Trailer, magic and beta soon

For the past two weeks I’ve spent a lot of time working on a variety of spells for the player to cast, both useful and not-so useful. As usual there’s also a lot of other additions near the bottom of this post.

Trailer

The biggest thing of this weeks post is the new trailer I made and published earlier this week. It doesn’t represent all the things you can do in the game, but it should give a decent idea of what’s going on. I hope you like it. I am planning to make more videos in the time ahead, hopefully with better editing.

More magic

I’ve added 8 new spells that you can cast, some of which are more useful than others. Below are some highlights:

• Blink – instantly teleport a small distance in whatever direction you’re facing.
• Bend Time – Slows down time 50%, but still allowing you to move at the same speed. Attacking cancels the effect.
• Sense Living – Adds a glow around living characters, such as people or animals
• Candlelight – Spawns a glowing light orb above your head that lights up around you for around a minute.

There should be a video demonstrating the magic in not too long.

Public beta in TWO weeks!

Tales has been in development for a while now, and it’s almost time to enter beta! The beta is planned to start on June 9 over at Itch.io. During this time the game will be available for free, with optional purchase for those who want to support further development.

Once the beta is ready I will make another blog post annoucing it, including a download link and some instructions on how to report bugs/errors/glitches/feature requests(within reason). I’m very excited to have strangers play it and not just friends and get some feedback on what is currently in the game. No time frame has been set for how long the beta will last.

Other changes/additions

• Started work on replacing the current dialogue boxes with new ones. The new system features such things as
  • Animated portraits.
    • Facial animations for mouth based on dialogue length
    • Facial expressions
  • Camera panning to the speaking character
  • Choice timer (random choice if time runs out (Not used everywhere, don’t worry))
  • Name of the speaking character at the top of the box instead of being in the dialogue text

New dialogue screen preview. Please excuse the prototype art.

Old dialogue box

This is a consideriable amount of work, as each dialogue box has to be manually replaced. I have no estimate for how long it will take to update them all, but the current goal is to have most of it done by the time of beta.

• Finally done with replacing trees
• Finally got save/load game to work properly in general and fixed issues with party members not spawning properly.
• Shop owners will now throw out the player if they are inside their shop at closing hours.
• Added space telescope for exploration of constellations and the Astya night sky.
• Added more camp sites and roads throughout the overworld maps
• Populated the swamp area with enemies

That’s it for the past two weeks, hope you enjoyed. Next post will mostly be dealing with the beta and some instructions related to reporting bugs and all that. So long!

Arena, Trading & One Year Anniversary

For the past weeks I worked primarily on a new shop system and the arena. Last saturday was also the one year anniversary for Tales of Astya’s development, woah! I didn’t have much to post until now, but there’s some goodies because of the delay. I was also thinking about maybe making a small YouTube video showing some of the biggest changes through the year with some commentary. We’ll see. Let’s get into the posts, shall we?

Trading Changes

Trading has received a decent overhaul, improving performance slightly and adding a variety of new features, listed below:

• Merchants now have a specific amount of gold available which can be increased by purchasing items and decreased by selling items to him/her.
  • Resets every three days, will probably be changed at a later time
• Price changes based on the player being a member of their faction and your rank in that faction.
  • Each rank adds a 10% price difference
• Only buying specific item types from the player
  • EG a blacksmith will only purchase weapons, armor and ore
  • EG an alchemist will only buy reagents and so forth
  • General stores still buy all types of items

 

Arena

Arena exterior

The arena was one of the earliest side activities I added to the project, though it has been shown little love the past year. This has changed! The arena now contains a small campaign where you’ll have to fight your way to the top to become the Grand Champion. The arena has two activities you can partake in; Tournament and Skirmish.

The main entrance of the arena where you sign up for tournaments and skirmishes.

The tournaments is the main campaign, where you’re pitted against strong opponents to defeat in order to advance to the next round. They still need to be balanced properly, and are intended to prove tough competition. Skirmishes on the other hand is a simple free for all, where the last man standing is the winner. Skirmishes yield little besides a few coins and is mostly intended for practice before the tournament.

Other changes/additions

• Started work on a wiki that should be ready for launch
  • Details about lore, locations, items and all that easily available. Want a preview? Send a message through twitter or leave a comment below!
• Added a telescope to look at the night sky
• Various bug and glitch fixes

The wiki has taken a lot of time away from development, but it’s worth it in my opinion. That’s it for this week! Until next time, have a good one.