So after the release of Alpha 0.5 at the beginning of the month I took a lovely week off in an attempt to recharge by doing some achievement hunting on the old Xbone & giving myself some time to get my creativity juices flowing again when I get back to work the following week. Only to start work again on Monday with what could only be described as a feeling of pure dread. Something was around the corner and by god did it hit me on Tuesday. After making some light work on Monday, by the end of the evening I could barely focus and called it an early night only to be denied of that by whatever decided to attack my immune system with full force. Tuesday was a complete write off and Wednesday was spent mainly recovering trying to get my head back in the game. Long story short, I haven’t been able to achieve much this week and I’m now crazy behind schedule.
Nevertheless in the time I was able to focus this week I began working on the first of the changes to reach Alpha 0.6. I’m pretty impressed with some of the new Pathfinding AI and Building Placement features, most of which I’ll go into more detail in a later video, but essentially characters with in the game are much smarter and will actually stop moving if their paths are blocked and wait for you to clear them rather than completely walking through stuff with a ghost-like ignorance. There’s also some improvements to buildings too, the game will now show you where the front door of the building is considered to be while you’re trying to place objects and subsequently won’t allow you to build anything in front of it, again, in an attempt to improve pathfinding. It also just makes more sense.
The main thing I’ve tackled this week is the overhaul of the Kingdom Inventory UI. I really liked the way that I handled the research menu from the previous update and I wanted to reflect a similar approach of laying out information for the Inventory. So objects are now listed with icons and given basic information to show you easily what they’re worth, what their function is, what level they are and whether they’re new or not. Inventory items are also listed into categories, so you can sort directly through the type of item you want to use. Currently there’s only three (Weapon, Armour & Items)
When you attempt to use an item (such as a piece of equipment) you’re presented with another list of anything in your kingdom that the item is usable with. In this instance I’m equipping one of my Heroes with a new piece of Armour. This menu also shows whether or not a hero is already equipped and shows you the icon their equipment represents. (I’ll probably also show some kind of stat difference display via a tooltip to show if the item you’re trying to use will be better or worse that the one that’s already in place).
I’m really happy with the new icons as they easily translate to the player what the Hero is holding, so this information will also bleed over into some of the other displays such as within the Hero menu and the information box. You can easily see whether a Hero is equipped or not and what they’re holding.
The new items portion of the inventory is full of objects that provide some kind of benefit to your Kingdom. Some items will be used with stores, others with Heroes or other items that will unlock a new features when used. I really like this because it adds an entirely new portion of strategy to the game by letting the player customize which elements of the game or objects in the kingdom they want to specifically focus on such as making a ridiculously over-expensive weapon store by giving it loads of Carpets or maxing out a Heroes health on Cheese!
It’s really only the first draft and many of the features in place are pretty basic but the whole system is something that’s been neglected for a while and I’ve needed to re-evaluate how it works. The progress I’ve made this week, although slow, has been a step in the right direction I feel. Having a good inventory system, something more useful than just weapons, should drive players to complete quests in order to earn these items. Unfortunately there’s still a long way on the quest system to go in order to make these two mechanics work well together but if, in the future I can get the balance right. I think they’ll co-incide with each other really well.
Next week I’ll make the last few tweaks I can make at this stage and then move onto some of the smaller tasks before tackling the huge overhaul of the Quests, which I’ve had some great feedback on and it’s really helped point me in the right direction with the changes I want to make.
All the best,
Matt