Garrison Encounters (Patreon)

So the Beta 12 voting was closed, and the results are in... how surprising (okay not really), more people preferred revamping Garrisons to make them even cooler rather than redoing the combat log:

This does, however, mean that Beta 12 is going to take a bit longer because, oh my, if the combat log was going to be an annoying, involved (UI) project, by comparison Garrisons are seeing a huge evolution! And did I mention awesome yet?

Here I'll provide a little update about what that means.

So the core of Garrisons will remain mostly as you're familiar with them, a central room with four outward spokes each leading to an entrance/exit (we'll be getting more of those layouts, too).

What's different is that:

• there will sometimes be bigger special events, i.e. things that can happen which aren't related to or caused by yourself
• a clock mechanism will be added to increase pressure inside beyond certain thresholds, even for RIF builds
• the RIF Installer will be placed randomly rather than always found at one of the entrance/exit locations
• Garrisons will insert a variety of "encounter" rooms, for example the kinds of things you see in Storage or other branches

Fortunately I had a lot of time lately to allocate to the Garrison development push; unfortunately it already took days of work to build and debug the encounter system. It ended up being integrated with the original/normal system, but because Garrison design has its own quirks, that integration did not go very smoothly and introduced a lot of issues that were time-consuming to debug (later I'll be writing a blog post about this topic).

As of yesterday morning the underlying architecture is finally complete, and it's time to move on to content!!!

As a demonstration of the results, see the image above depicting a Garrison in the map generator, with brown boxes outlining rooms where encounters could be added (each with one or more optional connections to the main Garrison area). The outlines would be shrunk as necessary (most encounter rooms are far smaller than that), and only some rooms would actually be used in a given map--the remainder are simply erased/ignored. Note that is not an actual final reference map for the game itself, just what I was using to test the system, and to give an idea of the concept here.

(The RIF Installer is becoming part of this new encounter system, which is how it's being randomly located.)

So yesterday after completing this I was coming up with the full list of encounters to build next, including a lot of the obvious stuff one might expect to see, along with of course some surprises, and even some big surprises (like "Kyzrati said he would never allow you to have this" surprises :P).

While finishing off that list, I thought it was about time to update you all on the progress, and also ask what kinds of encounter ideas you might have for these Garrison interiors. No guarantees at all that any of them would actually be added (if even feasible? xD), but there's always a chance, plus of course even unused or wild ideas can sometimes trigger other ideas that do get added! So anyway, feel free to comment, and for my part I will start building these new Garrisons for real :)