Lots of new additions and the re-introduction of items back into the ecosystem!

First, containers. In all main rooms (for now), there are containers that will contain one item each. To access their inventory, click on them and use the ‘loot’ action. 

Due to a change in the structure of how items are implemented, currently it will look like there is nothing inside the slots. However, in the first slot of each container, there is a single item. These work as they did previously. You can still drag them over to the slot on the character window in order to equip them. The only thing that’s ‘wrong’ with them is that their slot icon is currently broken. This will be fixed in a future patch, but I ran out of time this week. 

I got through a lot of technical debt on the back-end too! The item system was designed to work for the demo, so I spent some time this week bringing it up to a point that’s closer to where I want it. At the moment, there’s no hooks that function in game due to a manual override. However, feel free to look through the files and see the hook structure as it currently is! There’s lots of interesting things in there pulled directly from the source of TQ via scripting.

The final thing to change this week is custom room shapes. They are now fully implemented and work in the same way as the custom map shapes do! I might at some point add holes and more to the map shapes, but for now they are just additive. The options are rectangle, circle, and polygon, and they follow the same rules as the map shape generation.

Next week, I’m going to focus on refining and fixing any bugs that get reported (as well as a few that I’ve found!) I want to address some continuing technical debt in how the item system works as well. I’ll talk more about that next week when I get that sorted!

For now, enjoy the release! It’s open to everyone, so the link will be in this devlog right here! I don’t have to make two posts for it anymore! :3
 
Have a good weekend everyone, and see you around! 

All the changes to SubscribeStar are completed! Let me know what you think or if there’s any problems with things that are still inaccessible. There’s no option to change post settings in bulk, so it’s totally possible I missed something.


This Week

This week, I worked on pretty much exactly what I had outlined: creating a player .json file and further testing the animation process.

Things are now running much faster than before! Within the current region, there are something like 300 monsters operating at once. Their current AI is temporary, so it’s still (intentionally) fairly inefficient. That means we can expect to see performance remain around this level throughout the majority of development. This is more monsters than TQ ever had operating at once, and it’s still buttery smooth to play! One big change is that animations now only play when the room is in focus by the player, which is a big help. I managed to free up a lot of resources from unused testing resources and duplicate nodes that I was using for testing.

I ran into a technically interesting error in which my turn queue system was adding to the stack instead of being freed. It was a little bit tricky to find a working solution because I found the documentation around running async commands in Godot to be a little bit confusing. In the end, though, I got it working so that the game doesn’t crash from a stack overflow.

I’m currently about halfway through adding the custom room shapes to the game. I think it’ll add a lot more to the game if I can get those done for the next version, which is partially why I’m planning a release next week!


Next Week

Like I said, aiming for a new version to come out next week. My dream scenario is to have some chests around the map that the player can pull from. It requires implementing another custom class for the containers and tying them to the existing framework. All-in-all it is a little bit far fetched but that’s my stretch goal.

That’s it for this week! Let me know what you think about the changes to SubscribeStar and the devlog this week. Looking forward to sharing my progress with you all next week!

 

 

The next release will hopefully be next week!

Hello there, everyone! Welcome to the first 'minor' public devlog!

In regards to changes to monetization, I have decided to make a couple changes.

Firstly, all devlogs will be public starting this week. I will open up previous versions starting soon.

Secondly, all releases that I want feedback on will be public! I really hope this helps to grow the community around development and get more people interested. 

Finally, releases with systems updates or changes to the codebase that are less impactful will be taking place of the current 'nightly' builds. These will be available to everyone who chooses to financially support me month-to-month, as a way of showing my appreciation for the support. I'm not sure what the split of releases will look like yet, but I'm not going to stress about the specifics yet. The release schedule will come to be what it is in time!

Obviously, the two changes above will hit my income a bit, but I firmly believe that it's worth it. I'll also be adding in a $2 tier that gets the same access to every build as the other tiers, just as an in-between for people who might want to support at a different amount. To anyone who chooses to continue supporting in any way, including as a member of the community, I really really appreciate it!

