New Damage Formula & Character Creator

For the past two weeks, I spent some time updating the damage formula to be slightly more realistic, redesigned the character creator to better fit the rest of the interfaces in the game and drew the basic shape of the world map.

New damage formula

A new damage formula has been implemented, intended to increase realism and make the player care a bit more about what equipment they are bringing with them when heading out. With this new system, weapons are split into three categories; Sharp, Blunt and Ranged. Sharp weapons are things like swords, daggers, small axes and such. Blunt weapons cover maces, clubs, greatswords, war- hammers and axes and last Ranged covers bows and crossbows.

Blunt weapons are generally heavier, slower and more expensive to purchase, but deal more damage per hit. Sharp weapons is the other way around; cheap, fast and deal less damage. Ranged weapons are a mix, where you can either use Shortbows, Longbows or Crossbows. Shortbows shoot faster, Longbows shoot longer and Crossbows offer a middle ground between those.

Sharp and Ranged, except for crossbows, deal less damage towards plate armor. Instead when fighting these opponents, you should use a Blunt weapon instead to instead crush the armor. Sharp weapons are still effective towards light armor such as leather or chainmail, and more if the enemy has no armor at all.

World Map facelift

The world map has gotten a facelift, going from Excel spreadsheet style to something that looks like a proper map. It’s still gonna need some work to make it complete, but here’s what I got so far.

New character creator

Back in October 2016 I made a post about making a new character creator interface. Now, it’s time to post about that again. The new character creator screen has all the features of the old one, along with some new randomization buttons and layout. The old layout wasn’t coherent with the new design philosophy of interfaces, where most of them now have sub categories that you can choose between. Here are some of the new things you can do with this character creator:

• Choose a gender
• Randomization
  • Hair
  • Hair color
  • Clothes
  • Clothes color
  • Statistics
  • Gender (50/50 chance of either)
  • Name, based on gender
• Rotate the character to get a proper preview (up, down, left, right)
• Better performance

So without further ado, here’s some screenshots showing how it looks:

New statistics page, with description and everything.

Clothes color and shirt picker

Hair style and color

Overview page, where you choose a name and gender

Minor stuff

Apart from the new stuff mentioned above, some smaller tweaks and additions have also made it into Tales, list below.

• Icon changes
• Resized message box text and height
• Made outhouses interactive after testers complained they couldn’t use them
• New alchemy and cooking recipes
• Changes to the outposts quests to fit a stat theme based on their location. EG Strength up North and Dexterity in the South and so forth
• New traps; spinning blades and swinging axes
• Fixed some locations where player can get stuck (this’ll probably be on more lists in the future)

That’s all for now, thanks for reading and have a nice day.

Sound & Music(finally!)

Happy new year (just two weeks late)! For this week I’m going to talk a primarily about the sound design of Tales of Astya, as I have finally gotten around to purchasing some custom composed music!

Music

The musical style of the game is heavily influenced by medieval instruments and melodies, and inspire a feeling of going on adventures. I’ve inserted a small preview below:

The music is composed by Joel Steudler, whose Soundcloud can be found by clicking here. Lots of great stuff there, be sure to check him out.

Reverb

Since the project start, a goal was to provide a rich soundscape, one of them being reverb of sound in caves or inside stone structures. Since 001 Game Creator doesn’t support this feature by default, another solution had to be found. After discussing with the community over at the 001 Discord Server, the solution was to first play the original sound, then do a check if the user has reverb enabled in Audio Options. If so, play the audio reverb file at the maps defined reverb amount. This effect is used on both player and other characters.
Pseudocode;


Sound.Play(sound, SoundVolume);
if(Map.Reverb > 0 && AudioReverb)
{
Sound.Play(soundReverb, Map.Reverb);
}


Ambient Sounds

Another element included in the soundscapes are of course ambient tracks. Walking through the forest listening to the birds chirp, the ominous rumbling of the earth when exploring caves and squeaky walls in abandoned buildings add a lot of atmosphere combined with the music alongside camera effects and particle effects. I’ll include a screenshot of this sometime soon, it’s still a bit early to show off.

One of the unique aspects of the ambiance is how it is very dynamic. The chirping of birds are all coming from the actual birds in each map, meaning if you kill all the birds there’s no more sound coming from them. They respawn after a while, but while they’re not there you can contemplate on how horrible you are for eradicating species.

New Options Menu

Also coming with the music is a redesigned options menu, where you’ll be able to change many settings to tailor the game to your liking. You cannot change the resolution in-game, sadly. This will have to be set up in the startup menu.

The Effects tab isn’t screenshot worthy yet, it only has one options so far; raindrop impact particle effect toggling. The sliders in the Audio tab are for master volume, sound volume, music volume and last ambient volume. You might notice there’s another tab greyed out. I’m not sure yet what to put there, so it might be removed before release.

Other additions/changes/fixes

• Redesign of some maps to make them feel more compact and unique
• Lanterns/road lights automatically turning on or off depending on time of day
• Arena almost finished
• A bunch of new tile sets, sprites, sounds and items
• Performance improvements, thanks to 001’s new dynamic resource loading
• AI improvements
• Dungeon redesigns/tile updates
• Weapon usage animations were borked, weapons now properly show up when using them
• More magic spells and combat abilities
  • Mark/Recall ala Morrowind. Allows you to set custom teleport locations.
  • Dazing and Confusing to slow down enemies
  • Poison
  • Generic fireball
  • Magic staves
• More dialogue
• Quests written down, but not yet fully implemented

That’s all for this week. Here’s to a great 2017!