Quests, Combat and Equipment (Patreon)

Greetings!

I've been at work on a number of things since I last checked in, but before I get to that, I wanted to share another image from the upcoming H-scenes. Like I imagine most of us would be, poor Alex isn't too happy about getting a facial. Ana says it's good for the skin, but that's exactly what she would say, isn't it?

Quest Progress

I finished up one of the smaller quests I was working on and have been spending most of my writing/eventing time on one of the larger ones. (For those of you keeping track, one of the 'almost done' ones is now done and I've been at work on the 'fully planned, not completed' one.) I'm still not done with it yet, but I've made a lot of progress and I think it's shaping up to be pretty fun. Hopefully all of you remembered to pick up Ned's hat from the Dark Pits and found all three of his books! This quest chain will be quite long by the end, and because the starter for it is sort of hidden a lot of players may never see it. Still, I think it's important to reward players who explore with something nice every now and again :)

I've also been at work on some skits and filling out some new areas of town (I spent far too long working on a skit at the Barracks!) Some of this development time also went into adding a bit more life to the nightclub, so this is a good time to talk about my plans for it.

The Nightclub

The Nightclub will be an important area for Alex and the gang's remaining time in Zameroth. Not for plot reasons per se, few important plot events will occur there. Rather, it's important because it's where you'll get to know the characters better, if you so choose. You'll be able to encounter most important characters there at one point or another, and they will usually have unique conversations and events that will only occur there and which may influence how you interact with them outside the club.

The Nightclub will continue to evolve throughout the rest of the Zameroth releases. It will initially have a number of people to talk to, and this number will likely expand as the releases go on. You'll also have the ability to invite people you meet while out and about to the club so you can hang out with them in a more relaxed setting if you so choose. In 0.9 you'll only be able to invite a single Bunny back to the club at a time, but in future releases I plan to let you invite many people at one time, including many non-Bunnies. 

The 'only one Bunny' restriction may seem a bit arbitrary - and it is - but I'm doing this to cut down on the amount of writing needed to get 0.9 out the door. It would be pretty simple for me to let you invite, say, all the Bunnies, but I want this to be more than just "here's a character and a couple of unique conversations." I'd like there to be interactions between the characters - conversations among them, different vibes when different people are there - and if you know anything about combinatorics, you know how big this problem can get. Now, I'm not going to let the interactions grow out of hand, but I would like to have some of them. I think they'd make the whole experience seem more real and emotionally meaningful - and that's what this whole thing is all about!

Don't take this to mean the nightclub will be dead when you first go there - that isn't the case at all. The first time you go will be as part of a larger Bunny social event, and there will be a lot of conversations to have with your companions, guildmates and the other people there. You'll also be able to start two quests there, and, of course, that's where you'll eventually gain access to 0.9's H-scenes (and a few others in the future.) So get your dancing shoes ready!

Equipment Slot Rework

The equipment slot rework is now complete. To recap, I made a design decision not to use levels early on because I didn't want to require or encourage grinding, and I also thought this would make it easier to tune the difficulty of complex boss encounters. Since this game doesn't use levels, character power is increased through plot events such as Ana's taunt quest, event-based 'level ups' (e.g. after you beat the Stone King,) and equipment. Rewarding the player for playing your game is important, and this usually comes in the form of increasing their power, but my design decisions didn't leave me enough meaningful opportunities to do so. To help address this problem, I decided to expand the number of equipment slots available to all characters. This way I can hand out rewards for doing quests without you feeling cheated, as you probably would if getting a shiny new trinket meant you had to throw out the one you got two quests ago.

Characters initially had either 4 or 5 equipment slots; now they all have 8. I've added footwear and glove slots to all characters, and characters will get an additional accessory or weapon slot depending on class. I've added default equipment for the boot/glove slots, and Alex will also retroactively get an award if you completed Chickens vs. Frogs. The original text actually mentions a pair of boots, but I didn't give you one! Well, now I've remedied that :)

Changing all the equipment slots meant I also had to change the Character View menu. The original one had only enough room to display 5 pieces of equipment, and you now have 8. Here's the original:

And the revised (note: Alex's last accessory slot is empty):

I was a little worried about this part, since I neglected to write myself a guide on the character view plugin and had forgotten how most of it worked (I believe 'technical debt' is the term of art for this.) But it wasn't quite as hairy as I thought it would be, which was a pleasant surprise.

I've also fixed it so that older saves will both work and have all the stuff you're supposed to have. This part was rather tedious, but I figured a day or so of work for me was worth saving thousands of people having to start over. I put code in one of my plugins that modifies the way saves are loaded by looking to see if it's a pre-0.9 save, and if it is, calling functions that remap your existing equipment into their proper new slots, giving you the new equipment you're supposed to have, and in most cases equipping it for you.

One final note about the equipment slots: because of the extra equipment, characters will have higher stats and will thus be more powerful. I haven't rebalanced the game's encounters to account for this, and I likely won't in 0.9. I'll handle that in 0.10, when I'll be going back and revisiting some of the early-game stuff anyway. The effect probably won't be huge for most characters - the boot/glove items thus far aren't that powerful, but Ren and Cory are likely to be a little OP since they now have 2 (occupied) weapon slots.

Combat

This brings me to the final section in the update: combat. And the main takeaway is that I'd like to include a bit more of it. This game has never been all that combat-heavy and I don't plan on making it extremely so, but I think it does need more.

0.8 had very little combat. I think I was trying to get away from the mechanics-driven dungeon crawl that was 0.7, and I also wanted to spend time getting to know the Bunnies better, so I ended up giving 0.8 an almost visual novel feel. 0.9 will definitely have some of that same quality, but I want to have more actual gameplay going forward.

Up to this point, 'more gameplay' has usually meant 'more minigames.' And there definitely will be minigames in the future, but I think I want to be a little more circumspect about adding them. I'm now confident enough in my programming ability and knowledge of the engine to think I could create just about any minigame I wanted to, but that doesn't mean I should. Making a good minigame is hard. They can easily turn into huge time sinks. Many things that are interesting to program are not fun to play, and the point isn't to entertain myself, but to entertain you (though hopefully I'll also find it entertaining!) I think it would also make the game feel more coherent if minigames were related to each other in some way. For instance, suppose I introduce a mechanic in one minigame. In the next minigame, the mechanic is still there, but maybe I've expanded it so it can do slightly different things, or I add another mechanic that interacts with the first in interesting ways. I'll probably use the second world as an opportunity to explore these ideas in earnest, along with some ideas about upgrade/research paths - but I'll save the rest of this discussion for another time!

Anyway, the point is that I want to make good minigames, and those are hard. So, I'll start leaning a little more on combat for the gameplay between fewer - but hopefully better - minigames. Don't worry too much if you hate RPG Maker combat; I'll continue to make much of it avoidable. I'll also start (probably in 0.10) working to make it more interesting, with new abilities, more interesting resource management, flashy visuals, etc.

So, that's where we're at. Hopefully I can finish up the big quest I'm working on this week, and then it's off to the remaining ones. Thank you for your support!