Redesigns, factions & time flow

For the past week I’ve been working on a variety of things, primarily a small faction, changes to how time and quests work as well as interface redesigns.

Time

One of the changes to time is how it progresses. When the player walks from one edge of a map to another, time is currently advanced by 15 in game minutes to give a feeling of traveling a longer distance. It may change until release. Time also plays a role in some quests, requiring you to finish them within a certain amount of days. Some may also automatically fail if you take too long before starting/finding it, the dialogue of the quest giver can be different because no one helped them within a certain time frame or they may simply have moved on to somewhere else or died.

New Journal

In order to increase consistency of interfaces, I also made changes to the Journal, where you’ll now find your current quests and custom notes under proper categories. Creating custom notes requires you to have at least 1 piece of paper. Quest categories are also in, inspired by the Inventory screen. Below is a small example using placeholder quests. It still requires a bit of work, but it’s a proof of concept at least!

The categories are as follow: All, Main, Misc, Treasure Hunts, Bounty Hunt, Faction and Custom Notes. The categories are easily switched between either by using gamepad bumpers or clicking with the mouse.

Treasure- and Bounty Hunt are two new quest types that can be found by either reading wanted posters or finding small maps/notes leading to greater loot. Bounty Hunts usually leads to a nice chunk of gold or some unique items, based on who placed the bounty.

New faction: Stargazers

The new faction is a small one and will not be joinable by the player. This new faction is called “Stargazers” and are  a small group of astronomers and munks. Their job is to look at the night sky and try to decipher what the alignment of the starry night sky mean and turn them into blessings for the people and the land. With a little bit of exploring, they may be the first faction the player will meet after starting a new game.

Their astronomy tower and living quarters. No lighting effects are applied in the screenshot.

As with all other shrines and sanctuaries, the player may give tribute to the altars found within to receive unique blessings by the gods or just make the faction like them more.

Camera lerping

I also added in some camera movement which can be toggled either on or off in the options menu.

That’s it for this week, until next week I hope to have applied the same changes as the Journal to the Factions screen as well as implementing more quests and fix at least a few bugs. Cya!

Gamepad support & World Map

For the past week I did some tweaking of input and writing some more of the lore to the game. Some new items, dialogue and the usual as well. The meat of the post is towards the end, regarding the world map and the plan ahead.

Improved gamepad support

In an effort to make the game enjoyable both in your computer chair or in the sofa playing on the TV, I’ve made some changes and improvements to the gamepad support in interfaces. If the game detects you are using a gamepad to play, icons for buttons will now appear on interfaces. Example below from the Inventory screen.

Gamepad icons on interfaces, signaling what buttons to press.

In this case, using the triggers changes the current screen and the bumpers change the category of items that are displayed. The font has also changed to a more fitting one that also looks better in low resolution than the old one. For those interested, the new font is 8514oem.

Message Boxes

I also made some changes to message boxes. Previously the choices you could make would be a static size and position, now they resize properly to fit the amount of choices. Another change is the ability to press 1-5 on the keyboard to make a selection without clicking it. The colors need some tweaking still.

World Map

As mentioned in the previous post, the world map layout is also finished, though not all towns/areas are placed yet. Below is a screenshot from the spreadsheet layout of how the map should be once complete.

Each bordered square equals to a map which is 40 x 30 tiles big(each tile is 32px), equaling to 1280px Width and 960px Height.Although the maps in reality are small, the zoom of the camera makes it feel much bigger than it actually is. I can make a more detailed post about it if anyone wants it.

The yellow island is the same one from that project at the beginning of this blog, found under the Desert Island category. I’m doing my best to recreate it in 001 with the most essential features and environments from that project.

Base game experience

The base game takes place in the green zone, Uspya (in lore meaning heartland), while the other ones are planned to be worked on primarily after the base game is in a reasonably complete condition and are added to the game through updates. Does that mean the game is technically Early Access? Leave a comment about it if you want! Some characters will talk about these areas as well as being mentioned in books and similar to give players a taste of what to expect when the regions become available. More details to come in the future. An idea I’ve been thinking about is actions you perform in regions have an effect on things in other regions. Not necessarily anything huge,  but it will definitely be strongly considered.

Oh yeah, the project has hit 7 months of development. New record! That’s all for this week, hope you come back!