March Review

If you've been following the Twitter, you might have seen mention of going to a convention. Yesterday I attended a local convention, ETSU Con, along with some other people from the Tri-Cities Game Developers. If I met you at the con, thanks for checking out the Steam page! If you're looking for the group link, let me know and I can get it for you. Attending this con is a big part of why this post is appearing now rather than yesterday.

Pictures of our table exist, I'm told, but because of my absolute lack of media savvy, I don't have any of them. They will be posted on Twitter if I ever do get them.

Development-wise, I didn't quite get the full demo I wanted done in time to show. However driving toward it did result in a lot of things getting built that I had been putting off. There's now a user-friendly splash screen that hides the flash of weird content on loading. Though the music has been finished for some time, it's now fully integrated via playlists that are dynamically tweaked based on the current event being displayed, optionally with aggressive fading upon list changes. Speaking of options, there are now much more convenient options like remembering game window position between sessions (the previous method I was using was weird and bad, as most things are that developers build for themselves). Age progression properly updates the portrait now. I squashed some old bugs that somehow escaped notice for years. I replaced much placeholder text with the words that aught to be there. Most foolishly of all, I updated my dependencies from their circa '17 versions to the newest. All-in-all it's looking a lot more like a game and less like a random development project now.

Very little of this shows well in screenshots, but here's the splash screen. It's based on the key art which is slowly but surely becoming standard for Dei Gratia Rex across all my social media. Speaking of which, did you happen to notice the new buttons and such here on Steam, as well as the new screenshots?






The more deeply I tested the entire courtship module, the more bugs surfaced. I actually spent the first part of the month fixing things which I thought were working. So it goes in software sometimes. It can be annoying, but I'd much rather find the bugs now than find them in a bug report later.




My present goal is to "close the loop." I think enough systems are in place now such that satisfying stories can emerge. That's not to say that there isn't more that must be added, especially regarding the player's family. However development at the moment is focused on making the game playable from beginning to end so that I can get this into the hands of testers sooner rather than later.

First on the list is vastly expanding the number of "main phase" random events. These are things you see when you're not at war, touring the realm, holding tournaments, during the introduction in Normandy, and so forth. The bad news is that many of these are needed. The good news however is that the vast majority of them are rather a lot simpler than the "phase-bound" random events. I actually tried to have just enough done for the con, but it was always a bit hubristic to think I could do weeks of work in 4 days, regardless of how much I crunched.



More next time!