I'm hoping to have these changes to my SubscribeStar page done for some time next week.

Anyways, let's get back to the important things!

This week brings us two new systems changes: Firstly, the player no longer exists. Now, turns are taken entirely by the 'monsters' of the game. The player just happens to be one! That means that tying in all of the things we talked about a week ago should be options for the future.

Secondly, a new animation controller for monsters! Once I got the player removed and everything working, I noticed that the camera was panning away before the monsters finished moving. That meant that it was time to implement the last part of the monsters that I had planned, which is an animation controller. Essentially, it works to handle all of the animations for monsters in one place - the time they take, when to switch animations, and what to do at the end of those animations. Part of the animation controller is tied directly into the turn controller process and runs the on-screen animations after the processing for a turn has happened. Then, it can report back to the turn controller when any given monster has finished animating and is ready to end its turn.

One of the neat things about implementing all of these systems is that even if a combat system is completely out of the question for TfQuest and doesn't end up being a good fit, this animation framework and the underlying grid system will still be able to run on-screen as a visual aid that will help increase the depth of the game. 

Next week, I'm going to create a player.json file that will load the actual player. I'm going to do some things like add a 'starting room' field and some other things that are necessary for the player to properly load in. Then, I'd like to start adding ways for the player to interact with the world. 


I'm also going to start adding customizable room shapes as an option! This will hopefully add more personality to the game. I'm not sure if I'm going to add any custom room shapes right away, but I do want to get the internal code done to support them.

In a few weeks, I'm hoping to add the framework to start adding chests to tie items back into the game again. To be clear, all the framework is still there already, but I need to give the items another way to show up!

That's all for this week. I hope the monetization changes sound amicable to everyone! Let me know what you think of the project so far, and I look forward to next week when I get to write another one of these!

See you all around~

For those of you who don’t know, I was very sick last week. It was a nasty flu-like thing that’s been going around the area. Thankfully, though, I started feeling better a little bit into this week! I still managed to get a decent amount done.

I’ve expanded on the radial menu significantly and designed some custom panels for them. These panels are currently pretty plain, but underneath the hood they support all the features you might expect a radial menu to have including the ability to add titles, images, and custom colours and textures.

As well, new this week is a tooltip system. Hovering over the buttons (and later other things as well) will give you a popup with a title and description for the action. Hopefully, this should help to make everything more comprehensible while development is still ongoing. I feel like I did a good job on the tooltip system. It’s all set up and just waiting for a paint job before it’s ready for the final release.

Next week, I’m looking to add the player to the map again and restructure the project so that monsters are secretly just players in disguise. I wrote up a whole discord reply about why I want to do this, but I’ll summarize it here. Basically, I’ve made it so that all units on the grid share the same action pool. Some actions require player input, but any unit can use them. I tested this in a small sandbox to make sure it works how I want. I’m planning to rework player-specific features (like inventory display and the character window) so that monsters can use them too. The way I’m implementing this right now is making things less modular, which isn’t ideal, but I think it’s worth it.

There are a few speculative reasons for this approach:

Doing this will require some refactoring, but I believe that it will be worth it! That’s what I’ll be up to next week.

While I was sick, I did a lot of thinking about how I want to monetize this project. For me, I feel like having a larger, more diverse community around this project is more important than increasing my own income. So, I’ve decided to open up the development process and see how it goes. If you felt like your subscription was worth it before, hopefully you’ll still feel okay about supporting.

These changes won’t happen right away. I’m going to roll them out in about a week so that I have time to get feedback from everyone currently supporting. If this is an earth-shattering decision for reasons that I haven’t considered, I figure it’s important to give people an opportunity to voice concerns. For now, everything will still be exclusive to subscribers. 

That said, some of the perks will remain supporter-only. The private Discord channel will stay exclusive. People who aren’t supporting financially can still use the public chat, but the private one will be a smaller, more direct way to reach me. Subscriber-only Discord roles will also stay. 

I’m also thinking about adding a smaller tier, maybe $2, for anyone who wants to chip in just a little bit.

