read books better. It now can show the book cover and the writer of the book too.
Another improvement is something I was thinking to do for some time. It is about potion crafting and ingredients. There are simply a lot of ingredients and it makes potion crafting somewhat hard. Some of them also look similiar. For example, there is a bat blood and a snake blood. There are lots of vials like vial of pearl dust, vial of gold dust etc.
There are 79 ingredients for potion crafting. And this number was even bigger before. I already simplified some of them. For example there were different insect legs for all insects, like giant cockroach legs, centipede legs and giant mite legs. Now they are all insect legs. And there is still a bat wing and an albino bat wing.
In the older versions of the game, there was no potion crafting and these ingredients were used as a loot to be sold to the Alchemist Tower. So, for years, I added and added these things without being able to estimate what will happen once I add the potion crafting mechanism.
This inflation of ingredients diminishes the value of ingredients and makes potion crafting more complicated than it should be. It is also hard for inventory management.
In the current version of the game, every ingredient is used for one or two recipes. I want to change that so every ingredient is used for 3-4 recipes. So I needed to cut out some similar or less interesting ingredients. Some of them I didn’t want to cut out but I did it anyway.
Less ingredients mean gathering the necessary ingredients easier and smoother inventory management which is always a plus. Long story short, I came to the shocking realization that the game might be better off without Rat Whiskers.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading. May the tides bring you triumph!