Development Digest July 8th - July 15th
Hey there! Kindred here!
You probably guessed I was doing the development digest today based on the fact that it's several hours late, huh?
Janna's been super busy and will be for the next two weeks as well. It's not easy keeping things together without our producer and community manager!
This week I've been working on a few odds and ends as I chip away at the main storyline for Windless Woods.
I built a new visual lore-writing tool behind the scenes. Now Wendy, DD and I can write more in-game books without having to wrestle with data tables and page formatting. It's already proving to save us a ton of time and should result in lots more fun lore (leading to fun secrets, of course).
I also spent a bit of time scrolling through our new Canny board for features and ideas, as well as our ideas channel on the Discord. and found a few super simple features I could knock out. So I did that!
I made the trellis furniture items into planter items so you can now place seeds in them, added a toggle on player housing signs to hide the property marker posts, and finally, made some changes to the weight system. We kept hearing gripes about inventory size and so, after really breaking it down, we decided that there were a handful of different items that really shouldn't count toward your weight. So I spent some time building a filter and a tag system that we can use to tag specific items to no longer count toward your inventory weight. Currently this includes keys and seeds. We also discussed some potential unique bags that would make specific item types weigh nothing, like a miner's bag which would make all ore and gems weightless.
I also did a bit of modelling this week and started implementing a new special crafting bench similar to the astral forge. I don't want to spoil it though, so you'll have to wait until the update to discover where and what it'll craft!
Aside from fixing a whole bunch of items in the world I broke, Wendy spent the week doing a lot of clean up work in Dewdrop Village. She's also begun setting up the NPCs there as well as started writing a few quests and dialog for them. Dewdrop village is going to be a really fun little area for you guys to explore, I think. It has a good sense of progression built into it and I think it'll really add to the overall theme of the zone.
Louis has got the brand new glyph magic system working this week. In the last couple of days, he's added the first two spells to the game. The first glyph is the classic, tried-and-true staple of RPGs, Fireball. This spell launches a ball of burning arcane energy which will erupt in a huge radius on impact. Don't get caught in the explosion!
You might have noticed he spent a bit of extra time on the VFX, too. You certainly won’t be getting this glyph confused with the (now defunct) basic attack from the old “Novice Staff of Fire”.
The second glyph he’s added is a throwback to the original single player version of Swords ‘n Magic that some of you may remember from my early days on Twitch, or from the library of old versions we have available for certain tiers on Patreon. It's the “Launch” spell. This utility spell will send you soaring into the air, if only for a brief moment. Use it to escape a sticky situation or to reach unexplored heights.
Jesse has been hard at work adding the final touches in the Eyre and getting me and Janna super inspired to start making new furniture pieces for you guys to discover in the shops there.
And last, but definitely not least, DD has been chugging away at balancing quest rewards and tweaking the job boards in each town. A lot of our existing jobs in the job boards had quests that would take you all the way to the other side of a zone, even when there was a closer job board in that area. He's been restructuring a lot of these jobs to be more interesting.
We also spent some time chatting as a team about our existing quests, specifically on Azura and their purpose in the game. We've come to the conclusion that the job boards are a great alternative to some of our early game quests. Most of those quests were built when we had very few tools to work with for quest design and very few features and interesting item types to give out. We decided that it would be worth our time to go back through and refresh some of those old quests. And somewhere through that conversation, we also decided that from now on quests in the game have to meet a few requirements. They need to give unique rewards or perks, never just some gold or basic resources, and they must always be associated with a longer, more immersive story. We'll never be making simple fetch quests for the sake of having more quests. And that means that if an existing quest doesn't tell an interesting story or lead to a unique reward, it'll be scrapped or updated.
Unfortunately, we definitely don't have time for a lot of these changes for the Windless Woods update, so it'll be a future endeavor. But we're really excited to clean up some of those old fetch quests we've never really been happy with.
That's about it this week. We're mostly in the cleanup portion of this update, so we’re spending a lot of time tying up loose ends and linking our mechanics together to make a cohesive experience. Next week's digest will probably not be as interesting as this one... Unless Louis knocks out some wicked cool spell glyphs we can share with you!
