Dev Update #7: It's Coming Together!

[p]GOOD MORNING, SPIES! Sorry it's been a bit since the last post! I've been trying to wait until we had just the right things to talk about before I wrote this one. Here's where we're at.[/p][p][/p][h2]The Castle[/h2][p]As with every update post, we're getting more and more work done on the new castle! It's really starting to come together in a meaningful way. Evan, David, and I together have been working on its layout and figuring out how all the interior parts relate to each other (which is actually the majority of the work we've been doing for the last couple months, despite what the length of the rest of the update post may make you think).[/p][p][/p][p]Question: why don't I show much of the interior any time I do these dev updates? Answer: well, it's actually just because it's not lit yet. Lighting is something we prefer to do close to last in the environment pipeline, which is totally fine from a development perspective, but it's really hard to imagine what something is supposed to look like when it's not lit correctly if you're not in the project every day. For instance, in the zoom-out screenshot below, even ignoring the white cubes and sectioned off geometry, something feels. . . off about it, right? If you feel that way, it's likely because the environment light is literally just Unreal's default when you create a scene. We are changing this, but it'll be the last step of making the environment before we put in props. (Doesn't help that a lot of the walls are currently a flat texture too hahaha).[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]As another example, here's the same environment with and without lighting. Kinda a huge difference.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]As a reminder, the goal is not to fully finish this new castle for this update, but to get it to a "version one" state so it can act as a playground area for the moment and the base for us to put in what will be the main gameplay loop of Wizard Boy. Lighting will be included hahaha.[/p][p][/p][h2]Other New Stuff[/h2][p]Okay, so this is the stuff that's a bit more interesting to talk about for this update. I have been working on a lot of different types of new ideas and polishing old ideas to expand Wizard Boy apart from just adding in the new castle.[/p][p][/p][h3]Possession Changes[/h3][p]So, the spell Personum Assumum hasn't really been what it could be. I know it, you know it, and I've been meaning to take a second pass on it pretty much since we released into early access. Well, I finally did! Here's the two big, big changes:[/p][p][/p]

1. [p]You can now possess props. This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like and pretty much means everything you can think of. In theory this is a small change but gives just a WEALTH of new possibilities. And yes, while possessing a prop, you can scoot around just like in prop hunt. (This took me weeks to implement, by the way - I even made a whole video about it: [dynamiclink][/dynamiclink])[/p]
2. [p]While possessing an NPC, if you get defeated, Wizard Boy will pop out into the location they were at automatically. This means that when you possess an NPC, you're not longer stuck in them, and encourages you to pop in and out of NPCs more at your own will.[/p]

