Terra Randoma News

Hi everyone,
Work on the new update continues. As usual, unplanned features creeped so update became bigger than anticipated. No surprise there :) As I told in the previous dev-blogs, this update was about reading books to accumulate lore and purchasing treasure maps with this lore. Treasure maps will lead the hero to a treasure island which he can find a chest with a unique item in it. All is done and I played for a while. Then it occurred to me that there needs to be some kind of a hub for lore collectors.

We find books and statues randomly in dungeons and in battlemaps but what if we want to search for them specifically and make a lore collector career? We are in the mercy of the random gods. We have to find a town folk that wants us to bring back an artifact from the cultist dungeon. And inside the cultist dungeon we have to find a room full of bookcases. Or we may find an altar at the shrine of the forgotten god. But finding that shrine is also random. So hero should play the game normally and along the way he may find books and statues to collect lore. That is fine but what if I want to search for lore? There should be something besides playing the game normaly. So I decided to add “Ancient Library” to the game.

Ancient Library is a new type of building that will spawn on the overworld map at the beginning of the game. It is ruled by a new faction called “Lore Wardens”. Their power animal and trademark is an owl, representing wisdom and knowledge.



These people are actually very dedicated historians. They travel all around the world to collect lore and they always need help. So they give missions about lore collecting. Our hero can take quests from them to find newly unearthed tombs, lost libraries and ancient statues. So he can make a lore collector career if he chooses to.



There will be a treasure vault in this building so hero can earn rewards as he gains reputation. Rewards will be mostly valuable books. Elixir of Forbidden Knowledge may be a nice reward too.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading. May the tides bring you triumph!

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!

Hi everyone,
Another bugfix.

• Tomato Salad with Goat Cheese was not working properly.
  

Hi everyone,
Here is a bug fix update.

• Some unknown food recipes were shown as known recipes.
  
• If we save inside a dungeon or battlemap with a unique item in one of the chests there, unique item was not saving properly.
  
• Some unique items in some chests were spawning a different unique item everytime we load the game.
  

Hi everyone,
This week I worked on the books. Books and reading them are important elements of the upcoming “Lore Update”. Hero will be able to read books and gain that precious “Lore”. Here is how it works: If there are no enemies around, we can right click on a book, and an opened book GUI comes up.

On the right side, you see how much lore you will gain from this book, how many hours it will take to read it and how much food you will consume while you are reading it. This may be crucial information while you try to read the book at the wilderness. Note that hero can catch cold while reading book at the wilderness.

On the left page, you can see the book’s name, writer, publish date and the town it was published in. There is also a sub-header that gives a hint about the content of the book. These are all procedurally generated so the logic may be questionable sometimes. But it suits the name of the game after all.





Books may be read in 5-15 hours and grand Lore accordingly. First, I thought that the books may be read in 30-50 hours in several sessions. But then there will be lots of different books like half read books, full read books etc. So for the sake of simplicity, I decided that the books should be read in one go.

After reading the book, there will be a tick sign on the book icon to show that it has been read so that hero can see which books he can sell to shops.

Another thing I worked on is related to the last update. Daggers were missing from the unique items pool, so I worked on those. They will have a default critical hit modifier and another modifier like burn or freeze, that can scale from 15% to 25% percent. They will also be very light and will use really low stamina while attacking.



That’s all for now. Thanks for reading. May the tides bring you triumph!