Anyways, that’s it for this week! You’ll be able to find the download for this release linked right here. Let me know what you think about everything and I’ll see you next week!

Wow! Quick week! Thanks for sticking around! I feel like I really settled into my groove and got things done.

I’ve added in several new subactions ranging from extremely simple to very complex, got unit pathing working flawlessly (I hope), implemented a fairly robust targeting system for what monsters are interested in, thrown together a very basic AI for the monsters (it’s functional but not permanent), and did a significant amount of debugging. I think it’s about time we cover some of the systems I’ve been working on in more detail!

The action system is the external section that modders will interface with. Each unit on the field (whether monsters or players) has access to several actions. On their turn, they can pick which actions to use. Eventually, the number of actions that any unit can take will likely be based around some form of action point system. For now, it’s one action per turn.

Actions themselves are not entirely straightforward. Each action is built out of sub-actions; simple scripts that can be pieced together in different ways to accomplish nearly anything. As development continues, I’ll add more and more subaction scripts that people are interested in using. These are the most basic building blocks of what units can do: things like deal damage, search something, select a target, path to something, move with user input, or path to a different room. Internally, these are complicated multi-system processes, but externally, the goal is to keep them as simple as possible.

Like I mentioned before, you build actions out of individual sub-actions. For those of you who played the previous release, you’d notice that each button on the action wheel (I promise I will add a hover-for-description feature eventually) performed a simple action. One of them was for moving with input and one of them was for pathing to another unit in the room. Those are both actions composed of a single sub-action. It would be just as simple to have a button to do both of those things at once.

The system for modding actions is on my to-do-soon list, but the specifics of it are not concrete yet. It will essentially be actions composed by chaining subactions and logical operators together! I hope this keeps the modding generally easier to understand.

Rooms now have exits! These can be defined within each room’s .json file. Currently, they’re only within the room config file, so if you’re interested in playing around with modifying the exits you can either copy that formatting into an individual room’s .json file or just modify it directly within the config file! Either will have similar results. Monsters will, by default, attempt to path to random rooms using the exits in each room that are listed within the files. They all connect up properly, which is great! If you see they have weird values, I was just testing an edge case with those. The exits are in the middle of the room right now!

Units need something to be interested in, so I gave it to them! There is currently a subaction for ‘wandering’ that makes units target a particular room. I intend to expand this to items, units, and more in the future! Eventually, what a unit is targeting will be the driver for a lot of different subactions.

It will be fairly simple once I have the time to do it to add in some better UI around taking actions. The action wheel on each unit needs more clarity than it has right now. I’m planning on setting up a panel with space for an icon and title that will replace the current boring, square button that’s there. I feel like playing through the version that is releasing today will be somewhat confusing because the UI buttons aren’t clear enough even for a pre-alpha. These panels will also include a hover description that will appear when you hover the cursor over the menu for a brief time! Hopefully that will help clear some things up.

Room shape is currently customizable… if you want the room to be any sort of single rectangle. I am planning on adding in more shape options for each room at some point, but I’m not exactly sure when. It was really important to me to add in the actions first! Eventually, I’m planning on having options for multiple shapes at once including circles, polygons, rectangles, and individual points!

External Action System Accessibility
Right now, there's no way for modders to put together actions with the subaction units. I'm planning on addressing that soon!

More Subactions
Throughout development, I'll be adding in more subactions as needed. I have several more of these in mind right now!


That's all for this week! Thanks for reading and have a good weekend~

 

Hey there! Thanks so much for your support! Here's the nightly for today. Let me know what you think! Again, by no means is the combat system finished, but I hope that this scratches the itch to see what's going on~

A reminder that P is to pass turn, WASD to move between rooms, and the player gets two turns for every monster turn to make checking things out easier. The monsters spend their first turn looking for a room they'd like to go to and their second turn actually going there. That means that it'll take four player turns for the monsters to start moving!  

If you're seeing this right after I post it, check back in a few minutes for the devlog that goes with it! Have a good weekend everyone!