You probably guessed I was doing the development digest today based on the fact that it's several hours late, huh?
Janna's been super busy and will be for the next two weeks as well. It's not easy keeping things together without our producer and community manager!
This week I've been working on a few odds and ends as I chip away at the main storyline for Windless Woods.
I built a new visual lore-writing tool behind the scenes. Now Wendy, DD and I can write more in-game books without having to wrestle with data tables and page formatting. It's already proving to save us a ton of time and should result in lots more fun lore (leading to fun secrets, of course).
I also spent a bit of time scrolling through our new Canny board for features and ideas, as well as our ideas channel on the Discord. and found a few super simple features I could knock out. So I did that!
I made the trellis furniture items into planter items so you can now place seeds in them, added a toggle on player housing signs to hide the property marker posts, and finally, made some changes to the weight system. We kept hearing gripes about inventory size and so, after really breaking it down, we decided that there were a handful of different items that really shouldn't count toward your weight. So I spent some time building a filter and a tag system that we can use to tag specific items to no longer count toward your inventory weight. Currently this includes keys and seeds. We also discussed some potential unique bags that would make specific item types weigh nothing, like a miner's bag which would make all ore and gems weightless.
I also did a bit of modelling this week and started implementing a new special crafting bench similar to the astral forge. I don't want to spoil it though, so you'll have to wait until the update to discover where and what it'll craft!
Aside from fixing a whole bunch of items in the world I broke, Wendy spent the week doing a lot of clean up work in Dewdrop Village. She's also begun setting up the NPCs there as well as started writing a few quests and dialog for them. Dewdrop village is going to be a really fun little area for you guys to explore, I think. It has a good sense of progression built into it and I think it'll really add to the overall theme of the zone.
Louis has got the brand new glyph magic system working this week. In the last couple of days, he's added the first two spells to the game. The first glyph is the classic, tried-and-true staple of RPGs, Fireball. This spell launches a ball of burning arcane energy which will erupt in a huge radius on impact. Don't get caught in the explosion!
You might have noticed he spent a bit of extra time on the VFX, too. You certainly won’t be getting this glyph confused with the (now defunct) basic attack from the old “Novice Staff of Fire”.
The second glyph he’s added is a throwback to the original single player version of Swords ‘n Magic that some of you may remember from my early days on Twitch, or from the library of old versions we have available for certain tiers on Patreon. It's the “Launch” spell. This utility spell will send you soaring into the air, if only for a brief moment. Use it to escape a sticky situation or to reach unexplored heights.
Jesse has been hard at work adding the final touches in the Eyre and getting me and Janna super inspired to start making new furniture pieces for you guys to discover in the shops there.
And last, but definitely not least, DD has been chugging away at balancing quest rewards and tweaking the job boards in each town. A lot of our existing jobs in the job boards had quests that would take you all the way to the other side of a zone, even when there was a closer job board in that area. He's been restructuring a lot of these jobs to be more interesting.
We also spent some time chatting as a team about our existing quests, specifically on Azura and their purpose in the game. We've come to the conclusion that the job boards are a great alternative to some of our early game quests. Most of those quests were built when we had very few tools to work with for quest design and very few features and interesting item types to give out. We decided that it would be worth our time to go back through and refresh some of those old quests. And somewhere through that conversation, we also decided that from now on quests in the game have to meet a few requirements. They need to give unique rewards or perks, never just some gold or basic resources, and they must always be associated with a longer, more immersive story. We'll never be making simple fetch quests for the sake of having more quests. And that means that if an existing quest doesn't tell an interesting story or lead to a unique reward, it'll be scrapped or updated.
Unfortunately, we definitely don't have time for a lot of these changes for the Windless Woods update, so it'll be a future endeavor. But we're really excited to clean up some of those old fetch quests we've never really been happy with.
That's about it this week. We're mostly in the cleanup portion of this update, so we’re spending a lot of time tying up loose ends and linking our mechanics together to make a cohesive experience. Next week's digest will probably not be as interesting as this one... Unless Louis knocks out some wicked cool spell glyphs we can share with you!