Some words on the immediate future... (Patreon)
Content
Well, first of all, thank you for playing 0.1 and giving us your valuable feedback. I won't say your two main concerns took me by surprise... ^_^
Player speed is indeed frustrating at the current state of the game. The village will be a far more busy place in the future, with people moving around and barking their thoughts away, but we understand your boredom at not seeing a soul and needing to make the same trip over and over.
You've suggested several changes related to that. I don't want to make this post even longer with in-depth technical explanations, so I'll get straight to the point: it's far more feasible for me to implement a fast travel (teleport) map than drastically changing the movement method.
For starters, the plugin I'm using for characters to move, forces you to make up your mind and choose between point & click or keyboard movement. The first depends on path-finding algorithms, while the second works with physical colliders. So...: no arrow keys to move in the foreseeable future.
With that said, I can tell you I'm going to try (again) implementing a run command that doesn't relay on double-clicking, but maybe a Shift+Left Click combination, which would be easier to "refresh".
I know it would be better to have a 'hold to move' system. I tried long ago to implement it but, unfortunately, the path-finding logic of this plugin leaves a lot to be desired and the character turns back the way she comes from.
If you look at the development board you'll see this card...:
Experiment with A* pathfinding [BIG TASK]
That's for me to try to integrate a far better path-finding plugin with the one for movement. It's NOT a trivial task by any means, but I'm positive that if I get them both to work, then we could have that 'hold to move' feature in the future.
In the meantime you'll have to bear with me and use the fast-travel map we'll implement in 0.1.1 in the next weeks.
And now that I mention that version, the other main concern is about lack of content... well, as I already warned you, 0.1 was supposed to be a test of how well the basic engine would work for you hundreds of people. And I must say I'm pretty satisfied with the results. Even though I was stupid enough to change some code at the last minute and break the 2nd HJ scene (sorry), bug reports have been sparse and mostly cosmetic in nature.
For that reason I'm positive we could spend more time now on creating content. That doesn't mean we will only focus on that, because there are still things to add to the map, characters and the engine inner workings, but you certainly won't need to wait another six months for 0.2.
What we really, really need to do now is to make a proper plan. We can't improvise when deciding what to work on from now on. 'Content-tasks' and 'Feature-tasks' should be wisely balanced according to their game value and needed man/hours, so if you don't see much movement in the next days (from me at least), don't worry, I'm walking some steps back to take a little run.
I will end this wall of text with bad news for some people...
I tried guys, I REALLY tried. But making this game to work (well) with DirectX 9 systems is just madness... :-(
Even though I can make 4K sprite atlases, and I even said I would make that modification for you today, I must back down on that decision. I've spent ALL day frustrated and pissed off at the problems I've had at trying to fit all the graphics in those tiny textures.
You could think 4096^2 pixels are a lot... but when you went down from 8192^2 you quickly discover that 4K is NOT the half of 8K, but FOUR times smaller, so the beautiful but BIG backgrounds Kuja made are just a nightmare to fit in those atlases.
"-But you could slice them...!" Yeah, and then I'd need to manage a fuck-ton of tiny images with custom pivot points and four to six times more atlases than before which, in turn, hit performance because draw calls grow as well. I could go on ranting for hours...
Oh, and it also would be nice to be able to use some DirectX 11 features in the future, just saying... :-P
So, if you see blue backgrounds... I'm sorry, but it's time to upgrade your computer. I mean, there are DirectX 11 cards for less than $50, for God's sake!
And seriously, my life as developer will be far less stressful this way. ;-)
Tomorrow morning I'll finally release Mac & Linux versions along with the final (I hope) Bugfix 2.
Thank you for reading and good night (here at least).