Quests & Character Generator

For the past two weeks I’ve mostly been working on writing quests and whatnot, therefore no post last week. I’ve also made some other smaller additions of course, more details below. New art and maps aren’t such a high priority right now, as it’s mostly done. The focus forward will be on adding in all the quests and characters, which means posts will be less frequent (not every week, but definitely every two weeks). Let’s jump in.

Questlines

For the most part I’ve been working on the questlines related to the Outposts,  one of the primary factions you interact with. To begin either of them, you have to travel to the West Outpost and talk with the commander, telling him a skill you’re most sufficient in, which determines which of the outposts you are sent to (East, North, South). So far I’ve only worked on the North Outpost quests, amounting to six so far. There’ll be more as time goes on, of course.

The North Outpost

You might wonder, what are these Outposts? They are the primary quest hubs for advancing the main story and are spread to each of the four corners of Uspya. Each of the Outposts have a commander, a smith, a trainer and some soldiers stationed there. The blacksmiths each specialize in one kind of weapon/armor that they craft better than anyone else, but will only sell their best goods to those of higher rank or after completing some tasks for them. The trainers can help you gain some free experience points by completing their training tasks.

Deeper Character Creator – Homeland and backgrounds

A few posts ago, I wrote about the redesigned Character Creator. I’ve added two more tabs to it, allowing you to set your homeland and create a background for your character. Changing your homeland affects your stats, as each of them provides a +1 bonus to a specific statistic, as well as changing dialogue from time to time. EG people from Sedresh might not like a person coming from Usmor, or they might want to be their best friend and so forth. This can also affect trading to some degree. The background generator allows you to set your parents professions, your aspiration and your previous education. These settings determine what items, stats and money you start out the game with. EG; your father being a blacksmith starts you out with a iron sword.

Work in progress.

Other changes/additions

• Added a variety of cloaks to shield the wearer from rain and keep warm in cold environments.
• Fixed various sprites and item icons.
• Added magical wards, placeable by the player. Wards are temporary and stationary objects that attack enemies within range.
• New types of plants and cooking ingredients.
• Animated banners and flags to ripple in the wind.
• Started work on some new enemy types
• Added transition animation when sailing by boats.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

Facebook, dungeon refresh & game jams

This past week I’ve primarily been working on refreshing some dungeons, recording audio and drawing sprites. I also made a Facebook page to autopost new blog posts over there. More on that later. I also helped out a good friend drawing some sprites for a game he made for a GameMaker Game Jam over the previous weekend, which you can download by going here.

Dungeon Refreshing

Some of the dungeons I made back when Tales was just in its infancy was in desperate need of a refresh, primarily in layout. My main focus has been a frozen manor in the northern parts of the game world. I ended up scrapping the whole thing and redoing it from the ground up instead. I’ve included some ancient screenshots below, and screenshots of the new layout below those again.

Old

New

The new layout also features loads of new sound effects and other small things to improve the atmosphere drastically. Can’t say much more without risking to spoil what is going on there, you’ll have to try and find it whenever the public beta is available(shouldn’t be too long).

Temporal Turmoil

Temporal Turmoil is a fast paced puzzle platformer where a clone of yourself is spawned on a timer that follows your exact steps. You control Cat, a dude who has a cat named Dude. The game is free to download by clicking this link, it’s worth taking a look. Programmed entirely by Johnwo, and both of us made sprites for it.

Facebook page

As mentioned earlier, I made a Facebook page you can like to get new blog posts directly into your wall. No more needing to head over to Twitter or checking the blog for new posts if you’re unsure there is something new. Click here to check it out.

Other changes/additions

As usual, the list at the end of the post about other smaller changes and additions to Tales.

• Added a storage box to banks and player houses where you can put items you don’t want to carry around all the time. Storage boxes are linked, similar to Stash Boxes in Diablo or a bank in any MMO.
• Fixed shops
  • Prices were all messed up
  • Errors when hovering certain items
• Lighting improvements
• New hair styles, available at the barber shop
• Fixed saving/loading (big one)
• More variation in food and drink items
• Started working on more animals

That’s all for this week. Please leave a comment below if you want me to start writing a new post every week, or if it should still be bi-weekly. Every week will results in shorter posts with less exciting stuff, while bi-weekly results in longer, more in depth posts. Bai!