[p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]Prop Collection[/h3][p]We've added this kinda weird but also very interesting side questy-thing that you can choose to play with or not completely at your discretion. In the spy lair, there's now a machine that can "collect" props. If you collect a prop, it gets added to your collection permanently. It will also give you a couple biscuits as a reward![/p][p][/p][p]This seems like an "out of left field" sort of addition. . . and it is. Seemed like it might be a fun thing to run around the castle finding new items to collect. Since adding it we've also gotten some cool ideas of how to utilize it in some cool ways down the line too.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]Stats[/h3][p]Wizard Boy is now shows some select stats like "enemies defeated, props eaten, steps taken, etc." Small thing, but for a game like this it's really fun to see how far you go. You'll have to find the stat computer to see them![/p][p][/p][h3]Vehicles[/h3][p]The tank and broom have been polished and are ready for their V1 debut, or at least mostly (there's one super fringe bug that I still know of but it's so wild it might honestly just stay for the time being).[/p][p][/p][h3]New Missions/Gadgets[/h3][p]I've added something like 10 new missions onto the mission board and several fun gadgets as well, including one that makes you blow up when defeated, one that can transfer fall damage into jump power on your next jump, and some other ones.[/p][p][/p][h3]8 Player Multiplayer (I think)[/h3][p]I have opened up the floodgates of Wizard Boy accepting up to 8 players at once. I have to this point not been able to test it. Could work great, could be so incredibly CPU-intensive that it barely functions. Buuuuuuttt, the option is there, so if you're game to try, give it a go![/p][p][/p][h3]Some Hefty CPU Optimization[/h3][p]I took a couple days to really dig around the codebase to see if there was places I was missing that could help bring down the CPU overhead of Wizard Boy. Turns out, there were a couple really big things that I had missed before that took a bit of refactoring but should significantly help Wizard Boy to run better on lower-end hardware. To be fully transparent, this is also a safeguard against us making a larger castle and allowing more players at once, since both of those things could potentially drag down processing more. The hope is that after all these optimizations, Wizard Boy will run better in the existing area and equivalently to current in the new area. If it's not there now, we'll get there eventually.[/p][p][/p][h3]Fall Damage Changes[/h3][p]I've retooled fall damage to be a tiny bit more generous by default, scale a little slower, but then also rethought the fall damage upgrades in several ways. Overall, the changes will make fall damage a bit more forgiving for new players but for "power players" the ability to just essentially take the mechanic away entirely is harder to achieve.[/p][p][/p][h3]Dopelo Change[/h3][p]One small but important change is being considered for Dopelo, which is the idea that when you duplicate a biscuit, it's a "fake biscuit" in the same way as when you duplicate props they're "fake props." In practice, this is actually a pretty minor change in most cases (gets displayed differently on the UI, looks purple when it's duplicated), but most importantly the idea is that fake biscuits reset during cleanup day but real biscuits do not. This is so we as designers have a bit more flexibility with the in-game economy that in all honesty we currently don't have. All uses for the fake biscuits are currently the same, although maybe shop keepers should get angry if you use them to purchase stuff?[/p][p][/p][h3]Mission Failure Change[/h3][p]Okay, another small but meaningful change. We are migrating away from the idea of "failing" your mission if you reset the days too many times. Instead, "cleanup day" happens which resets the non-mission-critical things in the castle. This change is purely optics - mechanically, it's identical to how it functions now.[/p][p][/p][p]A long-winded chain of thought as to why this really small change is being made: we were originally intending for Wizard Boy to be a fairly small game that you were supposed to slowly learn about the castle and mechanics enough to be able to complete the whole thing in a single in-game week. Which, for the record, is still a really cool idea. However, once people got their hands on the game, it became pretty obvious that a lot of enjoyment comes from just "being in the world" and playing around with the wonky mechanics and finding secrets and stuff. It also was received, in all honesty, much more warmly than I personally thought it would be, which led us to realizing we really should be thinking about our game in a bit larger box than we were currently thinking about it in. You've already felt and generally really liked the results of this thinking - a lot of changes we made last update were because of this redirection (adding in upgrades, missions, spy lair, etc.)[/p][p][/p][p]Second part of this puzzle: we've got a plan on how to reapproach the ultimate goal of the game. Our v1 draft was "complete the whole game in one in-game week." Our v2 draft was "we'll have breakout dungeon spaces that you can do infinitely and then maybe one final dungeon that would act as the end of the game." We followed that for a bit but something didn't quite feel right as we tried it out. Our v3 draft was to take the dungeon idea but make them into more narrative spy-things like infiltrating an auction or skiing down a hill. For a good while we felt like this was the right call, but it also left very little room for. . . you know, having a story, making a world, etc. And it's very tough to make an environment where all of these things can either take place or have a logical in-world outlet to a loading zone where these things could take place.[/p][p][/p][p]So our v4 is taking a bit of the best of all the ideas before. The castle is going to be the main space, like in v1, but there's going to be encouragement to replay missions to re-experiment and try to do them better like in v2, but these missions are going to have more of a narrative spin like in v3. And how does this all come together? We're kinda currently mentally imagining something that maybe feels more like "episodes of a kid's TV show" where there's a bespoke goal and the castle has changes depending on what "episode" you're in, but the main pieces are still the same. This also completely allows us to still have breakout loading spaces for any given mission if we want, but doesn't at all mean we have to like in v3 and we don't need to find in-environment places for them to go. So like, you know, "Episode 1" is coming into the castle. "Episode 4" could be "Grumblemort made a big laser on the tower and you have to deactivate it." Maybe in some "episodes" the castle is nighttime and every area is an off-limits area. Some episodes could be really mundane like just going to a class to get a spell, which means if you're playing with friends that don't have that spell you'd likely want to do it. Maybe some episodes take place in a completely separate environment (we're already planning on this BTW). Let you imagination kinda run wild. We're still working on the idea, so don't be surprised if that ends up changing some before we land it.[/p][p][/p][p]That all said, though, because of this and also some other smaller reasons, we've been increasingly thinking that presenting the reset time as a "mission failed" state just. . . doesn't feel right. Everything you do is PART of the story, you know? If you "fail" that means what you did isn't narratively meaningful anymore. It's also kinda' frustrating to a certain type of player to be told they failed when the game is so. . . hard to not fail in. Maybe once we solidify the first couple "episodes" it will be like "yeah, okay, it is a fail state and should be presented as that" but for now it's just "cleanup day."[/p][p][/p][h2]Bug Fixes[/h2][p]Okay, I don't usually mention this, but I spent so much time on bug fixing I just wanted to be commended for it. I fixed a lot of bugs since last dev post. (I have a list of over 300 bugs I addressed related to prop possession alone.) Give me some credit. Please.[/p][p][/p][h2]More?[/h2][p]Yeah, this actually isn't everything we did over the last couple months. There's been a lot of small, incremental changes like UI changes, system changes (redid the whole visibility system again), tweaks, balancing, etc. It's just too much to write out in one post. Which is a good problem to have![/p][p][/p][p]We're still working very hard on the update! We hope to see you there when it drops![/p][p][/p][p]John S.[/p]