Hi, everyone. Welcome to another week's developer's diary.
I will tell you a story this week. This is a story of dark times.
It does not matter if it's the catastrophe caused by natural or mad-men, evil dictators or tyrants.
Today Shanghai is still in lockdown, Azovstal is still under siege, and Queensmouth is still in a Zombie Apocalypse. Life is never easy, yet every single day, we fight to overcome all those obstacles in our lives even sometimes having to witness our comrade fall asleep and never wake up again.
Stay in a situation long enough, and you can clearly feel your sanity fading away.
You can see it out of the corner of your eye, there are whispers in the dark, promising an easy way out.
They whisper.
Why resist if you can just give up and join the other side?
Why keep going if you can be relieved from your position and go on a normal life like everyone else?
Why suffer in this endless pain that nobody will even remember?
As such, along the way, many have lost their faith.
The temptation is just so sweet, step by step, it corrupts.
Dirty deeds can be done dirt cheap.
As we read through history, whenever there are tales of legendary heroes, there are also those who fall into temptations.
From Ephialtes of Trachis to some unknown electrician, "traitor" is their name.
It is the time to expand the story and the mechanism a bit more about how Queensmouth falls.
Let's start with the town's Shade-Tainted Mayor.
He has been a mini-boss for a while.
However, the item he drops became less interesting after our prefix system and a lot of other systems have been implemented. Thus, a revision has been made this week. His tainted business suit now has better attributions and qualities as a unique boss drop item. It may also have prefixes which may sometimes have astonishing powerful combinations alongside its default special attribution to cause poison. Following up with this, all generic shade creatures now also have their item drop list implemented that provides different clothes, shoes, weapons, and accessories.
Does that feel sweet?
Now, think again, what if all those items dropped from shade creatures all have a special side effect known as the "Shade Corruption?" A corruption that certainly sounds bad. But, the dark whispers will encourage you to take it. As for now, there is no significant issue with such corruption. Except, you may not sleep so well at the night. Occasionally, you may even get nightmares so real that they attack you.
But, look at the power you may get. Do you think that's the risk you may want to take? Maybe, it's just the edge you need to defeat more horrible monsters. Maybe just a bit more corruption will not hurt?
You don't know why. But, something out there even makes a demon feel uncomfortable.
That's the part of the corruption.
But, there must always be something good left in this terrible world, isn't it?
Sure.
There are rumors that those good souls may not go to heaven right after their death.
They may sometimes linger a bit in the form of butterflies to guide people in danger to somewhere safe. At least, that's the lore from another game I just played recently.
I hope that can be true so I added them to the game.
May all those in pain in the world may find their butterflies to help them to find their safety.
May all those trapped can find their freedom.
The world may just need that right now.
There is much more content added this week as we got 8 updates.
But, I will leave the rest part for you to find out in the game. (Alternatively, you can just read the changelogs.)
Sometimes, I just can feel a desire to implement something.
Thus, there was a day I made 2 updates this week.
Let's consider that a positive aspect of losing sanity during the Shanghai lockdown for now.
That's for this week. May the butterflies help us all.
Today's changelog:
##########Content#############
[Beneath the Church]Added a giant rock to block the path. However, if you have progressed the main story enough, someone will blow it up.
[Sins of the Father]Story continues. (from var 400 to var 415)
New prefix: Shaded (Only for items dropped by the shade for now. Those items have shade corruption, and the icons for those items will be slightly darker.)
Added item drop list for shade creatures. (All equipment from them has the "shaded" prefix.)
The Shade-Tainted Mayor now drops both his business suit in addition to a generic shade creature drop.
Ishida's Shade shall now drop generic shade drops.
If you are attacked by a nightmare during your sleep, the nightmare will now also drop shade items.
##########System################
Modified the rendering pipeline for item icons. Added a channel to add tone to adjust the color of those icons.
[Mod]Added support to allow mods to display their own books or overwrite existing books in the game. (Previously, it's possible. But, tedious.)
Added an error message when a previously existed document is no longer available in case you disable a mod you previously use.
Also added code to prevent a hard game crash in such case.
##########DEBUG#################
Fixed a bug that item's hue is not drawn in Window_ShopStatus
########WIKI####################
Added a wiki page of the quest [Sins of the Father], it's just for development tracking purposes right now.