The MiniLog - New Merchants, Monsters & Beasts


Hi everyone! Let’s take a look at all the recent developments.

UI Shop
I’ve added a friendly merchant NPC you can buy goods from and sell goods to. This will grant you an easy way to dispose of any old items cluttering your inventories and, for the time being, quick access to almost all loot items. You can find the merchant opposite the quest board in the underground area on the sky island.
This merchant is our first humanoid NPC. There will be more once I come to add talk dialog options.
Arkavite - Your friendly local merchant.
Phantom
Several new types of enemy are in development. First we have Phantoms. These creatures have the ability to phase through walls. They are rather troublesome in dungeons as they can suddenly appear in a room and strike before vanishing through the floor. The current iteration performs a simple dive attack, which may evolve into a dive and slash.
Arkavite - Phantom Dive
They are soon to receive a couple more attacks. I would like to try for a grapple ability where they grab onto the player and try to chomp them. The next prospective attack would be a poltergeist ability where they turn objects in the vicinity into projectiles. I’ll make more progress on this enemy, and we’ll see where it goes come the next update.

Turret
Next, we have static sentinel turrets. They scan their surroundings for adversaries, but you can avoid them by hiding behind cover. They can utilize different search patterns. For now we’re just using the standard “scan in a circle” pattern, but in the case of wall and ceiling-mounted turrets, we would want to opt for a pattern that makes the turret scan in an arcing motion. At the moment, these turrets have a very short-term memory. This will need to be adjusted somewhat, but the basic concept for this enemy is here.
Arkavite - Hiding behind cover while the turret scans for enemies.
Arkavite - Turret detection and tracking.
Design-wise, I would like them to take on the appearance of magical steampunk turrets. They should almost have a golem-like look to them. As the idea is that you get some grace between it locking on to you and firing, there will be some visual and audio cues between it locking on, charging up, and firing a volley of shots.
Another thing I am considering is granting these turrets friendly fire capability and alternate types of projectiles. Some turrets could fire direct shots, while others could use homing spells or bouncy explosives. As for its friendly fire capability, I feel as though this type of enemy should be unthinking and indiscriminate. If there happens to be another enemy between you and it, then that enemy should serve as your meatshield.

Slime Turret
After messing around with turrets, I had a slightly dumber idea off the back of thinking slimes could sometimes appear with loot or weapons stuck in their bodies... What if we had a slime with a partially dissolved turret stuck in its body?
Arkavite - Slime Turrets
Mobile slime turrets are a little terrifying. Some have compared them to Zelda Guardians, albeit a squishier sort. I believe a hulking mechanical (or golem-type) enemy with the same sentinel gun on its back could also be pretty cool. Enemies with canons on their backs as an alternate means of attack as opposed to a passive one.

Living Chest Mimic
Finally, we have a skittish chest-mimic enemy. It flashbangs players who try to open it before running away. We don’t have a means of inspecting chests for traps just yet, but it’s probably all the more necessary if we are to include this type of enemy.
Arkavite - Chest Mimic Flashbang
The concept for this enemy is something of a scaredy-cat mimic. If you hit it or try to open it, it will try to run away and hide. Once it is out of sight, it will return to a dormant state before waiting again. If you try to chase it, it will spit coins at you. It’s a little silly, but an evasive chest enemy that drops expensive loot could make for a fun dynamic. I may give them more ways of evading the player, like spitting out doppelgangers and smoke bombs.

It's AI definitely needs some more work, and it could do with some basic visuals to show it's transformed state when mobile. I envision it sprouting little legs that let it run off. Right now it looks like something out of prop hunt. We'll check in on this next time so see how it's developed. 

Location Titles
Location titles now appear on screen when moving between zones. Using this system, your current floor will be displayed when descending into the dungeons. Difficulty doesn’t scale with depth yet, so for the time being, it’s merely a handy indicator for any seeking to do endurance runs.
I would like to have some quests designed around retrieving items or performing actions at particular floors, so there should soon be a little more utility. Based on feedback from last time, there appears to be more interest than not in some basic questing, so I am aiming to get that system up and running next.
 
Other Changes
  • Ambient music now plays while paused and in menus.
  • I’ve added new BGM playlists for day and night on the sky islands. Playlists are shuffled every day cycle. I would like to give dungeons the same treatment.
  • Changes have been made to how player items (inventory / equip) are loaded from save data. An inventory cleanup pass will now be triggered on load to remove any items with defunct IDs and update item data for remaining items. This is all to ensure when loading saves from previous builds, icons, descriptions, values, and any other properties that may have changed between versions are updated.
  • Craft / Shop item search will no longer include matches by item description in the search result hitlist. Matching by item description was found to result in too many false positives.
  •  Fixed issue where the frame rate limit setting was not saving or applying.
  • Improved enemy line of sight checks. The enemy line of sight check will now be polled on timer while enemy is aggro.
  • Fixed issue where loincloth underwear failed to mask peen.
  • Fixed issue where chestwrap would mask peen instead of loincloth underwear.
  • Fixed Issue where sprinting while crouched or ragdolling consumed stamina, but did not end crouch/ragdoll.
  • Fixed issue where slimes failed to rotate to face player immediately on hit.
  • Added bonze bar item.
  • Added placeholder quest board UI and interaction.
  • Increased scale and improved position of player hurtboxes.
 
Coming Up
I’ll be refining the AI and basic look of these new enemies so that they’re in a more functional state for play and can be added to the dungeons. There are a few more enemies on the way, which I’ll be throwing into the mix. I would like to have a couple proper humanoid entities moving around the map.
As mentioned earlier, some basic quests will be set up, and with whatever time I have leftover, I’ll be conducting some tests of the lewd sort. If you're not alread, be sure to follow along on the discord server if you’d like to see and comment on things as they develop.
Thank you all so much for sticking around! Be sure to let me know what you think, and I’ll see you in the next one. ~