Sixth Milestone (EN)

And here we are. After a month of hard work and our trip to Gamelab convention we are proud to show what we have been doing during last 6 months. Time passes by faster than we expect, but to be fair, what did we have at the end of December? Nothing, and look at the game now… And we’ve learnt so much!

Milestone number 6, sixth delivery, sixth video, this time is very short and concise, but shows what needs to be shown:

In your face! I mean… interface! Take a look at it! Isn’t it beautiful? At least having in mind what we had before. At last we’ve brought a decent HUD to the game, a better placed and ordered. Last milestone our aim was to show what was happening inside the pitch black caverns of Lua scripts, but we postponed showing it properly, using our book-friend, the Dungeonomicon,  as we determined at the very beginning of the design phase. A bit late but we finally have it that way. The inventory is always shown on the right page and a tabbed left page that allows us to navigate through the different pages of information.

Health Points/Magic Points/Fatigue/Toxicity bars, action buttons, quick access slots, attack slots, the book icon (to access the book info pages) and a compass look quite polished.

Another notable achievement is the implementation of survival, well… not actually the implementation cause they have been in the game for quite a long time now… but we managed to balance thirst, hunger and tiredness  to be a main asset to the game, and now both three can be replenished by the following means: 

• Thirst: you can calm it using a new item we added to the dungeon, the fountain (two different looks, one for each biome). When found, player can interact with it and will set his thirst back to 0. You can also calm it a bit by drinking water bottles that might be found looting corpses (sounds delicious). 
• Hunger: you can only recover it by eating pieces of meat that you’ll find on enemies corpses (stone shell, tender interior, as it seems…).
• Tiredness: you must find a campfire in order to sleep and rest a bit. While sleeping turns pass recovering something for each turn. You can be woken up abruptly by a roaming enemy hit if you are not careful enough.

These three parameters determine a new one we call fatigue which is shown using a yellow bar placed at the right side of player’s avatar. The continuous increase of this bar will bring us some debuffs and serious penalties in combat, will make us move slower and this gives an important advantage to our enemies.

Both fountain and campfire are placed in a new kind of room, the rest room, which is carefully placed by the random map generator.

AI has been improved also, fixing many cases in which the enemy couldn’t decide what to do leaving the turn system stuck. Also, we now can have the two different types of enemy (melee and ranged) lurking the dungeon at the same time and we’ve given them the capability to open doors. So beware, be sure to have cleaned the colliding rooms before taking a nap!

Regarding the logics, enemies now drop loot. When they die they leave behind a little chest that we can interact with, opening a simple inventory where we can find items (even ones we can’t find in usual chests). In fact, this is the only way to find food, so don’t forget to check every one of them. Another new feature is the logic system of hearing (that wasn’t complete till now). Whenever the player opens/closes doors, opens chests, hit an enemy or is hit by him or just move around generates noise, each one with a different intensity. These noises can be heard by the enemies, affecting their decisions. We can also hear these noises (based on our level of hearing perception) and it will be represented by expanding semi-transparent waves that come from the origin of the sound, giving us its position. Just if the noise is perceived the sound will be played.

What is left to be done is balancing (easy to say…) and make some changes based on the feedback we obtained from the people who tried the game during the Gamelab convention. As remaining tasks, we’d love to add secret rooms (sense of sight will determine whether the player realizes that there is a hidden door or not), traps, magic, a new biome, new enemies. Not to forget the adding of the “book memory” that will keep track of our games, achievements and other sweets that will make the game replayable and fun. We hope we find time to add it all!

Here, milestone 6 video: