1/28/18 Development Update

Hello all! This is going to be a light development update as I was busy this week. Though, I did get some work done. Let's get started shall we?

Last week I showed the layout of the guild building. This week I have begun implementing the functionalities of the guild building. Mainly, the guild building will be the main source of side quests for the player and as such I implemented the guild board. The guild board will be where players pick up quests to do. Moving forward these quests will vary town to town and be random.

Finally, the last explorable part of the town of Weiss has been created, the town pub. And like pubs in other games, will be a place where players can meet characters, hear rumors, and possible find some extra side quests to do.

Looking forward, more tuning and testing of the questing system as well as the hero soul will have to be done, so look forward to a revisit to these systems in the future. Additionally, with many of the mechanics and system now implemented story development will now begin so you can also look forward to some lore/world building in future posts! That's it for this week I look forward to seeing you next week!

1/21/18 Development Update

Welcome to another weekly development update for my game Hero Soul! For this week I worked on the starter town. To start off, I created some more insides of buildings. Pictured below is the inside of the Adventurer Guild building. In this building players will be able to accept quests using the new quest system I implemented last week. With this building, the Starter Town of Weiss gets closer to being complete. In addition, I also began to populate the town creating NPCs with some dialogue. While the NPC's are rather simple now, I hope to add more complexity to them by adding different behaviors and dialogue options.

Moving on, I also finished and implemented the shopping system of the game, which I have been procrastinating for quite some time now. As you can see below the system is heavily inspired off the shop system in WOW. With the system you can buy, sell, and buyback items from multiple vendors. In addition every vendor will have their own special items you can purchase for a limited time. These special items will change as time passes so buy them when you can!

With the shop system in place, most of the planned/intended features have now been implemented and I am now making the transition to content creations/ story development.

1/14/18 Development Update

Hello and welcome to another development update for my game Hero Soul! This week has been another productive week as I can now (for the most part) check 3 more things off the to-do list.

To start, the actual "Hero Soul" mechanic has been for the most part finished. So what is the Hero Soul you might ask? The Hero Soul is a power that the main character will possess that allows them to draw from the experiences of heroes before them. What this means gameplay-wise is a talent tree system where players can select talents from 6 heroes (for now) and can be seen below.

Essentially, there are 6 different talent trees which the players can choose from. What is different about this is that the 6 different trees are not static. As you can see above the skills are broken into tiers which are available every 5 levels. For every tier, players can preview what each unique tree has available at that tier and then select which hero's tier they want. For instance, a player can pick the tier 1 talents of the berserker hero, but then select the vanguard talents for tier 2. This system was designed in a way to promote many different permutations, and as this system further develops I would further like to refine the trees to promote more synergies between the trees.

Outside of the hero soul talent selection, in game your selected talents will be shown in the inventory menu along with the description of what the talent does.

The next major system implemented is questing and quest tracking. Using the menu pictured below in the upper right, players will have access to the the quest log. It's heavily inspired off the classic WCIII quest log, which differentiates between the main quests (left) and side quests (right).

In addition to the quest system, I also implemented the bestiary system. Whenever a new monster is killed, the player will gain access to the bestiary entry, which will give information about the monster killed. This includes the items they drop, their health, and their weaknesses.

That's it for this week! Moving forward, I would like to flush out the "Hero Soul" system more, refining the hero talent trees and trying to make them unique.

1/7/18 Development Update

Welcome back to another development update for Hero Soul! As you can see the image above is finally done and is sitting nice and pretty on the title screen.

The focus for this week has been programming the Arcana Card to work. I'm glad to say that out of the 40 cards I initially made as placeholders, all of the cards effects have been created and implemented. Going into the creation of the spells, I found that initially I was not utilizing the mouse design space enough so many of the spells have been re imagined to incorporate the use of the mouse to aim some spells. This week has also been a personal victory because I finally was able to address the way damage is processed and displayed, via the battle floating text, for when multiple instances of damage hit an enemy. Before the text would just be a convoluted mess to read, no the text clearly and cleanly shows multiple hits.

Moving forward, I'd now like to work on making Arcana more synergistic with each other, perhaps introducing new effects when certain spells are used in a certain order.

Whew! That's all for this week. I've added a download link for the development build, so you can test the game. Though please pardon the unfinished stuff still there. WIP ^^"

12/31/17 Development Update

Happy new year and welcome back to another development update. For this week I've been working on a few systems and I am glad to say that I am inching closer to finishing most of the in game systems and mechanics that I want to have in the game. 

I guess the first big update this week has been the Arcana system. To start it off, the sprites I had commissioned for the casting animations were completed and I have successfully added them. Along with the new animations, I have several cards working now as well.

The next is an idea I have been toying with for a few weeks. It became readily apparent when players playtested as well as when I played myself that just killing monsters in the dungeons can get a little boring, especially when rooms layouts and monsters are repeated. So this week I also worked on diversifying the dungeons a bit more. This includes rooms that aren't completely flat as well as planning for puzzles/minigames to break up the monotony of killing monsters.

Lastly, I've been slowly updating the UI of the game. The main thing this week that has changed about the UI is a menu on the top right corner of the screen that allows players to access the in game menu, quests, etc. 

That's all for this week! I look forward to continue working on this project in 2018! I'll leave this week with a video on how the gameplay looks now.