Hi, everyone welcome to another week's developer diary.
Unfortunately, as mentioned in previous announcements, I spent almost half of the time in the hospital during the last 2 weeks. The worst part is passed, just some occasional fever and pain remain and some implants are to be removed later. The daily update is now back to "normal."
Talking about "normal," there aren't many supernatural adventures during those two weeks as I am mostly taking the advice of my doctors to stay on the normal side of the world to recover.
But, before we go down to more details. First and foremost, I shall thank everyone who supports me during this unpleasant time. That of course includes the nurses who took care of me in the hospital. Thus, we now have "nurse" as a new playable female character variation that can be used for both your main character and your customized teammates.
Hospitals have a lot of chilling tales and urban legends. Fortunately, we have those well-prepared nurses ready for all kinds of emergencies, supernatural or not.
Now, let's move on to some of the most interesting features we got:
1, The public awareness of the supernatural world.
As an open-world RPG with a lot of freedom, we can do a lot of quite messed up things in Liu. Thanks to the cleaners, such activities can be covered up almost for free. But, that cannot be an all-mighty solution for everything. Some actions will slowly start to make people who live in this "normal" world start to be paranoid and want to believe something is out there.
Thus, during the updates of those two weeks. Functions and features have been added to reflect this respectively.
If you drop a supernatural pet (such as a zombie, a skeleton, or even a family-friendly ghoOoOoOoOoOoOost) in front of a normal citizen of Liu on the street, they may notice it and be scared for a few moments.
If you use a magic spell in front of a normal citizen of Liu on the street, they may find it unthinkable.
Actions like this inevitably make people in this town start to be more aware of the existence of a secret world beneath the normal surface they live in and start to dig.
A quite immediate effect of this development is the appearance of shade creatures in the open areas of this town. Currently, if the public awareness reaches beyond 10, they will spawn in different locations in Liu, causing trouble for you to explore certain areas.
On the good side, if those shades wander into some traffic-heavy roads of Liu, they will likely get eliminated by all those passing by vehicles. Because most people cannot see shades, drivers will not slow down, they will run them over even without noticing what just happened. You may take that to your advantage if you get chased by a lot of shades.
2, The power of rings
This is a new generic type of item that takes its user's accessory slot and grants a skill. As long as a character can equip such a ring, they can use the skill attached to it immediately without restriction. That provides another layer of flexibility on your character builds. You can find a new type of merchant in Liu's Commodity Market selling a few basic versions of those rings, providing skills such as healing, and some basic magic spells with different elements.
3, More different loot from various enemies.
Right after those skill rings got added into the game. The loot tables of some enemies also got updated to provide more diverse item drops. For example, the ancient sandworms may now drop Rings of Acid Spit, the foreman in the Unfinished Building may now drop Rings of "Back to Work." and the skeleton cultists may now drop Rings of Darkness.
In addition, to add those rings to the loot table, some other sneaky changes also happened, such as the vampiric researchers may now drop analyst pods.
4, Gomoku
It may be sometimes better to just lie down to play a few rounds of traditional games like this. (You get a GPA coin if you win.)
Plus, there is a short background story about this mini-game.
Part of the code of this mini-game is from a friend of mine back in 2006. The last time I heard about him was in 2019 before the Era of Covid. I'm not sure if I will see him again. But, no matter what happens, nobody is gone for as long as their name is still mentioned. Maybe I was just feeling nostalgia when my health condition is not great. Thus, I took that old code out, made some modifications, added functions such as mouse support and early surrender, and integrated it into this game. Thus, for as long as this game updates, this memory will not fade away.
That's for this week. I want to add much more content. However, that relies on my recovery speed. Meanwhile, in order to recover faster, I need to take orders from my doctors to rest more. The situation sounds like a paradox.
Today's changelog:
############Content#################
[Liu]For whatever reason that shade appears on the streets of Liu, cars will just run them over and eliminate them. (Because, normal people cannot even see them. Drivers will not slow down their cars.)
[Liu]Once the public awareness of the supernatural world is above 10, shade may appear in the alley near the bar. (They will attack you if you can see them. They will not leave this alley.)
[Liu]Once the public awareness of the supernatural world is above 10, shade may appear in the Unfinished Building. (They will attack you if you can see them. They may chase you all the way to the street and can be killed by cars.)
[Liu]The amount of shade that may appear under those circumstances is scaled with the public awareness of the supernatural world.
[Loot]Vampiric Researchers may now drop Analysis Pad.
############System#################
Added code to allow vehicles to run over targets