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! 

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!

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!

You'll find the .zip for the release here.

Hello everyone and thanks for joining me over here!

This post will just be to catch up this page with all of the content so far! This will include devlogs #1 through to #6, as well as two releases: the proof of concept version and the map generation showcase with its hotfix.


Links:
TQ First Look Prototype
Map Generation Update (Unpatched)
Map Generation Update Hotfix #1
As a reminder, to implement the patch, please replace the .exe in the unpatched version with this newer one. The patch fixes a bug with displaying the overlay for circle textures.